The Future is Past: Rethinking Dystopia in Contemporary Film and Literature
Description
In its canonical form, dystopia often depicts a dark future based on the worldbuilding of spaces and characters: these worldings operate as a warning, projecting a plausible future that serve to critique the present through the operation of estrangement (Cole (2022); Horn (2018).The trope of the "last man" marks a future “seen as an open horizon of expectations” due to their “fictional position of a future perfect"(Horn 41). For instance, while Atwood’s Offred goes through unimaginable tortures underlining the fragility of freedoms gained against patriarchy, she is also a sign of a future that can be avoided if the right measures are taken now.Similarly, whether in the sterile office spaces of eugenicist futurity in Gattaca (1997), or in the grimy streets of Detroit as an early warning of neoliberal accumulation in RoboCop (1987), dystopic space is imbued with the destruction of its own spatial logic. This classic model of dystopian narratives relies on a temporal structure in which the future is imagined as a space of possibility that can be both anticipated and shaped.
There seems to be a shift: no longer warnings to guarantee our multispecies existence on earth, there seems to be no possibility of a future at all. From the meaningless death born of endless labor in Torishima’s Sisyphean to the father-daughter duo’s weird suicide in Denis’ film High Life(2018), recent works reveal a deep ontological and epistemic loss. Indeed, as McManus(2022) and Rosenfield(2021) note, this dystopic future feels like present while shutting down the possibility of alternative futures: dystopia, then, ceases to function as a warning and instead becomes an act of mourning . Indeed, the desire to find some form of meaning is frustrated in the repetitive and linguistically impossible spaces of Volodine’s post exotic novels, or the seemingly inexhaustible episodes of Black Mirror. If anything, these works evoke losses that await us in the not-so-distant future, losses that often feel as though they belong to the present, or worse, an already foreclosed future
We are interested in exploring the conditions, the nature and the power of this shift: What does recent dystopic fiction and cinema tell us about our existence today and in the near future? If dystopia does not work as a warning but functions merely as a mourning, what is its new telos? What is represented in this new bad space, and what is silenced or excluded? Taking into account the advanced neoliberal capital accumulation's damage and the future of human and non-human animals, we invite questions including but not limited to:
Posthuman and animal approaches to dystopia including multispecies futures.
Cinema and TV as sites for imagining alternative futures.
Queer, feminist, and decolonial eco-materialist approaches
Environmental collapse and climate grief
Ontological and epistemic loss in contemporary dystopias
Labor, exhaustion, and suffering in speculative futures.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Elif Sendur, Ph.D., is a scholar of cinema and media studies whose work explores intersections of critical theory, political imagination, and visual culture. An assitant teaching faculty in the Department of English and the Writing Program at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, she offers courses on American cinema, film theory, and writing. Her research engages with queer and posthumanist theory, global and transnational cinema, and questions of embodiment, technology, and political film.
Speaker Bio
Cagatay Emre Dogan, PhD, is an independent scholar who approaches his work through an interdisciplinary lens, exploring modern and contemporary art and visual culture with a focus on critical animal studies and posthumanism. He enjoys sharing his knowledge through teaching, lectures, and seminars whenever the opportunity arises.
Speaker Bio
Miguel García is an assistant professor of Mexican studies in the School of International Letters and Cultures. His teaching and research focus on 20th- and 21st-century Mexican literature and film, with an emphasis in the cultural representation of science and technology. He is currently working on his first book monograph, entitled “Posthuman Mexico: Bodies, Objects, Posthuman Monsters"
Speaker Bio
I am currently doing my PhD in English Literature with my dissertation being based on pulp literature. I also enjoy discussing science fiction as well as deeper analysis of video game narratives and their mechanics.
Beyond my literary interest i also enjoy looking for and developing interdisciplinary analysis, born from my prior background in Environmental Engineering and Biology.
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Speaker Bio
Professor of Anglophone Literatures and coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Research Group at Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and Research Associate at University of the Free State, South Africa
Speaker Bio
Natália Fontes is an Associate Professor of English at the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV), Brazil. Her research interests include women’s writing, ecofeminism, gender studies, global literatures and dystopias. She coordinates the FAPEMIG-funded project that examines the entanglements of the human, posthuman, and nonhuman in women’s writing.
Speaker Bio
Sarah Thompson is a PhD student in English at the University of California, Riverside. Her research examines horror lit and film through queer theory, posthumanism, and ecocriticism, with a focus on hybridity and ecological collapse of the (non)human. Her essay on folk horror and physical embodiment in British and Irish film is forthcoming in Body Horror Cinema (Manchester University Press, Foundations of Horror Studies series).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Myles Chilton is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Nihon University. He is the author of English Studies Beyond the ‘Center’: Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English (2016), co-editor and co-author of Asian English: Histories, Texts, Institutions (2021); and co-author of The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies (Routledge, 2023), among other books. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Speaker Bio
Kirsten Bussière is a researcher and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral work, which was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, focused on representations of time, history, and memory in contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction. Recent work appears in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, and the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.