Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

“The thesis investigates the case of the modern Television drama series FlashForward and sets out to chart the employment of concepts of Collective Memory Studies in the narrative in order to reflect upon the ways of how social perceptions of the past and Collective Memory are remediated in the course of the narrative.
To achieve that goal, the…[Read more]

This critical commentary argues that the novels submitted (emphasis on Ammonite, The Blue Place, and Hild, with three others, Slow River, Stay, and Always briefly referenced), form a coherent body of work which centres and norms the experience of the Other, particularly queer women. Close reading of the novels demonstrates how specific word-choice…[Read more]

This essay develops interrelations and mutual implications foremost among Bernie Sanders’ book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, and David Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence. It proposes that the evolution of contempla…[Read more]

Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective…[Read more]

Bans on coal mining have been implemented in two tribal majority states in India’s north-east frontier; Nagaland and Meghalaya. In Nagaland the state government imposed the ban in an attempt to capture control of coal extraction and trade, while in Meghalaya India’s National Green Commission imposed the ban over concern for the environment and…[Read more]

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report narrates two interrelated stories. The micro
story concerns a family, a kidnapped son, the ensuing trauma, and the work of mourning that
follows. The macro story concerns criminal justice, social stability, and hermeneutics at the level
of the nation state. The problem for both stories is ontological a…[Read more]

This paper discusses Pacific Rim as a film deeply concerned with birth, in particular the horror of birth, and the process by which birth is assimilated. The film may then be seen as part of an unbroken commentary on nuclear
weapons insofar as it is our technological, capitalistic, and nuclear capability that allows
us to close the “breach” and…[Read more]

This paper examines Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake in relation to environmental justice. The best-selling first novel in Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy, Oryx and Crake was widely hailed for its nightmarish depiction of a post-apocalyptic, bioengineered future. The major themes of the novel mirror key themes of the environmental justice movement tod…[Read more]

This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of t…[Read more]

This essay considers Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison’s other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with…[Read more]

This essay considers Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison’s other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with…[Read more]