Even though Mark Fisher's original thesis on Capitalist Realism was centered on the Global North - especially the United Kingdom - its global salience persists a decade and a half after the publication of this momentous book, as the world faces a polycrisis of inequality, environmental breakdown, budding fascism, war, the rise of artificial intelligence, and more. In this seminar, we will focus specifically on how capitalist realism is also a worldmaking affective regime, in that it creates depressive hedonia for the Global North while fostering cruel optimism for the Global South, weltanschauungs and ideologies that move and shape cultural, political, social, and economic worlds around us. Simultaneously, capitalist realism is a worldbreaking force, one that has taken apart residual formations of the social welfare state, resistant subcultures, legacies of working-class movements, and traditional communities and their kinship structures. How does capitalist realism, as both worldmaker and worldbreaker, subtend, delimit, or potentiate the alternative worlds that literature and the arts variously struggles to realize, despite recurrent containments? How and to what extent does capitalist realism shape the form such struggles take, and what is its salience in the current rise of techno-feudalist social formations?

Our studies range across media and genre (films, television series, video games, comics, novels, drama, dance, and ecological phenomena) from 1950 to the present across a global geographic reach. We envision this seminar as a sustained response to and expansion of Fisher’s core ideas by emphasizing the intersections between a global capitalist realism, its dominant world formations, its suppression of the remnants of residual worlds, and the resistance put forth by worlds emerging in its wake. This seminar will also serve as the next step towards the publication of a curated special issue in a journal; as such, it will be an opportunity to share our latest work, mutually inspire, and help refine each others’ arguments before pitching a formal proposal to a desired venue of publication. We welcome all participants who are invested in and intrigued by the questions put forth by our seminar.