“Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream” examines the postethnic and the posthuman in fiction by Maxine Hong Kingston, Octavia Butler, and Isaac Asimov.

In this provocation, I investigate the notion of long term thinking, as a notion of ‘sustaining time’, which identifies failures in dominant conceptions of time and proposes an alternative that is thought to be better suited for responding to current environmental crises. Drawing on close analyses of two examples, I argue for a deeper und…[Read more]