Category: 51.2

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Pandemics in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction: Rethinking the (Post)Human

Tânia Cerqueira

Following the worldwide popularity of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010), dystopian narratives took the young adult publishing world by storm. The  subsequent dystopian boom in young adult literature offered readers dreadful new worlds that emerged from the ashes of contemporary society after it was destroyed by violent wars, climate change, deadly contagious diseases, and the like.

As is widely understood (and some people still pretend to ignore), our society is currently facing an infectious disease that is straining the social order. Young adult dystopian literature has often represented the consequences of a pandemic – some of which consequences we are currently facing as a society today. From novels published at the beginning of this century, such as The Way We Fall by Megan Crewe (2002) and The Last Dog on Earth by Daniel Ehrenhaft (2003), to works like The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch (2011), Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin (2012-2013), and This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada (2017-2020), to highlight a few, this literature has explored the loss of human life, the paranoia caused by the fear of being infected, the struggle to find a cure, and how the infection (or the cure) can alter the human body – the body might evolve or retrogress, changing in ways such that it is no longer defined as human.

This essay discusses how pandemics and their effects on the human body are represented in recent young adult dystopian texts through the lens of posthuman studies. My analysis will focus on three young adult series: James Dashner’s The Maze Runner trilogy (2009-2011), Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles (2012-2015), and Rory Power’s Wilder Girls (2019). In these works, the characters are confronted with the consequences of a viral outbreak, including zombie-like creatures and “unnatural” bodily changes. Due to these bodily changes, one can affirm that the infection provoked by the viral outbreak and/or cure creates posthuman bodies—bodies that threaten social norms by being different from the rule – forcing the reader to rethink what it actually means to be human and deconstructing the dominant idea implemented by the humanist worldview, where humanity is disconnected from the surrounding world.

A Definition of Posthumanism

During the Renaissance, a new vision about the human emerged, humanism. This new cosmovision “affirmed values of the individual and the right to self-determination” and “enshrined ‘Man’ as unique, the origin of all meaning, protagonist of History, the hegemonic measure of all things” (Knickerbocker 67). Thus, a new conception of the Human as an individual being with agency, responsible for his own destiny, reigned by reason, and as the centre of the universe emerged.[1] Moreover, Man built himself in opposition to nature, the Other, and what was considered to be monstrous. Then, humanism came to influence the construction of several binaries which are now, as the young adult dystopian novels under analysis will show, being questioned and challenged by posthuman studies.

In the last decades, there has been significant growth in the corpus of theoretical and critical posthuman studies. The following influential works on this philosophical perspective deserve our attention due to their own importance to this discussion. Firstly, N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman (1999), stresses a vision “of the human that embraces the possibilities of information, technologies […], and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival” (5). Secondly, in What is Posthumanism? (2010), Cary Wolfe argues that posthumanism “isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (xv, author’s emphasis), accentuating how posthumanism defies humanist notions. Finally, Pramod K. Nayar’s Posthumanism (2013) distinguishes “transhumanism” from “critical posthumanism” as two different types of posthumanism. The latter of these “seeks to move beyond the traditional humanist ways of thinking about the autonomous, self-willed individual agent in order to treat the human itself as an assemblage, co-evolving with other forms of life, enmeshed with the environment and technology” (13).[2]

Recent studies on posthumanism and children’s and young adult fiction use these critical works as a basis for further development, such as Victoria Flanagan’s Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject (2014), an exploration of the importance of posthumanism for adolescence identity formation, Zoe Jacque’s Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg (2015), in which she defines posthumanism as “a new ontology which goes beyond the borders of our kind” (2), and Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World (2018), edited by Anita Tarr and Donna R. White, a volume that gathers several essays in which we can find a multiplicity of definitions regarding the concept of “posthumanism.” Some definitions of the term contradict themselves, and such happens, as Tarr and White state, because posthumanism is not “a monolithic concept” (22).[3] In her essay collected in this volume, White claims that in the twenty-first century, to be posthuman signifies “to be more or less than human, but always means being different from human” (258). Although there is an assortment of definitions and ways to interpret this concept, the posthuman bodies under analysis are indeed more or less than human, but always different from what we tend to consider human.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner (2009-2011)

After massive solar flares ravaged the Earth and permanently changed the Earth’s climate and environment in Dashner’s The Maze Runner trilogy, human civilization was devastated. Realizing there would not be enough resources for all survivors, the Post-Flare Coalition began researching methods to control population growth; that is, scientists began researching procedures to painlessly exterminate a large number of people. During their research, the Coalition discovered the Flare. An airborne virus, the Flare “attacks the brain and shuts it down, painlessly. […] [It] was designed to slowly weaken in infection rate as it spreads from host to host” (Dashner, The Kill Order 282). However, the virus did not work as expected. Instead, it slowly “ate” away the brain of those who were infected, turning them into bloodthirsty and irrational beings with no memory of their past, who killed, tortured, and ate human flesh. Those infected by the Flare came to be known as Cranks.

 When Thomas, the protagonist of the trilogy, first faces a Crank, he is left with an uneasy feeling, describing the infected man as follows:

A man stood on the other side, gripping the bars with bloody hands. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, filled with madness. Sores and scars covered his thin, sun–burnt face. He had no hair, only diseased splotches of what looked like greenish moss. A vicious slit stretched across his right cheek; Thomas could see teeth through the raw, festering wound. Pink saliva dribbled in swaying lines from the man’s chin (Dashner, The Scorch Trials 15).

The Cranks evoke the figure of the zombie, a creature that is usually represented as a monster that leaks disgusting fluids, with parts of its body often missing, and which does not even seem to know what’s going on beyond the fact that it is hungry, pissed off, or both (Greene and Mohammad 13). In recent years, zombie-like creatures have been depicted as the result of viral outbreaks, biological warfare, or even of a vaccine created to treat a pandemic outbreak that deeply changes human biology.

After being infected by the Flare, the humans in The Maze Runner trilogy go through a decaying process. Just like the zombie, the Cranks rot and become walking bodies with no memories or cognitive capacity, ruled by their most primitive desires. By going through these bodily changes, the zombie-like Cranks deny humanism, revealing that the human being is not static and can retrogress into what is described as a primitive being—of course, this primeval transformation allows the Cranks to survive in a world that has become a wasteland, while humans find themselves close to extinction. Additionally, as Dale Knickerbocker claims, “In opposition to the free will and individualism held so dear by humanists, the zombie lacks autonomy and individual identity, each action exactly as its peers and thus functioning—literally unwittingly—as a collective” (68). Thus, by losing their memories, the Cranks, as the zombie, also lose their personality, disputing once again the humanist worldview by shattering the notion of individualism.

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer (2012-2015)

In Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles, a deadly pandemic, Letumosis, has killed millions of Earthens worldwide. This disease has four stages: the first stage is the incubation period in which nothing appears atypical; during the second stage, large boil-like patches in shades of blue appear on the skin; in the third stage, those who are infected become lethargic, unable to move or speak, and occasionally cough blood; in the final stage, the fingertips become tinged with blue due to lack of blood and oxygen. In New Beijing, the main setting of Cinder (2012), the ones infected are kept in a warehouse, taken care of by droids. When Cinder, the protagonist of the first novel, visits her step-sister, Peony, who was infected by Letumosis, she is faced with the dire conditions the sick live in: “the stench of excrement and rot reached out” and “flies had already caught on and filled the room with buzzing” (Meyer, Cinder 145-146). This pandemic was created in the laboratories of Luna, a country built on the moon’s surface.[4] The virus was created due to Levana’s, the queen of Luna, wish to control the Earth and enslave its inhabitants.

As observed throughout The Lunar Chronicles, Earthens and Lunars, the latter of whom are considered the Other, do not see eye to eye. They share a strong distrust and hatred, even though Lunars are descendants of human colonizers that travelled to the moon to advance space exploration. As Cinder explains, “Lunars were a society that evolved from an Earthen moon colony centuries ago, but they weren’t human anymore. People said Lunars could alter a person’s brain – make you see things you shouldn’t see, feel things you shouldn’t feel, do things you didn’t want to do” (Meyer, Cinder 43). Due to their DNA being damaged from prolonged exposure to ionizing radiation from cosmic rays, Lunars were genetically mutated and can manipulate bioelectricity – they can control other people’s minds and bodies. It can be stated that Lunars inhabit posthuman bodies – posthuman bodies that reaffirm the idea that the human is not static. Moreover, here we can see the reinforcement of the notion that what we usually consider a human body is the norm, upon which one can either retrogress, as the Cranks, or evolve, as the Lunars. Due to these abilities, the relationship between Earth and Luna was strained.

Before infecting the Earthens, Lunars developed a cure to Letumosis – yet despite the existing animosity between Earth and Luna, Lunars did not intend to exterminate humanity. Nevertheless, this cure requires the blood of Lunar shells, that is, Lunars that do not have the ability to manipulate bioelectricity. More precisely, the cure requires the platelets that can be found in their blood. Platelets contain mitochondrial DNA, which is a: 

form of DNA [that] consists of a tiny ring of hereditary material that actually lies outside the nucleus of the cell and is passed solely through the maternal line. It is not recombined between generations, as is nuclear DNA, and it seems to accumulate changes quite rapidly, which makes it ideal for analysis of recent evolutionary events (Tattersall, par. 7).

From the chimera-like monsters from ancient Greece to cinematic works such as The Fly (1986), one can perceive that there has always been an irrational fear about mixing the DNA of different species, a process seen as unnatural. This feeling of anxiety “may be mostly to do with how it destabilises our perceived human uniqueness and undermines our own moral superiority” (Bastian, “The Uneasy Truth about Human-Animal Hybrids” par. 29). Thus, to survive, Earthens must take a cure in which one of the main components is the blood of the Other—their DNAs must be mixed.

Those who are cured do not go through physical changes—not like the Cranks or the characters from Wilder Girls, as we will observe later. The only hint of every being infected is small scars left by the large boil-like patches. And even those can be insignificant since “The rash from the disease grew fainter every day. He doubted it would leave many scars” (Meyer, Winter 776). Nevertheless, can a body still be the same when there is what one might consider “alien” DNA running through their veins? Could not the cured Earthens acquire Lunars’ abilities, or perhaps develop their own, due to the mixing of DNA?

Wilder Girls by Rory Power (2019)

In Rory Power’s Wilder Girls, a highly contagious disease, referred to as Tox, has been contained in Raxter, an isolated island. Once a private school for girls, Raxter is now a quarantine area where the former students must deal with the effects and dangers of the Tox with little-to-no resources. The outbreak manifests in flare-ups, which leave the girls’ “bodies too wrecked to keep breathing, […] wounds that wouldn’t heal, or sometimes, [manifested in] a violence like a fever, turning girls against themselves” (Power 13). Most girls ended up dead from the wounds provoked by the Tox or by the deadly violence that has prompted them to kill each other. Those who survive the flare-ups develop bodily mutations, such as gills, two hearts, a taloned hand, a serrated ridge of bone down the back, or a second closed eyelid. After the first mutations took place, it is understood that the Tox models the girls after the natural environment (fauna and flora) that surrounds them. Not only do the girls go through these bodily mutations, but also the animals and the vegetation that populate the island.[5] At the end of the novel, the origins of the mysterious Tox are revealed:

And there it is—the climate changing, the temperatures rising. I read once about creatures trapped in the arctic ice. Prehistoric, ancient things, coming awake as the ice melts. In Maine, on Raxter, a parasite slowly reaching into the weakest things—the irises, the crabs—until it was strong enough to reach the wilderness. Into us. (215) 

A worm—a parasite—has taken hold of every living thing in Raxter. If one is to remove this dormant parasite from their body, they become empty shells—a body without speech, feelings, thoughts, or memories. The living beings of Raxter and the parasite have developed a symbiotic relationship; one cannot survive without the other.

The bodies of the girls are no longer similar to what one usually identifies as the body of a human. After surviving for so long, the girls, who are harshly treated by those who should be helping them, are left to die on the island. Due to the structures created by humanism, speciesism is strongly underlined by our society. As Wolfe points out in Animal Rites (2003), 

as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever species – or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference (8, author’s emphasis). 

Thus, the girls’ mutations, a cross between human-animal-nature, deny them their human status. No longer seen as human, and once starved, probed, and tested, they have no more use to the CDC and are left to fend for themselves on a nightmarish island. Nonetheless, has not their journey on Raxter highlighted the girls’ humanity even though they inhabit a posthuman body? The presence of humanity in bodies that are no longer considered human (one might say, of a different species) undermines the humanist discourse of species since one must question the violence against these girls (or any other being) simply because of their bodily difference.

Conclusion

Humanism created a view of the human built in opposition to and wholly separated from the monster, the Other, and the animal. This worldview built boundaries that do not allow the human being to merge with all of the living beings that surround them. Additionally, this narrow vision built a concept of the human that stresses the idea that whatever those other beings are, the human cannot be: if the monster is vicious, the human is kind; if the Other is uncivilized, the human is civilized; if the animal is irrational, the human is rational.

As we can observe, the consequences of a pandemic viral infection in young adult dystopian fiction create posthuman bodies—the changes the human body goes through to become posthuman can be external or internal, as observed in The Maze Runner trilogy, The Lunar Chronicles, and Wilder Girls. These posthuman bodies force the reader to problematize the binary oppositions human/monster, human/Other, and human/animal established by humanism, as well as reconsider what one believes a human body to be. As the novels mentioned in this brief analysis reveal, the infection and/or cure resulted in posthuman bodies, that is, bodies that question and dismantle the aforementioned binaries. These bodies, which are strange and yet so alike, have the power to change perceptions, to open dialogue, and to unveil how powerful is the connection between human/monster, human/Other, and human/animal. Hence, in these novels, monstrosity, otherness, and animality are depicted as a part of human ontology, just waiting to be awakened by a pandemic.Therefore, the human being has always been (and will always be) interconnected to the world that surrounds them, and is part of a network of relationships that cannot be detached. Contrary to what humanism presumes., there are no boundaries, no hierarchies, no categorizations. Then, as Michel Foucault ominously declared, “as the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (422).

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NOTES

[1] Needless to say, when this new view about the human was formulated, “human” actually meant white cis straight male. For that reason, I used the pronouns “his,” “himself,” and “he”.

[2] Another important study on this field is Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013).

[3] More recently, in the field of young adult fiction, Jennifer Harrison’s Posthumanist Reading in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction: Negotiating the Nature/Culture Divide (2019) was published.

[4] Later, the plague mutates, and not only does it affect the Earthens, but also the Lunars.

[5] When Hetty, the protagonist, faces the grizzly bear that inhabited the woods, she is confronted with the deep changes the wildlife in Raxter has gone through: “The bear’s head swings up and around to look right at me. I let out a muffled scream. One half of its face is bare to the bone” (177).

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WORKS CITED

Bastian, Brock. “The Uneasy Truth about Human-Animal Hybrids.” BBC Future, BBC, 22 Jan. 2017, http://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170222-the-uneasy-truth-about-human-animal-hybrids. 7 Jan 2021.

Dashner, James. The Kill Order. Delacorte Press, 2012.

—–. The Scorch Trials. Delacorte Press, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge, 2005.

Greene, Richard, and K. Silem Mohammad. “A New Lease of Life for the Undead.” Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead. Open Court, 2010, pp. 10-14.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Scribd, University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Jacques, Zoe. Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg. Routledge, 2015.

Knickerbocker, Dale. “Why Zombies Matter: The Undead as Critical Posthumanist.” Bohemica Literaria, 2015, pp. 59-82.

Meyer, Marissa. Cinder. Puffin, 2012.

—–. Winter. Puffin, 2015.

Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Polity Press, 2013.

Power, Rory. Wilder Girls. Delacorte Press, 2019.

Tarr, Anita, and Donna R. White. “Introduction.” Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World. Scribd, University Press of Mississippi, 2018, pp. 10-36.

Tattersall, Ian. “Homo Sapiens.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 11 Jan. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens/Bodily-structure. 28 Feb 2021.

White, Donna R. “Posthumanism in The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium.” Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World. Edited by Anita Tarr and Donna R. White. Scribd, University Press of Mississippi, 2018, pp. 253-288.

Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

—–. What is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

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Tânia Cerqueira holds a Master’s degree in Anglo-American Studies from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. She obtained it with a dissertation titled “‘Are you afraid of your own shadow?’: The Monster and the Construction of Identity in Monsters of Verity.” She is currently a PhD candidate at the same university. Her PhD thesis main focus is the relationship of the Gothic tradition and young adult dystopias. She is a collaborator at the Centre for English, Translation, and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (CETAPS) and a member of the Young Adult Studies Association. Her main research areas of interest include Young Adult Fiction, Dystopian Studies, Gothic Studies, and Posthumanism.

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Apocalypse Never: Walter Benjamin, the Anthropocene, and the Deferral of the End

Gregory Marks

Today there is no shortage of proclamations on the end of days, either in the mode of imminent catastrophe or in the grim acknowledgement that it is already too late to change our fate. It is said that our actions on this planet have inaugurated a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene, the era of humanity—and that this epoch also marks our doom as an era of inevitable catastrophe and extinction. The concept of the Anthropocene carries within it a temporal ambiguity, as it signifies both “that there will not be complete annihilation but a gradual witnessing of a slow end, and that we are already at that moment of witness, living on after the end” (Colebrook 2014). To call this situation apocalyptic or even post-apocalyptic would be a misnomer, because the catastrophe is one without a moment of revelation, much less a redemptive relation to the history that preceded it. The end is embedded in the earth itself, and made into something always already present, as an incontrovertible fact of the human era. 

It is the argument of this paper that this vision of an end to human history that is at once finished and unfulfilled is not an innate fact of our ecological predicament, but is rather symptomatic of our present historical juncture of late capitalism—which is itself interminably caught on the verge of global climate catastrophe but seemingly without alternatives. To attribute the ecological disasters of a historically novel economic system to the geological epoch of humanity itself risks reifying that system into something ahistorically innate to human nature, and therefore without changeability or recourse. The narrative of the Anthropocene is thus characterised by a mournful order of time—which shrinks from historical consciousness and envisages humanity as fossils in the making.

To make sense of this melancholic disposition, I will turn to the works of Walter Benjamin to give a typology of the forms of time available to us. Specifically, I will examine Benjamin’s early writings on baroque drama, which stages a model of history in which all human action sinks into the mute eternity of the natural world. This form of time stands in contrast with Benjamin’s more famous formulations of industrial capitalism’s homogeneous, empty time and the messianic time which marks the moment of historical fulfilment. If, as Benjamin claimed, the funereal vision of nature’s eternity is a mark of historical failure, we are today confronted with a failure of world-historic proportions that threatens to sweep up even the most critical minds in its tide. 

The subject of Benjamin’s 1925 habilitation thesis is the ‘trauerspiel,’ which may be best defined as an obscure genre of baroque drama originating from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. The trauerspiel has its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, although the most famous of these—Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Calderón’s La vida es sueño—are marked by their transcendence of the trauerspiel form, which in Germany remained an esoteric, even stagnant, genre without a claim to greatness. The term trauerspiel is variably translated into English as ‘baroque tragedy’ or ‘German tragic drama,’ although both translations risk assimilating the trauerspiel to tragedy proper. 

Unlike tragedy in its classical sense, the trauerspiel lacks a historical dimension, in which its heroes attain the immortality of a fulfilled fate. The plot of the tragedy sustains itself on the interplay between fate and character, and the eventual fulfilment of both in the hero’s fulfilment of his destiny. His death is his gateway to greatness, and therefore a paradoxical kind of immortality as the heroic forefather of a city, a culture, or a faith. As Benjamin writes, “in tragedy the hero dies because no one can live in fulfilled time. He dies of immortality. Death is an ironic immortality; that is the origin of tragic irony” (Origin 262). As we shall see, the trauerspiel lacks access to an immortal or historic register because it admits neither a permanence to worldly affairs nor a transcendence from the world of creation. 

Yet in its lack of historical consciousness, the trauerspiel is in every respect a reflection of its historical context. Emerging from a Europe ravaged by the wars of religion, culminating in the prolonged bloodshed of the Thirty Years War, the trauerspiel was a narrative form that expressed the hideous violence of the age. For the heroes of the trauerspiel there is no immortality following great deeds, much less any redemption conferred from on high for the victors of the bloody squabbles that take centre stage. 

Translated literally, the trauerspiel is a ‘mourning play’ or even a ‘funeral pageant’—terms which better express the melancholic disposition of the genre. It is the prevalence of mourning that informs the trauerspiel’s unique relation to time and history, which it conceives under the symbol of the ruin: a marker of humanity’s passing, where historical triumph is recognised in decay, and nature reasserts itself over the greatest of human achievements. As a measure of decay, the time of the trauerspiel is marked by its transience and the sinking of historical time into the timelessness of non-human nature. “With decay, and with it alone, historical occurrence shrinks and withdraws into the setting” (Benjamin, Origin 190). Its narrative, and the prevailing symbol of the ruin, provide a model for a conception of history that is inevitably fated for decline. The ruin figures the failure of history to achieve any ends beyond inescapable death.   

If the trauerspiel occupies a curious position in relation to historical time, this relation is only complicated by its conception of nature and the natural world. As Benjamin writes, “what has the last word in the flight from the world that is characteristic of the Baroque is not the antithesis of history and nature but total secularization of the historical in the state of creation” (Origin 81). This is not an opposition between history and nature, but the total submergence of the former within the latter, silencing historical consciousness in favour of a melancholic rumination upon the cruel whims of nature. Human history is caught within the much wider movement of nature itself, and inevitably cycles downwards from glory to desolation. It is this turn from history to nature that marks the barrier between classical tragedy and the trauerspiel; as Fredric Jameson suggests, “tragedy brings history into being by emerging from legend, by overcoming myth; Trauerspiel is condemned to a history without transcendence, which it can only think my means of natural categories, cycles, organisms, the seasons, the eternal return” (68). This nature appears “not in the bud and blossom but in the overripeness and decay of its creations. Nature looms before them as eternal transience” (Benjamin, Origin 190). Nature in this sense is not merely the non-human world or the earthly basis for human affairs, but a force external to history which constantly intervenes to dash the dreams of historical permanence. 

Although preoccupied with death, the trauerspiel is not an apocalyptic vision of the end of history, because there is no end to speak of. Eternal transience destroys all sense of permanence, but it also precludes any fundamental change to the state of the world. It is in this interminability of natural history that the time of the trauerspiel shows its diabolical face. The eternity of nature’s dominion is experienced as the endless torment of perdition. In the trauerspiel’s bloody dramas the most boastful of nature’s creations are the most overripe, and the most accomplished are the ones most ready for decay. Something abyssal is recognised at the heart of humanity, god’s fallen children who cannot be anything but the imperfect mirrors of a creation lacking all transcendence. The subsumption of history within nature begets a theory of human nature: a bloody turmoil, a lust for power, and a war of all against all. History does not end, because it can come to no lasting conclusion; it eddies in the vastness of nature but does not entirely subside. “History finds expression not as [a] process of an eternal life but as [a] process of incessant decline” (Benjamin, Origin 188). The narrative of the trauerspiel realises a melancholy negation of historical consciousness, which retains the historical interest in disputes of power while simultaneously undercutting the lasting achievements of those historic struggles. 

But where does this damned, earthly time of the mourning play find its expression today? If this melancholy resignation to the vicissitudes of nature came to the fore of German drama during the social crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I argue that similar attitudes toward history and formulations of time are also near at hand for many who today see climate change as the augur of a new, posthuman age. As we have seen, the time of the trauerspiel has four key traits: (1) It is, first and foremost, a time which is historically unfulfilled: a litany of lost causes; (2) it is a spectral time in which history is understood under the symbol of the ruin; (3) it naturalises eternal transience as the order of the world at large; (4) its drama is one of earthly creation without hope of messianic redemption. Now it remains to be shown that the grand narrative of the Anthropocene possesses parallel traits to those of the trauerspiel narrative, allowing it to be understand as both an anti-historical narrative of naturalised decline and as a symptom of the world-shattering catastrophe that it purports to describe. 

As in the narrative of the trauerspiel, the concept of the Anthropocene carries with it a sense of time that twists back on itself, projecting its catastrophic epoch back to the primordial origins of humanity and far into a post-human future. As Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro write, although the Anthropocene is an epoch “in the geological sense of the word,” it also “points toward the end of epochality as such, insofar as our species is concerned.” Danowski and Viveiros de Castro continue: 

It is certain that, although it began with us, it will end without us: the Anthropocene will only give way to a new geological epoch long after we have disappeared from the face of the Earth. [It is] a present ‘without a view,’ a passive present, the inert bearer of a geophysical karma which it is entirely beyond our reach to cancel (5).

The Anthropocene, from this perspective, is not only a description of a new era, but an injunction to think of the present time with resignation. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s invocation of ‘karma’ is no anomaly. Among the proclamations upon the changed circumstances of history, there is no shortage of statements on the moral meaning of those changes. The discovery that we have entered not only a new era of history but a new geological epoch has brought with it a chiliastic fervour, spoken in, for example, Roy Scranton’s manifesto for Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and Patricia MacCormack’s argument in The Ahuman Manifesto that human extinction may well be the only solution to climate change. 

It is little wonder that the trauerspiel has not gone unnoticed by some theorists of the Anthropocene. As the editors of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Anthropocene Project write, “the Trauerspiel plays on in the Anthropocene, for ‘the catastrophe here is in the form of the age itself, meaning our entire civilization, and its requisite way of life, is already a ruin’” (Klingan et al. 34). The Anthropocene is rendered as a trauerspiel drama for the entire globe: 

A return to the earthly conditions of man, the name of a fated history, the passing away of Renaissance humanism, humans above all, for a general ideology of the creaturely, an immanent intermingling between rocks, trees, angels, and tyrants. (Klingan et al. 29-30) 

A rosy picture, but one we will not be fated to see with our own eyes. What at first sounds like an eschatological vision of paradise returned to earth belies the infernal heart of the trauerspiel. In its shock at the unrepresentable catastrophe that lies before it, the trauerspiel finds solace in a catastrophic conception of nature itself. In the eternal stretch of natural time, we are already dead; a fate we must contemplate in melancholic resignation. In Anthropocene theory, too, there is a recognition of shock, a desperate need to make sense of a world that no longer conforms to the myth of progress—and the answer these theorists provide is a new, earthly myth. At precisely the moment that the planetary reign of Anthropos is declared it is disavowed, and the eternal transience of nature’s dominion is reaffirmed.

If the Anthropocene contradicts the narrative of historical progress by naturalising decline in the place of ascent, this is not to say that it has no relation to the mechanical time that Benjamin identifies as the source of progressive modernity in his 1940 “Theses.” In fact, the time of the Anthropocene depends just as much upon a homogeneous, empty construction of time as does the myth of progress. But whereas the universal history of progress sees a timeline stretching indefinitely upward into the heavens, the Anthropocene envisages a timeline that infinitely curves back upon itself across millennia. As Claire Colebrook writes, conceptualising the Anthropocene means envisaging a world without us which is already present, virtually, at this moment: 

The positing of an anthropocene era (or the idea that the human species will have marked the planet to such a degree that we will be discernible as a geological strata) deploys the idea of human imaging—the way we have already read an inhuman past in the earth’s layers—but does this by imagining a world in which humans will be extinct. (28)   

This construction of time is no less uniform than its progressive counterpart, but whereas the latter takes the clock as its model the Anthropocene measures itself on a cosmic scale. In the place of the seconds, minutes, and hours of the clockface, the Anthropocene’s homogeneous, empty units are geological layers—trace remnants that we imagine ourselves as in advance. Chronological time is distended across an inhuman expanse of time, projecting forward a future in which we must necessarily meet our demise—a future that is then brought back to the present as the lesson that our fates are already sealed: sic transit gloria mundi. Just as mechanical time and its universal history of progress work to negate true historical consciousness by turning our gaze from the sacrificed dead to an imagined future paradise, so too does this vision beget an ahistorical image of eternity: which seals up the past and future alike in forgotten aeons. 

In its retreat from historical time, the concept of the Anthropocene is opened to a mythic sensibility, which discovers in the inhuman void of extinction a hard-faced divinity staring back. Isabelle Stengers has made much of James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis,’ taking seriously the theory’s personification of an impersonal planetary system. For Stengers, Gaia is a strange kind of god, who announces the end of days but does not preside over the casting of judgment or distribution of redemption: 

Gaia is the name of an unprecedented or forgotten form of transcendence: a transcendence deprived of the noble qualities that would allow it to be invoked as an arbiter, guarantor, or resource; a ticklish assemblage of forces that are indifferent to our reasons and our projects. (47) 

Mirroring the demiurgic divinity of the trauerspiel, this is a ‘transcendence’ that does not, in fact, transcend, but remains mired within the world it governs without recourse to a world beyond. This curiously non-transcendent divinity also finds its spokesperson in Bruno Latour, in his lectures on natural theology, who proclaims the coming rule of Gaia over a terrestrial world of “immanence freed from immanentization” (212). Whereas for Stengers the inauguration of a new mythology for the era of climate change stops short of a definite political project, for Latour the intrusion of Gaia means a return to the bellum omnium contra omnes of Hobbes, the ‘earthly’ politics of Carl Schmitt (149-50), and the repudiation of the modern world proclaimed by Eric Voegelin (242-5). For this mystified faction of Gaia, the world as we know it is damned, and all that remains to be done is to make a choice of future barbarisms. An apocalypse is proclaimed, but redemption is postponed, as myth reasserts itself over a humanity with neither a history nor a future.  

Even apart from these more explicit attempts to formulate a mythology for the era of ecocide, the Anthropocene has been subjected to a great deal of scrutiny for its ahistorical qualities. One cogent expression of this critique has been given by Andreas Malm, who writes that the main paradox of the Anthropocene narrative is that, within it “climate change is denaturalised in one moment—relocated from the sphere of natural causes to that of human activities—only to be renaturalised in the next, when derived from an innate human trait. Not nature, but human nature—this is the Anthropocene displacement” (270). For Malm, the core problematic of the Anthropocene is a sleight of hand, which displaces the culpability of industrial capitalist society onto a wider complicity of ‘human nature,’ presumably including the masses of humans today and in the past who did little to fuel the climate crisis. Seen through the lens of the trauerspiel and Benjamin’s typology of temporal forms, we can see how this act of legerdemain extends into the heart of the Anthropocene concept. As the proclamation of the first human epoch, the Anthropocene naturalises the present state of humanity and its crises as symptoms of human nature specifically and nature itself in general. 

Against this naturalisation of history it is necessary to historicise nature; to understand the recursive, or dare we say dialectical, feedback loop between history and nature, and the way in which both are composed in a mutually dependent natural history. The merely natural processes of the world—from weather, to digestion and respiration, to the architecture and fashion we take for granted as part of our living environment—are, Benjamin insists, only those things of which we remain unconscious, allowing them to slip into the subterranean zones of dream and myth. To the dreaming collective, these phenomena “stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges” (Benjamin, Arcades 390). This is the meaning of historicised nature: the emergence of unconscious forces into the light of day, transforming their motions from the vicissitudes of chance or fate into the known causes of a totality in which nature and history are inextricably linked. The failure to recognise the historical component of this system is to lose this foothold, and to conceive of nature as an unconscious and seemingly inalterable force that slowly engulfs history in its myths. As in the trauerspiel narrative, we find in Anthropocene theory a recognition of historical crisis that precludes a consciousness of history itself. Rather, crisis is naturalised and made the founding myth for a melancholic model of history. According to this narrative, we are the doomed creatures of a monstrous world, residing in the ruins of a geological epoch that will stretch far beyond the life of our species. But even though extinction is at hand, the end is nowhere in sight as we drift further into an anti-apocalypse; an event that mutes revelation and casts its transient shroud across our collective horizons. That is, until we can grasp the historical as well as the natural genesis of the present conjuncture—to understand that the present epoch is not the consequence of an eternal order but the work of human hands; hands that, if conscious of the work they do, can just as well halt what they set in motion. 

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WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Belknap Press, 1999. 

Benjamin, Walter. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Translated by Howard Eiland, Harvard University Press, 2019.  

Colebrook, Claire. The Death of the PostHuman. Open Humanities Press, 2014. 

Danowski, Déborah and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of the World. Translated by Rodrigo Nunes, Polity, 2017.  

Jameson, Fredric. The Benjamin Files. Verso, 2020.  

Klingan, Katrin, et al. Textures of the Anthropocene: Manual. MIT Press, 2015.  

Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia. Translated by Catherine Porter, Polity, 2017. 

Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital. Verso, 2016.  Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times. Translated by Andrew Goffey, Open Humanities Press, 2015. 

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Dr. Gregory Marks is a recent PhD graduate and tutor in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University, Australia. His thesis was on the Gothic narratives and posthuman nightmares of Thomas Pynchon’s novels. He has presented locally and internationally on Gothic fiction and its intersections with ecology and philosophy. His chapter “Undead Matters: The Life and Death of Gothic Materialism” in Dark Glamor: Accelerationism and the Occult is forthcoming (Punctum 2021).

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The Underside of Time

Laura Denning

‘Pandemics and the spectre of eco-apocalypse don’t signal the end of all worlds or times but merely of the world as presently constituted; there is always the vital question of what comes after.”[1] The Present as a future archaeological past is, currently, often identified as the Anthropocene. This contested term, however, continues to calibrate our human-scale perception of time as central to deep pasts and deep futures. This poem-film draws upon a recent collaboration with paleo-archaeologist Suzi Richer, to question that calibration, and to consider ‘change’ within these massive scales. Some of the questions that surfaced were: How can we un-map, backwards? What is revealed in the shift from the polar view to the equatorial view? What stories might evolve as companions in a changing world? What can we do with furrows, spores, apertures and spikes? Could hydrophobic materials adapt back towards their origins? Do humans just need to get over themselves? Could metals become future pollinators? How would oxidisation fold into future fertility narratives? And so forth. 

Timefullness, says Marcia Bjornerud, references literacy in relation to the longer view. She says ‘We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us’. The Underside of Time is an evocation of these insights, realizsed through visual and sonic metaphor. The short film and subsequent poem is situated long after 6^th or even the 9^th mass extinction, and offers a speculative and fictional account of how OUR present is a future archaeological past, asking what a poly-temporal world view might offer, in terms of how we live and what we leave behind, in a post-pandemic world.

The Underside of Time

It’s Over
Get over it
Get Over Yourself
Humans are Zero
Gone, Nada, Zilch
Disappeared
Here, on the Underside of Time
Just Ice and Stardust
Carried in the wind.

Traces of you
(Just the ruins really)
Pock the fringes of this planet still.

You were always building
Then unbuilding
Further and further away from yourself
You scared the weather
You scared the birds
But you’re just zero now.

Careful Now
Do you suppose that the
Underside of Time
Is a place?
That can be known?
Mapped? Somewhere?
On the inside of
Yourself?
You? Surrounded by your own detritus.

Careful Now
Time moves on 
Without you
But this isn’t History
History is a human thing
The world breathes without you
Time and History
Are set free.

Your detritus pollinates other possibilities
Form and Function adapt
Earth’s secrets
Seeding new stars
Shooting.

Shot
Submerged
Tempests hurl
All this matter
(That doesn’t matter)
But still
Reaching out.

Reaching across multiverses
Weaving myths of connection
Spectacular Tentacular
Temporal acrobatics
That you will never see.

Death Star
Killing everything
Chasing the shiny new
Extracting pasts
Sinking in your own discharge
Always with strings attached
You tried to compress time
But you merely killed time
Without you
There is just
The Underside of Time.

There were jungles everywhere
Before the extractions
There were diamonds dancing on veils of silver
Before the Deluge
But the light faded
Leaving nothing but
The Underside of Time.

Laura Denning ©2020

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NOTES

[1] Taken directly from the CFP for Pandemic Imaginaries 2020.

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Recipient of the inaugural scholarship in Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, Laura Denning has recently successfully defended her PhD thesis “Hydrofeminism: bodies, spaces, practices”. This practice-led research positioned art practice within experimental geography in order to open up the registers within which art might operate, and to foreground the environmental and ecological focus of her art practice. Using Hydrofeminism as a trigger to generate speculative artworks, all of which attracted Arts Council England funding, Laura is now developing new works as proposals for post-doctoral opportunities that have an arts/science crossover. These works explore transcorporealities in relation to temporal shifts – including the moment, and extending to considerations of deep time. Laura is the recipient of a number of awards and commissions and her work has featured in a number of publications.

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The Wrong Kind of Viral: Post-Apocalyptic Pandemics in Contemporary North American Fiction

Katrin Isabel Schmitt

Narratives of catastrophe are omnipresent. They range from the latest concerning headline about the COVID-19 outbreak to canonical movies such as Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004). A prominent and iconic story of disaster is that of the apocalypse, which goes back to the Bible, especially to the Book of Revelation. While the term ‘apocalypse’ still evokes strong associations to the biblical narrative, in the twenty-first century, it is primarily used to refer to large-scale disasters or drastic changes of any kind. Consequently, the apocalypse has undergone a conceptual expansion. Now, it encompasses doom, downfall, and disaster, a “modern conflation” (DiTomasso 478) of the end of the world. Concerning literary renditions, the apocalyptic event has ceased to be an ultimate endpoint in contemporary narratives. Rather, as James Berger argues, in “nearly every apocalyptic presentation, something remains after the end” (5–6). As there are survivors and other remnants of former times in the post-apocalyptic world, the catastrophe is not only destructive, but also bears the potential for new beginnings and therefore signifies hope. In this regard, Mary Manjikian points out that it is not primarily the apocalypse as such that is at the center of post-apocalyptic stories. According to her they are rather “concerned with the consequences of the apocalyptic moment, the ways in which society’s norms and values and social practices will be changed as a result” (64-5).

It is an inherent feature of apocalyptic representations that they are adapted to and influenced by the time of their creation. Accordingly, they pick up on prevailing individual and collective fears, and draw attention to potential threats and dangers within society. This is already disclosed in the Ancient Greek root, apocalypsis, which translates to ‘revelation’. The spread and impact of COVID-19 poses an ongoing threat to the global community. Years before the spread of COVID, contemporary post-apocalyptic novels took up the theme of worldwide pandemics. Although these works follow the same genre conventions – a world-changing catastrophe, few survivors struggling to carry on, and destroyed urban spaces – they are also diverse in their structures and themes. In this paper, I focus on three particularly felicitous post-apocalyptic novels by North American writers that feature a deadly virus: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), The Dog Stars (2012) by Peter Heller, and Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel. This comparative analysis allows to highlight how contemporary works approach apocalyptic pandemics, especially concerning new beginnings and the element of hope in the post-apocalyptic space.

Oryx and Crake features the protagonist Snowman, who is the (apparently) sole human survivor of a pandemic and shares the world with posthuman creatures called Crakers. The Dog Stars follows Hig, who has outlived a flu that killed almost everyone around him, and his struggles in a post-pandemic space. In the third example, Station Eleven, a deadly virus spreads in North America and eradicates most of humanity, apart from a few survivors like the actors and musicians of the ‘Travelling Symphony.’ While all three novels present a pandemic setting, they vary in their representations of catastrophe and the changes caused by it. To compare them, I will analyze the respective pandemics as catalysts of change, to then describe the remains in the post-apocalyptic world. As a conclusion, my paper will highlight elements of the hope for new beginnings in post-apocalyptic literature, mirrored most prominently in the re-emergence of nature and communities. Based on these findings, I will discuss whether the respective pandemics in these novels are, in fact, the wrong kind of viral.

All three novels feature a pandemic that overthrows civilization and disrupts modern life. In Station Eleven, the “Georgia Flu” (Mandel 17) brings an end to the modern world. It has a short incubation period—”if you’re exposed, you’re sick in three or four hours and dead in a day or two”—and a “mortality rate at 99 percent” (20, 253). Throughout the novel, it remains unclear who is responsible for the emergence of the virus, thus giving it a sense of agency of its own. For example, the virus is characterized as so “efficient that there was almost no one left” (192). Similarly, in The Dog Stars, a “[m]utation of a superbug” (Heller 197), which supposedly originated in New Delhi, kills almost everyone. However, it turns out that the virus was fabricated in the national weapons lab in Livermore, California, and then spread in a plane crash, making a governmental institution responsible for the catastrophe. In contrast, in Oryx and Crake, the outbreak of a pandemic is intentionally caused by the scientist Crake with the objective of freeing the world from harmful and morally corrupt humanity to make room for the posthuman Crakers. 

A comparison of the novels stresses that the representations of the viruses vary and hereby set different emphases. In Station Eleven, the origin of the flu is not revealed, which signifies a lingering anxiety concerning the unknown and the unpredictability of life. In The Dog Stars, the pandemic spreads due to the error of a governmental institution, which symbolizes fear of the misuse of political power and influence. Only Oryx and Crake portrays a virus that is purposefully created to sentence sinful humanity, thereby evoking Judgment Day in the Book of Revelation. While the biblical apocalypse leads to a better place, New Jerusalem, Crake’s approach is merely destructive—at least for humans. 

It is striking that in both Station Eleven and The Dog Stars the pandemic is ascribed to foreign countries, namely to India and the Republic of Georgia, respectively. Hence, the characters in the novels perceive the viruses as a representation of the Other, something caused by an alien force. These perspectives are also reflected in the pandemics’ names: Georgia Flu and Africanized bird flu. There appears to be an inherent need to find a logical explanation for the catastrophe. If none is to be found, as the characters experience in the novels, people try to find a scapegoat—a scenario quite familiar after the year 2020 and the rhetoric of the ‘China Virus.’ The anxiety that powerful scientific knowledge might be abused is reflected in Oryx and Crake, as a scientist with a biocentric value system makes the conscious decision to eliminate humanity. 

Although the novels’ pandemics differ in their causes, they share the representation of a clear-cut “divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through… life” (Mandel 20). Yet, the apocalypse is not a conclusive end, as there are some survivors and physical remains of pre-pandemic modernity. August, one of the members of the Travelling Symphony in Station Eleven, remarks: “The world didn’t end . . . It’s still spinning” (Mandel 202). While the pandemics may not prove to be the end of the world, they significantly alter the world and demolish the achievements of civilization. Heather J. Hicks claims that post-apocalyptic fiction “interrogat[es] the category of modernity” as the apocalypse destroys “physical structures, social formations, and values of modern life” (2, 4). In this context, it is not the question of whether something remains that is relevant. What is significant is what persists, how the apocalypse transforms the remnants, and what emerges in the spaces almost completely void of humanity. 

All three novels feature the destruction of infrastructure and social systems in the pandemic, which are virtually non-existent in the post-apocalyptic world. The breakdown of modernity is prominently depicted in ruined urban spaces as the pandemics lead to an “industrial wasteland” (Mandel 191), desolate cities, and collapsed buildings; worlds where it “won’t be long before all visible traces of human habitation will be gone” (Atwood 222), as proposed in Oryx and Crake. With the collapse of societal structures and depictions of ruins, the novels present the familiar “end of the world as we know it” (Hall 3). Previously held humanist values are shattered together with these structures. The few remaining people live in a “world that’s way past diplomacy” (Heller 203) and fight for their survival, regardless of the consequences for others. The apocalypse is not only an end on the physical level, it also demolishes the core concepts of human interaction and existence.

As human lives and structures disappear, nature can reclaim the spaces they once occupied. From a biocentric perspective, which according to Timothy Clark aims to “identify with all life or a whole ecosystem, without giving . . . privilege to just one species” (3), the novels under discussion reveal a sense of purpose in the ruins as they are re-naturalized. For example, Station Eleven describes “beauty in the decrepitude, sunlight catching in the flowers that had sprung up through the gravel of long-overgrown driveways.” This image of serenity is strongly contrasted by the remains of urban life, as houses contain “only trash from the old world” (Mandel 296). While the pandemic brings the damaging environmental impacts of humans abruptly to an end, the long-lasting effects of climate change brought on and precipitated by them are still visible. Although there might not be a clear future perspective for humanity, nature is recovering. In Oryx and Crake, the former urban structures are annihilated by the natural world as “the botany is thrusting itself through every crack. Given time it will fissure the asphalt, topple the walls, push aside the roofs” (221-2). Natural space conquers human constructions. To summarize, in all three novels, nature gains more space to flourish and regenerate than in the pre-apocalyptic world. 

The pandemics are presented as a positive event from a biocentric perspective in which non-human life forms no longer suffer under a hierarchy shaped by human exceptionalism. The survivors in Station Eleven and The Dog Stars adjust to the situation and sometimes even enjoy peaceful pastoral moments. For Snowman in Oryx and Crake, in contrast, nature continuously poses a threat and he cannot accept a subordinate role within the new ecosystem. In addition to the struggle for survival, the post-apocalyptic world also provides space for the formation of new human communities. Although most characters in these three novels start out as lonely survivors, almost all of them establish new social bonds and forms of familial ties. Eva Horn asserts that those who survive are “either communities that fight or nuclear families–communities, in any case, whose bonds are based on blood, the blood shared by kin or the blood shed by the enemy” (100). Within this framework, it is a central concern, whether the new collectives attempt to reproduce the past or if they are future-oriented. 

A prime example is the newly formed community at Severn City Airport in Station Eleven. Shortly after the pandemic, the survivors are keen for their lives to go back to the way they were before, waiting for “the army coming in and announcing that it was all over, this whole flu thing cleared up and taken care of, everything back to normal again” (Mandel 179). However, as they start to realize that there is no way back, they accept their situation and find a new purpose in life. Starting out as individuals and small groups from all over the world who are stuck at an airport, the survivors soon begin to cooperate, developing shared survival strategies, and establishing new traditions, such as a topical bonfire every night. This new beginning is most strikingly manifested with the burgeoning of new life, as a woman at the airport giving birth to a baby is “the only good thing that had happened in that terrible first year” (233). 

Similarly, The Dog Stars opens with Hig dreaming of returning to the past as well, sleeping outside so he can “pretend there’s a house somewhere else, with someone in it, someone to go back to” (Heller 30). His only close contact is Bangley, although the two form an efficient survival team rather than being friends. Nevertheless, they grow closer and add to their community by letting Cima and her father join them. As Hig and Cima become romantically involved, there are grounds for a new nuclear family, which Hig even considers to be his “patriotic duty to follow… through.” Although the novel ends before there is any potential offspring, the topic of new life is further evoked with Cima bringing a male and female lamb with her, “[l]ike the Ark” (250, 265). The reference to the biblical flood narrative underscores that, theoretically, it only takes two to repopulate a species. In Oryx and Crake, in comparison, Snowman roams the earth as a lonely last man, only encountering other survivors at the end of the novel, although it remains unclear whether he will approach them or not. He desperately yearns for what he has lost. His post-apocalyptic present is significantly shaped by nostalgic memories he cannot let go. Constantly on his own and longing for the past, Snowman is unable to develop a perspective for the future and is incapable of building a new existence in the post-pandemic space. However, a new, future-oriented community is introduced in the form of the posthuman Crakers, who are perfectly adapted to the harsh environmental conditions and have a harmonious relationship with nature. To ensure that this equilibrium is maintained, Crake removed all attributes he considered to be human flaws in his creation, making racism, hierarchy, and territorial behaviour impossible for Crakers. While there seems to be little hope for humanity, the Crakers prosper in the post-pandemic space.

New communities are established in different variants in these novels. In Station Eleven, there are several new collectives, for example a cult led by a prophet, who think “they were saved from the Georgia Flu and survived the collapse because they’re superior people and free from sin” (Mandel 115), and the Travelling Symphony. At first glance, these groups appear to be transformational and novel. Nevertheless, at the end of the novel, the survivors spot a town “whose streets were lit up with electricity” (311), a sight that foreshadows the redevelopment of other structures of modern life. The Dog Stars presents a traditional nuclear family, thus reinstating former societal values. Consequently, these two novels contain the hope that former times can be reconstructed. Yet, this hope also contains the threat of cyclically repeating mistakes, potentially leading back to apocalyptic circumstances. In Oryx and Crake, in contrast, a unique and promising posthuman community is introduced. However, the Crakers, contrary to Crake’s plans, start to mirror human behavior, such as symbolical thinking and the formation of hierarchical structures. There is consequently the risk that they will repeat human mistakes as well, which diminishes the utopian traits of their new beginning. 

In sum, this comparative analysis has shown that the selected novels are representative for the range and depth of North American post-apocalyptic fiction as a negotiation of political, philosophical, and bioethical questions and values. Although the works considered here create a scenario in which viral pandemics are vastly destructive and cause the annihilation of social (infra-)structures and large percentages of humankind, there are also new beginnings. The surviving humans rebuild communities, which are adapted to the post-apocalyptic space while simultaneously replicating elements of pre-pandemic times. The element of hope is a double-edged sword, as there is an underlying threat that history might repeat itself for humanity. Nature, however, thrives in the post-apocalyptic spaces, stressing its intrinsic value outside the anthropocentric framework of human perception. In the end, pandemics are, from a biocentric perspective, the right kind of viral after all.

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WORKS CITED

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Bloomsbury, 2003. 

Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

DiTommaso, Lorenzo. “Apocalypticism and Popular Culture.” The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, edited by John J. Collins, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 473–509. 

Hall, John R. Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity. Polity, 2009.

Heller, Peter. The Dog Stars. Headline, 2012.

Hicks, Heather J. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 

Horn, Eva. The Future as Catastrophe. Columbia University Press, 2018. 

Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Manjikian, Mary. Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End. Lexington Books, 2014.

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Katrin Isabel Schmitt is a doctoral researcher in the field of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Konstanz and holds a doctoral scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. She is currently working on her dissertation project titled “Beginning after the End: Narrative and Trauma in Twenty-First Century North American Post-Apocalyptic Fiction” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Reingard M. Nischik and Prof. Dr. Silvia Mergenthal. Prior to that she successfully completed her state exam in German and English (teaching degree), including an Erasmus stay abroad at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her focus on contemporary North American Literature is also reflected in her teaching at the University of Konstanz, namely in seminars such as “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Fiction” and “North American Post-Apocalyptic Short Fiction” for graduate and undergraduate students. Further research interests of hers include Contemporary Literature, Speculative Fiction, and Environmental Humanities. Additionally to her research, Katrin Isabel Schmitt is employed as a startup officer specialising in marketing and communications at the University’s startup-initiative Kilometer1.

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Imperialism is a Plague, Too: Transatlantic Pandemic Imaginaries in César Mba Abogo’s “El sueño de Dayo” (2007) and Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” (2012)

Giulia Champion

As the world is in the midst of a global health pandemic, focus on the continued other crises that have plagued our world is both minimised and increased. It is minimised because COVID-19 seems to have taken centre stage in all news outlets and in much academic research and it continues to impact everyone’s daily life. However, it has also increased the focus on structural and systemic inequalities, which are pandemics of sorts as well. The very marginalised communities that are more vulnerable to COVID-19 have also continually suffered from these inequalities in the past. Our current health crisis is entangled with all these other ones, including our climate emergency, our racism pandemic and many others. 

This brief paper engages with pre-COVID-19 pandemic imaginaries in two short stories. The first is authored by Equatoguinean César Mba Abogo entitled “El sueño de Dayo” (“Dayo’s Dream”)[1] (2007) and the second is by US-Dominican author Junot Díaz and entitled “Monstro”, first published in The New Yorker in 2012. The transatlantic connections between these two works inscribe pandemic imaginaries into the history of the Atlantic trade and colonialism, the diseases developed then, and into contemporary histories of mobility and migration, put into a halt in time of lockdown. This comparative investigation proposes to identify the use of the pandemic trope in fiction as a manner to emphasise colonialism as a metaphorical pandemic. I argue that the mobilisation of contagion and disease in the short stories serves to highlight the continuity of uneven developments and dynamics in formerly colonised spaces. This is crucial when considering that sf tropes like alien invasions and abductions, environmental apocalypses, and contagion plots, such as pandemics, are not merely works of the imagination; they are a reality, having taken place for indigenous and previously colonised communities (Whyte). Moreover, to support this argument, I also focus on the fact that in both narratives one can displace monstrous tropes from a colonial and racist rhetoric onto (neo-)imperial practices to signify the consequences of colonial dynamics as bringing forth destruction and extinction. This is seen in particular by identifying “Western” countries—broadly described as “United Powers” and the “Great Powers” in each short story—as responsible for the creation and spread of the epidemic and pandemic scenarios depicted. The conflation of these Euro-American-based powers in the two stories emphasises how most of the Global North can be seen as having benefitted and continuing to benefit from colonialism, whether through formal colonial relations or mercantilism and because of the advantages it generated for the Global North, which continue to be at the basis of its current wealth and productive economies.

Colonisation also continues to impact former colonies economically, socio-politically, environmentally and infrastructurally. This is the reason why imperialism can be articulated as a metaphorical pandemic, though one with material consequences: It invades, exploits to the level of extinction and then leaves its victims like patients affected by an illness’s long-term effects. Countries on the African continent—as noted below Mba Abogo’s narrative operates a specific conflation of the continent to exemplify these dynamics—and Haiti, as the spaces of the two narratives considered here, are crucial for this discussion. Indeed, through different yet similar histories of colonisation and (neo-)imperialism, they continue to live through these uneven consequences, as I will discuss below.[2] It is important, though, that these spaces are more than this history and, as Gina Athena Ulysses and Felwine Sarr argue in each context, they are more than depictions of victimisation and monstrousness.

Mba Abogo’s short story is part of a collection entitled El porteador de Marlow. Canción negra sin color (Marlow’s Helmsman. The Black Song without Colour) and the work considers throughout the way in which all of Europe has profited from colonialism and is still profiting from its extension in various forms of imperialism today. This is done in particular through the setting of all the pieces in different invented places located on the European and African continents. Indeed, the collection does not directly refer to Equatorial Guinea or Spain, but rather sets its writings in imaginary places referring to Africa and Europe more broadly and “[t]hus [the pieces in the collection] transcend particular national contexts and point to more abstract geopolitical power structures determined by notions of ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ of belonging and alienness, and by positionalities of privilege and exclusion” (Brost 35). In these terms, it becomes clear that the collection attempts to give a voice to different diasporas across the European continent, and to re-centre the “Black subject” which has been marginalised in different socio-economic, political and cultural spheres. 

In “El sueño de Dayo” (“Dayo’s Dream”), the narrator and character Dayo, a young man from an unnamed African country who has recently moved to Europe to study, dreams that Africa stops existing after the receipt of humanitarian aid afflicts all Africans with a strange illness from which they cannot seem to recover. This echoes dynamics in Díaz’s short story “Monstro”—taking place in the Dominican Republic as a strange and unknown epidemic is slowing developing on the other side of the border in Haiti—in which we are made to recognise that apocalyptic scenarios often speak to the daily lived experiences of formerly colonised countries. Monstrosity in particular comes to play a crucial role in both narratives: in Mba Abogo’s short story African characters are described as “savage” and violent towards each other following the receipt of the fatal aid: “Los negros se enfrentaron unos a otros como perros por aquellos alimentos, se arrancaron la piel a tiras y se devoraron unos a otros” (“Black people fought each other for this food, they skinned each other, devoured each other”) (20). This depiction is followed by the description of major news outlets’ coverage, including that of BBC and CNN, of the humanitarian intervention and its subsequent result in a pandemic. The news outlets appear as voyeuristic and feeding on people’s misery as they cover live what they describe as “el Apocalipsis de la estirpe condenada a cuatrocientos años de agonía” (“the Apocalypse of the lineage condemned to four hundred years of agony”) (20). This phrase invokes the four hundred years of colonisation and exploitation of the continent as a catastrophic and ongoing event. This illuminates a connection between the literal pandemic unfolding and the metaphorical one that colonisation has been for the continent. This type of discourse is associated with Euro-American fantasies concerning formerly colonial spaces, in particular narratives of the African continent, which, as Patrick Brantlinger argues “grew ‘dark’ as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light, because the light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of ‘savage customs’ in the name of civilization” (166).[3] Outside of the fictional world, this imagery is still powerful in the perception of the continent abroad, which is often conflated as one big country and described as a place of hunger, violence and “under-development”, fetishised through images of starving children and violent strife. 

A similar monstrosity is deployed in Díaz’s short story in the increasingly violent depiction of the victims of an unknown pandemic. The action of “Monstro” unfolds from the perspective of a first-person narrator who has returned home from the US during the summer break to visit his mother in the Dominican Republic. She had moved back to the island to seek treatment being unwell, facing a much more dire situation in the US given the costliness and unevenness of its health care system. While this is a pre-COVID-19 imaginary, this type of situation only appears more prescient in the current health crisis that crowds hospitals all over the world and, in the US in particular where minorities have the least access to the health care system and are often the primary victims of the pandemic due to systemic and structural inequalities (“Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups”). In “Monstro”, the depictions of the people affected by the epidemic, which at first is concentrated in Port-au-Prince, evolves from describing them as “viktims [sic]” (84) to “possessed” (98) to “invaders” (101), and, as the illness evolves the city is bombed to avoid further contagion:

Nothing was working except for old diesel burners and the archaic motos with no points or capacitors. People were trying out different explanations. An earthquake. A nuke. A Carrington event. The Coming of the Lord. Reports arriving over the failing fatlines claimed that Port-au-Prince had been destroyed, that Haiti had been destroyed, that thirteen million screaming Haitian refugees were threatening the borders, that Dominican military units had been authorized to meet the invaders – the term the gov was now using – with ultimate force. (101, emphasis in original)

The use of the term “invaders” raises the issue of migration and the appalling treatment of Haitian labour migrants in the DR since the establishment of Rafael Trujillo’s race-based anti-Haitian autocratic rule that resulted in violence such as the El Corte (the cut) massacre that took place in 1937 (Martínez 115-116). This is continued in the 21^st century in the obscene 23 September 2013 ruling by the Dominican constitutional court, “[a]ptly described as civil death, social apartheid, and administrative genocide” (Shoaff 59), which established that only persons born in the DR to Dominican parents or legal residents are regarded as citizens. Considering Díaz’s background as a US-Dominican author, this depiction of migrants’ treatment can be read as spilling over from the Haitian-Dominican context to that of the South-North migration, especially when bearing in mind the treatment of immigrants in the US under the Trump administration. Migration is, to many extents, a legacy of colonialism, because of the lack of infrastructure in the countries that were drained (of resources and peoples) and exploited during the colonial period and then forced to take IMF loans during the decolonial period.[4] As Christina Sharpe argues, the:

ongoing crisis of capital in the form of migrants fleeing lives made unlivable is becoming more and more visible, or, perhaps, less and less able to be ignored. […] The crisis is often framed as one of refugees fleeing internal economic stress and internal conflicts, but subtending this crisis is the crisis of capital and the wreckage from the continuation of military and other colonial projects of US/European wealth extraction and immiseration. (59) 

The racist and discriminatory rhetoric surrounding immigration in the Global North can also be seen as such a legacy as it stems from residual traces of colonial and imperial discourse.

Moreover, monstrosity is suggested by the short story’s title itself, which as Sarah Quesada notes is “phonetic for monstruo in Spanish” (292), which she argues reflects the term’s “Latin root monere, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means to warn and to instruct” (292). Scholars have, in general, focused solely on this connection of monstrum to monere: interestingly, none seem to have considered the close etymological relation that the term ‘monster’ bears with ‘monument’. Indeed, monere also means “to remind, bring to one’s recollection”, which is the root for the term monument, to which the adverbial suffix –mentum is added (“Monster”). The myriad of terms associated with memory and commemoration implied in the word is crucial in understanding monstrosity and monstrous figures as monuments of colonialism. Crucially, monuments play a critical role in relation to colonisation, being physical reminders of western hegemony. Hence, the monstrous figures in these short stories—the zombie-like “viktims” in “Monstro” and the cannibal-like ill Africans in “Dayo’s Dream”—can be understood as literary monuments of colonial relations, signifiers that represent a vestige of this history, and they can be read as depicting the monumental ruins, or material traces, of colonial pasts and monstrosity as representing the corporeal embodiment of empire’s violence. 

In particular, this violence can be seen in the fact that both pandemic scenarios depicted in Mba Abogo’s and Díaz’s works can be identified as resulting from colonial and neo-imperial dynamics and are considered to be the responsibility of Euro-American countries. In Mba Abogo’s short story this link is made in the following description: “un doctor escandinavo, con la piel tan blanca que daba pena mirarle, denunció que el mana lanzado a los negros, por un descuido que nadie sabía bien cómo, transmitía una enfermedad mortal y contagiosa” (“a Scandinavian doctor, whose skin was so white it was painful to behold, reported that the mana thrown to black people, due to an unexplainable oversight, transmitted a contagious and fatal illness”) (20). In this quotation, the description of the “Scandinavian doctor”’s whiteness as painful to behold inverts racist discourses and thereby emphasises the arbitrary and epistemic violence of these types of rhetoric that are themselves monstrous monuments of colonialism. Along the same line, the identification of all Africans here as only black people plays on usual Euro-American stereotypes that conflate the continent to one country and ethnicity overlooking its heterogeneity. 

Moreover, the identification of humanitarian aid as responsible for the pandemic highlights the unintended issues that these aid programmes often create, which perpetuate uneven dynamics already in place as consequences of colonialism. In Díaz’s short story, I argue that the association of the epidemic with climate change similarly aligns the responsibility for global warming with the Global North as different colonial dynamics have accelerated and exacerbated anthropogenic climate change in former colonies and in particular in the Caribbean.⁴ Indeed, it is notable that from the beginning of the short story, the narrator continually describes the epidemic alongside issues related to anthropogenic climate change, such as abnormally fluctuating temperatures: “The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince, in the hottest March in recorded history” (81) or the exploitation of nature: “Strangest thing, though: once infected, few viktims died outright; they just seemed to linger on and on. Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected” (82). This rhetorical device informs the reader of the connection existing between the impending climate crisis, the culpability of the Global North, and the epidemic narrated in the short story. This connection continues to exist outside of this fictional world, considering the context in which COVID-19 emerged, wherein the destruction of natural habitats for a number of animal species has allowed for zoonotic diseases to spread more easily, as contact zones between humans and non-human animals continue to be compressed (Dobson et al.).

Furthermore, in both short stories, the solutions proposed and enacted to resolve the pandemics are genocidal. In “Dayo’s Dream”, the description is reminiscent of the stereotypical view of the “new-world-explorer” machete in hand traversing the jungle: “Con machetes y trajes especiales suministrados rápida, diligente y eficazmente por las Potencias Unidas, y sudando copiosamente, iban rematando a todos los enfermos. No se podía correr el riesgo de que le transmitieran la enfermedad a alguien. La operación fue un éxito. Se mataron a niños, mujeres, hombres, ancianos” (“With machetes and special garments rapidly, diligently and effectively supplied by the United Powers, and sweating profusely, they went to finish off all the people who were sick. One could not take the chance that the illness be transmitted to anyone else. The operation was a success. Children, women, men and elderly people were killed”) (20-21). Additionally, in the narrative, the “United Powers” erect a monument in front of their headquarters to commemorate the victims of this sacrifice (21), allowing us once more to associate monstrosity, monuments and colonialism with the extinction that colonialism brings forth and that a statue cannot replace.

Echoing Mba Abogo’s “United Powers”, in Díaz’s “Monstro” the narrator describes the decision of the “Great Powers” to bomb Port-au-Prince (99). The aftermath is felt as far as Cuba, Puerto Rico and Florida and it has many consequences, including a power outage, which itself provokes more death: “Tens of thousands died as a direct result of the power failure” (101). While this line appears to have further meaning in the wake of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, which inspired Díaz’s narrative, it also now echoes the state of other Caribbean islands since the repeated hurricanes and violent storms of 2017 and 2019, which have destroyed infrastructure across the region, leaving countless people without electricity or shelter. Additionally, as Quesada notes, the use of language in describing the event, and particularly of the word “white”, leaves space for multiple interpretations: “The Detonation Event—no one knows what else to call it—turned the entire world white” (Díaz 99). Quesada focuses on its relation to the race binary and its extension to lightness and illumination: “In this case, whiteness as the counterpoint of its binary other is produced by such intense illumination that it does not reveal clarity. Rather, its brightness is blinding, both literally […] and figuratively, as it occludes the distinction of reality. The reinscription of the universal in light, like the dichotomy of blanqueamiento [whitening] and negrura [blackness], is thus reversed in ‘Monstro’” (312-313). She discusses how the lack of illumination destabilises the race binary and thus re-evaluates it, showing how, in fact, whiteness and light provoke “occlusion and blindness” (313). I want to bring this argument further by proposing that the use of the term can also be seen as a “whitening” or “white-washing” of history and identity. The bombing, metaphorically, represents European and North American colonial and imperial agendas and interventionism in the Caribbean and South America; the destruction symbolises the writing of this region’s history and identity from a one-sided Euro-American-centric perspective, which returns to my above discussion concerning the use of monstrous figures and tropes to describe former colonies.

As Mba Abogo’s story progresses, Dayo, the main character repeatedly dreams about the disappearance of the African continent provoked by the pandemic, which fills him with dread. The storyline begins to blur the boundaries between dream and reality, pushing Dayo to confront his fear and his dream. As he does, death comes upon him and, as he is about to die, he understands that “[s]u vida estaba anclada en la historia” (“his life was anchored in history”) (22). This quote can be read through what Sharpe describes as “a past that is not the past” (13), insofar as the final line of the short story concludes its message by inviting the reader to reconsider contemporary events and developments as consequences of our colonial and neo-imperial past. Crucially, Sharpe explains this as one of the ways in which black people globally live in the wake: 

The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching; new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery, of undoing the ‘racial calculus and . . . political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago’ (Hartman 2008, 6) and that live into the present. […] I’ve been trying to articulate a method of encountering a past that is not past. A method along the lines of a sitting with, a gathering, and a tracking of phenomena that disproportionately and devastatingly affect Black peoples any and everywhere we are. (13, my emphasis)

The formulation of “a past that is not the past” reminds us that colonialism, neo-imperialism and racism are a pandemic too, one that began a long time ago and that continues to spread and perpetuate structural and systemic inequalities. Díaz’s “Monstro” and Mba Abogo’s “Dayo’s Dream” remind us of this reality and demonstrate how epidemic and pandemic imaginaries can be mobilised to articulate colonial and (neo-)imperial realities.

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NOTES

[1] All translations are mine unless specified otherwise. I would like to acknowledge Nora Castle’s help which significantly improved this brief intervention.

[2] See for instance Walter Rodney’s seminal study on this for the African context.

[3] Though migration is also a pre-capitalist phenomenon, considering many nomad groups for instance, the specific fluxes and routes that are established today often follow the Global North/South or Metropole/Periphery divide established during colonialism.

[4] See in particular Watts 1990.

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WORKS CITED

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 166–203.

Borst, Julia. “‘To Be Black in a “White” Country’: On the Ambivalence of the Diasporic Experience in César A. Mba Abogo’s El Porteador de Marlow. Canción Negra Sin Color (2007).” Research in African Literatures, vol. 48, no. 3, 2017, pp. 33–54.

Díaz, Junot. “Monstro.” Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Matthew David Goodwin, Wings Press, 2017, pp. 80–102.

“Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html. Accessed 25 March 2021.

Martínez, Samuel. Peripheral Migrants: Haitians and Dominican Republic Sugar Plantations. The University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Mba Abogo, César. “El sueño de Dayo.” El porteador de Marlow. Canción negra sin color, IAL Ediciones, 2007.

“Monster.” Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/121738. Accessed 10 May 2019.

Quesada, Sarah. “A Planetary Warning?: The Multilayered Caribbean Zombie in ‘Monstro.’” Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, edited by Monica Hanna et al., Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 291–318.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.

Sarr, Felwine. Afrotopia. Éditions Philippe Rey, 2016.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

Shoaff, Jennifer L. “The Right to a Haitian Name and a Dominican Nationality: ‘La Sentencia’ (TC 168–13) and the Politics of Recognition and Belonging.” Center for Black Studies Research, vol. 22, no. 2, 2016, pp. 58–82.

Ulysses, Gina Athena. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Wesleyan University Press, 2015.

Whyte, Kyle P. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, vol. 1, no. 1–2, pp. 224–42.

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Dr Giulia Champion is an Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on transdisciplinary climate change communication, material histories, and the Energy and the Blue Humanities. She recently co-edited a collection entitled Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction with Palgrave Macmillan (2020), and edited one entitled Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There, forthcoming with Routledge in May 2021. She is currently co-editing two journal special issues, one on “Activism and Academia in Latin America” with the Bulletin for Latin American Research with Dr Jessica Wax-Edwards (Royal Holloway) and Gabriel Funari (Oxford), and other one on “Animal Futurity” with Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism with Nora Castle (Warwick).

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Podcasting in a Pandemic: Dystopian Audio Drama in 2020 Brazil

Benjamin Burt

Introduction: Negotiating Dystopia in the Country of the Future

As the twenty-first century enters its third decade, Brazil’s enduring associations with Edenic bounty and predestined prosperity have succumbed to a dystopian imaginary (Sadlier 1-9). Optimistic visions eliding the darker aspects of Brazilian history have long characterized the place that Stefan Zweig famously called A Land of the Future in the subtitle of his 1941 nonfictional book, Brazil. In recent years, however, fatalism has largely eclipsed such hopefulness. The 2016 parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff, the election of far-right congressman Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2018, major fires in the Amazon rainforest, and the emergence of COVID-19 in 2020 have fueled a consensus that Brazil has become a dystopia (Fernandes; Fuks; Lavinas and Stefanoni).[1] The pandemic has been particularly damaging, with Bolsonaro overseeing the world’s worst national response according to a January 2021 study by the Lowy Institute. 

As the coronavirus spread in Brazil, most collective artistic production became potentially dangerous. Unlike cinema, television, and the theater, however, podcasting required minimal adaptation to continue apace. Audio dramas released via podcasts thus stand alone as full-cast, fictional productions released in their standard form during the initial months of the pandemic. This article analyzes three such works released in July and August 2020: Jacqueline Vargas’s #TdVaiFicar…  (#EverythingWillBe…), Projeto Pytuna’s Pytuna: Estação Nacional Libertadora (Pytuna: National Liberation Station), and Spotify Studios’ Sofia. While these series are united by their contemporaneous debuts and their exaggerated depictions of social ills, their production histories and the foci of their respective sociopolitical critiques diverge widely. As reflected by #TdVaiFicar’s COVID-centric script, Vargas conceived of her podcast entirely during the pandemic (Vargas, “Como”). Pytuna sought public funding as an audiovisual project yet transformed into an audio drama in 2020 (Crisci). Although it was recorded in lockdown, Pytuna does not incorporate COVID-19 into its critique of Brazilian fascism. In contrast to these independently produced works, Spotify’s Sofia is not an original drama but rather an adaptation of Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffat’s 2018 podcast Sandra.[2] The absence of COVID-19 in the Brazilian version directed by Mabel Cézar is unsurprising given its close adherence to the American original.[3] In fact, the exact timeframe of Sofia’s realization is unspecified in any production materials, meaning that it could have been recorded prior to March 2020. Still, the podcast’s debut during the pandemic recontextualizes its topical yet temporally indefinite depiction of technology’s detrimental social effects. By comparing these three projects, this article considers podcasting’s status as a medium for speculative critique and the uncertain ethics of dystopian narration during moments of collective crisis. 

Compounding Tensions: Form, Genre, and Field of Production

Faced with the logistical challenges of production during pandemic, the selected podcasts adopt similarly conventional approaches to form and narrative. Sofia maintains Sandra’s episodic structure and original sound design,  while the independent productions are similarly serialized and sonically straightforward. Journalist Leonardo Sanchez highlights the theatricality common to all three works, tracing their aesthetic roots to the radionovelas popular in Brazil in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. This shared traditionalism, however, constricts the shocking elements of each work’s dystopia, characterized by “plac[ing] us directly in a dark and depressing reality, conjuring up a terrifying future if we do not recognize and treat its symptoms in the here and now” (Gordin et al. 2). By maintaining a conception of audio drama as the “theatre of the mind” rooted in radio plays, these podcasts foreground cognitive interpretation without engaging the expressive, avant-garde representational possibilities outlined by Farokh Soltani (200). While more experimental approaches to auditory dystopia might incorporate discordant music or cacophony, for example, these podcasts describe their heightened societies primarily through dialogue and narration. 

These tensions between form and content produce cognitive dissonance that limits the critical possibilities and utopian impulse of each work’s dystopian vision. For Michael Gordin et al., dystopia and utopia comprise a dialectic rooted in reciprocal functions of social critique: “Every utopia always comes with its implied dystopia – whether the dystopia of the status quo, which the utopia is engineered to address, or a dystopia found in the way this specific utopia corrupts itself in practice” (2). Dystopia functions as utopia’s negative, exaggerating social flaws to reveal the need for targeted, constructive imagination. The object of this critique may be explicitly identified, as in the works Lyman Tower Sargent categorizes as “critical dystopia,” or remain implicit (5-7). A work that is uncritical or entirely hopeless, however, should not be considered a dystopia but rather an anti-utopia (Baccolini and Moylan 5).  

A brief overview of the field of Brazilian podcasting will contextualize each work’s embrace of dystopian criticism. For Pierre Bourdieu, fields of cultural production are intricately structured social spaces wherein agents compete for cultural (and economic) capital through a series of position-takings (29-73). The cultural capital available for Brazilian podcasters has risen precipitously in recent years. In his study of the medium, Lúcio Luiz identifies rapid expansion in the early 2010s, arguing that the national “podosphere” included programming on nearly any subject by 2014. By 2019, Brazil was the world’s second largest podcast download market, trailing only the US (Blubrry). 

Despite this increased popularity, profitability has lagged (Luiz). In response, Brazil’s podcasters have traditionally embraced a collaborative ethos (Bonassoli). Due to this sense of community and cheap costs of production, podcasting has remained attractive for creators despite the unlikelihood of financial gain. #TdVaiFicar and Pytuna embody this low-stakes, risk-taking tradition despite the involvement of television professionals in each project. Developments during the late 2010s portend significant changes to the field, however, as domestic and international media companies seek leadership in a consolidating market. 

    Audio dramas retain a niche position in a field dominated by a conversational, nonfictional format derived from live radio. The 2019 edition of the biannual PodPesquisa market research survey, for instance, does not list a single narrative work in its top twenty ranking (Associação). Still, Marcelo Abud et al. identify surplus demand for fictional podcasts (13). Spotify’s investment in Portuguese-language audio drama seeks to capitalize on this dynamic. Initial results suggest that this Swedish firm has effectively leveraged its position as the dominant delivery system for Brazilian podcast listeners (Associacão). Sofia is among the most popular fictional podcasts on Spotify’s rankings and the only featured podcast in the company’s overall top 200 list (Chartable.com, “Spotify Podcasts: Brazil”). While this success might translate to heightened awareness for independent dramas like #TdVaiFicar and Pytuna, Spotify’s billions pose a clear threat to the collaborative spirit underpinning these works. 

Catastrophe, Cognitive Dissonance, and Conformity: Analyzing 2020’s Dystopian Podcasts

    Set in a near future where COVID-19 has run amok, #TdVaiFicar embraces the exaggerated darkness of dystopia. Even so, the podcast’s explicitly “vintage” aesthetics rooted in theatricality and serialization evoke a sense of normality that belies its production during lockdown (Vargas, “Como”). While the series effectively evokes the dramas of yesteryear, this unexpected ordinariness at times dilutes the urgency of the work’s social critique and accentuates the ethical challenge of representing an ongoing crisis. 

The podcast’s primary narrative takes place in a single location: the upscale Edifício Harmonia (Harmony Building) in São Paulo. Millions have died from COVID-19, which has now evolved into multiple, vaccine-resistant strains. Much of the drama is quotidian, but one fantastical subplot follows a conspiracy to forcibly vaccinate all of São Paulo with an airborne, untested remedy. In addition to the main storyline, Vargas intersperses occasional narration by building resident Débora from an unspecified point further into the future. Backed by the sound of rain and thunder, this intradiegetic narrator repeatedly affirms the hopelessness of the narrative future.

At its best, #TdVaiFicar conjures the darkness of March and April 2020 alongside the resilience and hopefulness of this frightening time. During emotional moments like Ulises’s revelation that his physician wife died working in a COVID ward, Vargas takes advantage of the intimacy of earbud listening that Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann identify as a distinguishing characteristic of the podcast medium. Such moments of vivid pathos fortify #TdVaiFicar’s illustration of unexpected solidarity between acquaintances, hinting at the prospect of localized utopian praxis rooted in collective trauma. 

Other elements of the series, however, undercut this constructive impulse. Any political critique remains fragmentary, as Vargas eschews the specificity and historical focus of critical dystopia to focus primarily on interpersonal drama. Since overcoming a pandemic requires large-scale, collective action, this absence dilutes the series’ transformational imagination. Devoid of political perspective, Débora’s dispatches from the narrative future fail to add urgency and instead imply that community-based solidarity is impotent when faced with authoritarian governance. #TdVaiFicar’s social criticism similarly fails to outline any radical utopian horizon for the post-pandemic world. Good intentions reconcile class differences between building residents and employees, while neither the script nor the series’ casting address racial disparities. As proven by the outsized effect of COVID-19 on Brazil’s Black and indigenous populations, these historical divisions must be addressed to realize a more socially just future after the pandemic recedes.[4]

In an interview with Luciano Guaraldo, Vargas asserts that dystopia produces a cathartic effect by allowing an audience to confront their fears in fictional form (Guaraldo). Indeed, a comparison of the real and fictionalized pandemics at the time of #TdVaiFicar’s release would suggest that the worst-case scenario did not come to pass. Nonetheless, the surge of the more infectious P.1 variant across Brazil in February and March 2021 underscores the prematurity of this sense of relief.[5] With Brazil increasingly resembling #TdVaiFicar’s dystopian future, the podcast’s implicit optimism appears misguided. Disconnected from any specific vision of sociopolitical reform, the implication that the pandemic could have been much worse fuels a potentially dangerous sense of complacency that approximates the resigned worldview of anti-utopia.

Pytuna avoids any such fatalism, instead constructing a paradigmatic critical dystopian denouncement of Brazilian fascism. Despite its well-defined target, this podcast adapted by Vitor Paranhos from an idea by Francesco Crisci struggles to synthesize its focus on the present with its broader allegory of twentieth century history. Although the series’ script predates the pandemic, the exclusion of COVID-19 fuels dissonance related to this engagement with current events. Whereas #TdVaiFicar’s virus-centric narrative would benefit from more specific sociopolitical critique, Pytuna reveals how this catastrophe’s gravity challenges critical dystopian representation of other phenomena. 

The series’ narrative recounts the struggles of a racially and sexually diverse group of rebels forced into hiding by a fascist regime in 2025. The journalist Clarissa hopes to bring down the Novo Regimento (New Regime) government by proving that its founder and his wife, evangelical leader Mara Summer, enslaved an indigenous girl. Pytuna’s heightened depiction of religion, politics, and censorship draws from several moments in Brazilian history: the integralist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, the Estado Novo dictatorship of 1937-45, the military dictatorship of 1964-1985, and the Bolsonaro government. However, explicit references to the earlier moments are largely confined to the podcast’s blog while the narrative allegorizes recent scandals.[6] The character of Mara Summer, for instance, derives her name from right-wing agitator Sara Winter, while the story of the exploited adolescent Aracy derives from evangelical government minister Damares Alves’s controversial adoption of an indigenous child. These references underscore dystopian aspects of contemporary Brazilian society, but this specific attention to comparatively minor crises throws the pandemic’s absence into relief. 

Pytuna’s utopian aspirations, outlined in the series’ paratextual materials, are recurrently curbed by a script that emphasizes survival rather than social reconfiguration. In his blog introducing the podcast, Crisci argues that radio can serve as a liberating medium of democratic expression for Brazilians engaged with myriad social justice struggles. The decision to adapt his screenplay into an audio drama due to insufficient funding exemplifies this belief (Crisci). In Pytuna, Paranhos and Crisci incorporate the aesthetics of radio to generate identification with the rebels. As the first episode begins, the listener hears snippets of music and a sermon as if they were “tuning in” to the resistance’s pirate broadcasts. In later episodes, the audience is privy to shortwave radio communication between individual guerillas. However, the rebels’ ultimate failure to broadcast their incriminating evidence appears to acknowledge this medium’s limited cultural reach. While the series could yet become a cult favorite, Chartable.com’s rankings confirm that the series’ creators encountered similar difficulty connecting with a broad audience (“Apple Podcasts: Brazil: Fiction”).

Crisci’s blog also invites collaborators and audience members to project the future they wish to see. The rebels reflect this collectivist ethos, yet they too often appear as secondary characters eclipsed by the vaudeville villainy of Mara Summer. For instance, the series offers minimal details about the resistance’s governance of the Park of Monsters, a rural area contaminated by a Chernobyl-like meltdown, while an interview with Summer fills an entire episode. Apart from its admirable embrace of diversity, Pytuna fails to project a radically different society and instead limits its vision to exaggerating undesirable aspects of the present.

By excluding COVID-19, Pytuna partially avoids the ethical challenges faced by #TdVaiFicar. Nonetheless, this absence could be construed as negligent in a work recorded during the pandemic and otherwise actively engaged with contemporary politics. Given its devastating impact in Brazil, COVID-19 will cast a long shadow over national artistic production regardless of the virus’s narrative inclusion in a particular work. Pytuna thus foreshadows the delicate balance that socially engaged works whose critical priorities lie elsewhere must seek. At the same time, the series’ lack of narrative resolution suggests that Paranhos and Crisci’s critical vision remained constrained by the financial difficulties that undermined their initial ambitions. 

Unlike most independent podcasters, Spotify has vast resources at its disposal. The company’s arrival in Brazil could thus reshape the field of podcast production and the niche of audio drama. Given this context, Sofia’s dystopian bona fides derive as much from its status as a potential harbinger of a homogenous future as from its heightened portrait of technological alienation. The series’ Brazilian localization only changes character and place names, maintaining the rest of the original, American script verbatim. Sofia’s critical view of corporatized technology applies to Brazil, yet the series does not engage with current events or distinct aspects of contemporary Brazilian society. Deprived of the cultural and historical specificity inherent in critical dystopia, the series’ analysis foregrounds a moralistic rejection of technology disconnected from any constructive projection. 

This series’ plot follows Helena as she begins working in a call center whose employees are the true voice behind the popular virtual assistant Sofia. Although she initially aspires to leverage her position to escape her dreary hometown, Helena later perceives the corrupting influence of corporate culture and her employer’s technology. Given the script’s roots in 2018, the exclusion of COVID-19 is unsurprising. However, Sofia maintains a brief discussion of an imaginary pandemic from the original script that now produces a striking moment of cognitive dissonance. Despite the coincidental nature of this incongruity, this moment demonstrates Spotify Studios’ disinterest in adapting Sofia to address Brazilian reality at the time of the podcast’s release. 

The series is entertaining, with high production values and an effective plot twist whereby Helena’s attempts to create interpersonal connections accidentally enable a domestic abuser. After ignoring mounting evidence that technology facilitates destructive impulses, the protagonist abandons her professional ambitions and attempts to save the woman whose life she endangered in the series’ final moments. Still, Helena’s decision does not represent conscious engagement with utopian possibility but rather an attempt to limit the disastrous effects of her corporate ambitions. 

Although Sofia effectively exaggerates negative repercussions of technological ubiquity, the series’ ambition to remain evergreen limits the impact of its critique. The call center’s technical capacities suggest a near-future setting, yet the podcast does not include temporal markers. The topicality of its themes and setting in recognizable geography associate the narrative with contemporary Brazilian reality, yet there are no references to public figures or historical events. This aesthetic does not affect the podcast’s broad denouncement of corporatized technology as morally corrupt, but it does preclude the specificity of critical dystopia. Consequently, Sofia’s social analysis and its final utopian gesture towards a less-connected future are simultaneously sweeping and superficial.

Conclusion: Problems without Solutions 

None of the three podcasts analyzed in this article ultimately project the radical aspirations that Gordin et al. associate with dystopian narratives: “dystopias by definition seek to alter the social order on a fundamental, systemic level. They address root causes and offer revolutionary solutions” (2). #TdVaiFicar effectively recalls the trauma of the pandemic, but its premature satisfaction that this crisis could have been worse leaves little space for the series’ critical impulse. Pytuna approximates the critical dystopian interest in root causes, yet this analysis is too often eclipsed by denouncements of recent scandals. Sofia’s adherence to its American predecessor requires a broad vision that precludes granular critique. At the same time, the indefinite temporality of the Spotify Studios production throws the historical rootedness of the independent works into relief. Neither #TdVaiFicar nor Pytuna outline revolutionary alternatives to the present, but they do analyze contemporary Brazilian society with constructive intent. As a result, it remains possible that future artists (in less trying circumstances) will draw inspiration from these works’ inchoate utopian desires while outlining their own visions for radical change. Such works will likely be marginalized, however, if major corporations continue to colonize the Brazilian podosphere.

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NOTES

[1] Recent headlines confirm the prominence of this pessimistic vision across academic disciplines and national borders. To cite but a few examples, French political scientist Gaspard Estrada (in an interview with Daniela Fernandes), Brazilian author Julián Fuks, and Brazilian economist Lena Lavinas (in an interview with Pablo Stefanoni) each describe Brazil as dystopian in articles published in 2020.

[2] Sandra was produced by Gimlet Media, which was purchased by Spotify in 2019. Part of Spotify’s larger experiment with localization, Sofia was released alongside German-, French-, and Spanish-language translations of Sandra. 

[3] Cézar’s presence as director of an entirely Brazilian cast explains  Sofia’s classification as a Brazilian podcast.

[4] Consult Dom Phillips’s article “‘Enormous disparities’: Coronavirus Death Rates Expose Brazil’s Deep Racial Inequalities” (2020) for an overview of this dynamic.

[5] This strain of COVID-19 drew international attention by overloading Manaus’s healthcare system in January 2021. It is known colloquially as the Manaus variant or the Brazilian variant.

[6] See Marcela Silva’s  “O fascismo tupiniquim” (2020), included on Pytuna’s Medium.com page, and Rafael Patiri’s “Plano Cohen” (2020), published on the series’ website.

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— and Vitor Paranhos. Pytuna: Estação Nacional Libertadora. Mídia Ninja, 2020, projetopytuna.com. 

Fernandes, Daniela. “Brasil passou do sonho à distopia, diz estudioso francês.” BBC News Brasil, 20 Jun. 2020, https://www.opendemocracy.net/pt/brasil-diante-da-covid-19-urgente-superar-a-distopia/.

Fuks, Julián. “Distopia à brasileira: a não-ficção do desgoverno e do individualismo.” UOL, 5     Sept. 2020, https://www.uol.com.br/ecoa/colunas/julian-fuks/2020/09/05/distopia-a-brasileira-a-nao-ficcao-do-desgoverno-e-do-individualismo.html. 

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Guaraldo, Luciano. “Radionovela online transforma pandemia e isolamento em diversão.” UOL,     28 Aug. 2020, https://noticiasdatv.uol.com.br/noticia/series/radionovela-online-    transforma-pandemia-e-isolamento-em-diversao-41562. 

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Moffett, Kevin and Matthew Derby. Sandra. Gimlet Media, 2018, https://open.spotify.com/show/3SltI1zTwbUea66SMtrafu. 

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Patiri, Rafael. “Plano Cohen.” ProjetoPytuna.com, 22 Jun. 2020, https://projetopytuna.com/2020/06/22/plano-cohen/.

Phillips, Dom. “‘Enormous disparities’: Coronavirus Death Rates Expose Brazil’s Deep Racial Inequalities.” The Guardian, 9 Jun. 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/enormous-disparities-coronavirus-death-rates-expose-brazils-deep-racial-inequalities. 

Sadlier, Darlene J. Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present. U of Texas P, 2008.

Sanchez, Leonardo. “Séries de ficção em áudio revivem era das radionovelas: batizadas como audiosséries ou até mesmo como podcasts de ficção, essas novas produções não escondem as raízes no entretenimento do passado.” Folha de S. Paulo, 29 July 2020, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/2020/07/series-de-ficcao-em-audio-revivem-era-das-radionovelas.shtml.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1-37. 

Silva, Marcela. “O fascismo tupiniquim.” Medium, 10 Aug. 2020, https://medium.com/@projetopytuna/o-facismo-tupiniquim-2701da7b177c. 

Soltani, Farokh. “Inner Ears and Distant Worlds: Podcast Dramaturgy and the Theatre of the Mind.” Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares et. al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 

Spinelli, Martin and Lance Dann. Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution. EPUB, Bloomsbury, 2019. 

Vargas, Jacqueline, creator. #TdVaiFicar…. Jacqueline Vargas, 2020, http://www.tudovaificar.com.br. 

—. “Como tudo aconteceu…” TdVaiFicar.com.br, 2 Oct. 2020, https://www.tdvaificar.com.br/post/como-tudo-aconteceu.

Zweig, Stefan. Brazil: A Land of the Future, translated by Lowell A. Bangerter. Ariadne, 2007.

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Benjamin Burt is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in UCLA’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a Research Fellow at the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies. His dissertation “Cities of Dreams and Despair: Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary Brazilian Film and Literature” (2020) uses a utopian studies framework to analyze recent representations of Brasília and São Paulo. His current, comparative research project considers ecological dystopia and post-utopia in Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico.

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Diseased Bodies Entangled: Literary and Cultural Crossroads of Posthuman Narrative Agents

Başak Ağın & Şafak Horzum

From ecto-parasites in the hair follicles to the microbiota in the gut flora, the human body is composed of diverse nonhuman species, illustrating what symbiotic adaptation is, and which often goes unnoticed due to our limited perception. The entanglement of nonhuman matter “in everything bodies are, experience and do” pinpoints the difficulty of “putting” it “under the spotlight” (Macnaughton 31). If we are so imbued with nonhuman bodies around and within us, then how are we supposed to disentangle ourselves and understand their agency? The posthuman and material-ecocritical senses of agency might provide an answer to this question, which is crucial to our contemporary understanding of pandemics, especially considering how zoonotic diseases hold a pivotal place in the “geopolitical-biopolitical medical surveillance” (Wilbert 7) systems of the twenty-first-century global communities. 

Underscoring the constant reconfigurations among the human and nonhuman actors of such diseases, this paper takes disease-carrying agents as material-textual bodies with narrative capacities. In doing so, it relies on posthuman theories which deconstruct the dualistic worldview of Enlightenment humanism and offer a non-hierarchical ontology among planetary systems, things, and beings. We examine the complex and dynamic web of these agents in literary and mediatic works like Ndemic Creations’ Plague Inc. (2012) and Plague Inc.: Evolved (2014), Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), and Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1992), portraying narrative capabilities of non/human beings as nonlinear assemblages of effect. These assemblages, we argue, enhance posthumanist understandings of ethical, ontological, and epistemological positions of (un)contaminated bodies that narrate themselves in myriad ways “through the mutual accommodation of . . . heterogeneous components” (DeLanda 144).

Sometimes read as gods’ “language of displeasure” (Wald 11), contagious diseases ‘communicate:’ they spread, and they speak, most often in ways that are “not possible for epidemiologists [without] the disembodied, all-knowing . . . gaze” (Dahiya 520n1). Such omniscience can only be available for the human in literary or media narratives, recalling Priscilla Wald’s observation on the transgressive kings in The Iliad and Oedipus Rex, who must read the language of the plagues to decipher the wrath of the gods and correct their wrongdoings. Forcing the kings or the sinful population “to assume responsibility for their actions,” the plagues in Antiquity “illustrate[d] the relationship between the group and an anomalous individual” (Wald 11). Nonhuman narrative agency in the posthumanist sense, however, is not a direct translation of human intentionality, conveying literal or metaphorical messages, but explicates how communicable diseases confound our primary visions of ourselves as self-contained entities by making the porosity of our bodies palpable, exhibiting the agency of matter and the inextricability of the human from the nonhuman. In other words, the disease-carrying agent demotes the human from its position of the only determiner of causality and the only narrator.

Such demotion is strongly exemplified in Ndemic Creations’ mobile game Plague Inc. and its sequel Plague Inc.: Evolved, recalling Wald’s conceptualization of contagion as both “epidemiological” and “foundational” (2). The games, manifesting themselves as narrative bodies, activate a conversation between the player and the disease-carrying agent within an always-already entangled dynamic web of the more-than-human world. The task is to eradicate humanity by selecting a pathogen ranging from viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites to nano-viruses and bioweapons, so the players can empathize with the microorganism, see the map as an omniscient entity, and rewrite the narrative again with their choices, which blend with the games’ agency. As every pathogen acts and intra-acts differently with the population, climate, and the player’s decisions, it creates a different narrative pattern depending on the player-gameplay interaction. The players must overcome a wide range of actors, varying from the treatment potentials of the developed countries to geographically isolated areas where it is difficult to spread the virus. They must also calculate whether and when to activate the pathogen’s resilience against cold or hot climates, or if they should spend the collected DNA points on a certain symptom, which might help or prevent dissemination. In a nutshell, they need to “determine how to solve [the] puzzles, which mutate depending on the disease type, difficulty level, and chosen location of patient zero” (Mitchell and Hamilton 591) to guarantee disease transmission all over the map. 

Those material agencies and meaning-making strategies form an amalgam giving each storyline its unique outcome, affected by “situated activity inflected by personal, social and cultural factors” (Bradford 56). The gameplay is, therefore, a cluster of human and nonhuman agents: the decision-making strategies employed by the player, informed by his/her background, require at least some basic knowledge of geography, climate, biology, and economics, thus making the disease both a ludic and a narrative experience of the embodied self. Both narrative and interactive, the games balance strict control and a preset storyline with freedom, which produces “signs,” not simply “representing” them (Mitchell and Hamilton 591), paralleling an emergent relationality. As the player changes the severity, lethality, and infectivity of the disease, leading to new narrative patterns, the game thus “recirculates and rewrites elements of an increasingly coherent semiotic repertoire” (Mitchell and Hamilton 588), which is part of the intra-active human-nonhuman relationships. The omniscient view that the contamination map provides enables the player to observe the pace of the spread, the magnitude of its effect, and the incidence rate of the disease, while the biohazard symbol facilitates the track of the “speed, scale, and ubiquity of pandemic threat” (Mitchell and Hamilton 588). The disease thus becomes a narrative agent central to the interactions between the player and the game design, the entanglement of which reveals a set of material-discursive practices at work. In other words, it relates how individual actants of geography, climate, bacterial/viral bodies, the signals on the screen, the storyline, and the invisible population are “entangled” and “intra-relating agents” of the narrative choreography (Barad, Meeting ix). 

Among the intra-active agencies within the game are also pathogenic calibration, which denotes “gene expressions that determine the interaction between humans and contagion” (Servitje 86), and epidemiological mapping, which is independent of neither the set of concrete data from the physical and medical sciences nor the social, cultural, or economic knowledge practices of local and global communities. The calibration and mapping function like an apparatus, which “becomes inverted as players work against humanity rather than for it” (Servitje 86). This inversion analogy, suggesting “a dynamic set of open-ended practices, iteratively refined and reconfigured” (Barad, Meeting 167), demonstrates both literal contagiousness of material entities with which we are constantly in touch (like mobile phones or tablets) and the metaphorical “connection” of the disease “to the virality of social media” (Servitje 86). Therefore, the games reveal a learning opportunity, allowing the players to (re)consider and (re)evaluate “the biopolitics of outbreak narratives” with their fingertips on the games’ nonhuman components such as their “narrative, mechanics, graphical representation, and hardware interface” (Servitje 86).

Along similar lines, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion highlights how “natures-cultures-technologies are always already mixed up and mixing up—intra-acting—in . . . technonatures or socionatures” (Wilbert 7). Although it is an “outbreak narrative” in itself, as Wald would contend, it is the final scene of the film that speaks volumes and narrates “the precise origin story of the pandemic” (Dahiya 520n1). The character of Beth Emhoff, one of “the prime suspects for being patient zero—the first to be infected—along with the three unnamed characters in London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo,” is easily the scapegoat as a corporate executive celebrating her success in a casino in Macau, who “stops in Chicago for a tryst with an old flame before returning home to Minneapolis” (Weisberg 2). As Matthew Beaumont notes, “this is a dirty stopover” (84). Beth’s “cosmopolitanism and promiscuousness,” as Beaumont asserts, that is, “her thoughtless consumption of fossil fuels and selfish recourse to casual sex” signal the primal cause of the outbreak because they “prove to be a killer combination” with “moralistic” and “misogynistic” undertones (84). This “red herring” fallacy leads the viewer to leave behind the other unnamed characters who were also potential index patients, “provok[ing] [the audience] to question whether Beth is liable for spreading the lethal disease and if she warrants sympathy” (Weisberg 2). Soderbergh wittily plays to the species-based prejudices of the viewer, clearly aware of the human tendency to seek linear causality between disease and morality, hinting at the potential stigmatization that accompanies contagions. 

As is often the case with real-life pandemics, the invisibility of the disease-carrying agent and its entanglement with the nonhuman environments within and around us prevent our understanding of relationality and emergent ontologies. Unable to grasp at once what such relationality means, humans often fail to acknowledge that “things (or matter) draw their agentic power from their relation to discourses that in turn structure human relations to materiality” (Iovino and Oppermann 4), which means individual agents do not follow or precede one another in existence but are inextricable.

The final scene of Contagion, however, reveals the intricate dynamics between material and discursive practices as it exposes how the multinational corporation AIMM Alderson, Beth’s employer, causes deforestation, leading to the displacement of bats, which, in turn, approximate an industrial pig farm upon losing their habitat. Dropping the remains of the fruit it is chewing onto the pig farm, a bat clearly transmits the MEV-1 agent to a piglet that ingests the dropped fruit. That same piglet, chosen for slaughter, is moved in a wired cage to the casino restaurant, where the local chef seasons it and prepares a pork meal. When Beth, the business executive, wants to meet and thank the chef for the meal, the chef simply wipes his hands on his apron, and the film ends when Beth and the chef pose for the camera smiling and holding hands. It is within those two minutes that the viewer can understand how human cultural practices are always already enmeshed with nature: the human-induced dangers such as deforestation and loss of habitats for many species circulate both human and nonhuman bodies, putting their lives at risk and reducing the likelihood of survival for many species, especially humans. As bats and other forest species have stronger adaptation capabilities to co-host several forms of nonhuman bacteria and viruses, they mostly outlive humans in such dystopic scenarios, thus creating narratives from the gaze of the nonhuman. 

Although Soderbergh’s narrative seems to shift the blame from Beth Emhoff to the Chinese chef, who is another easy target of scapegoating for reasons of racial and ethnic discrimination, it is the dynamic relations of the humans with the nonhuman bodies that cause the outbreak, not a single person or animal. Breaking away from the common tendency to seek linear causality between phenomena, events, and agentic bodies, the narrative thus reminds us of Barad’s observation: “subjects and objects do not preexist but rather emerge from their intra-action” (“Erasers” 444). The film thus creates a narrative of such emergent subjectivities, with an emphasis on the intersections of race and gender stigmatization, as well as that of class, as in the case of the Chinese villagers’ kidnapping of Dr. Leonora Orantes, the WHO official, in a desperate search for the vaccine that is otherwise unavailable to them. Soderbergh’s narrative also reappoints the human as one of the many agents within material-semiotic enmeshment and explicates what it means to be entangled, which can be summarized, again, in Barad’s words: “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair” (Meeting ix). Thus, Contagion, especially in its final scene, not only portrays the dynamic relations between materiality and discourse but also helps the viewer (as members of Homo sapiens) face their so-called superior position by outlining what narrative agency would look like in nonhuman bacterial or viral agents.

Viewing Contagion in this light, one cannot help remembering Gregory Bateson’s evaluation on the enmeshed and interdependent characters of ecosystems: “If,” Bateson writes, an “organism ends up destroying its environment,” then this organism “has in fact destroyed itself” since its “likelihood of survival [in such a relation] will be that of a snowball in hell” (451), especially if that organism is Homo sapiens. Humans’ limited apprehension of and crippled relation to nature, predicated on a false belief in possessing an agentic throne due to having advanced technology, bring about their cataclysmic end. As in the exploitative practices of the AIMM Alderson, which destroy habitats for many species, causing wild and disease-carrying nonhumans to get closer to urban zones, irresponsible human activities bring a planetary demise. 

Bateson’s suggestion of symbiotic adaptation of beings in a system is also significant because it echoes the posthumanist array of material ecocriticism, which views nature as loquens—an eloquent body that shares with humans many of the characteristics that were once considered to be uniquely human. This symbiotic adaptation highlights the incessant communication between earthly bodies and their material-semiotic, human-nonhuman, and natural-cultural enactments on one another, as illustrated by the extra-terrestrial planet, Jeep, in Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite. A re-discovered planet ready to be (re)colonized and exploited by the Durallium Company, Jeep shares its name with its endemic virus, which infects everyone and kills all men and some women who resist welcoming it into their bodies. As the “Company’s guinea pig” (Griffith 14), the protagonist Marghe Taishan, an anthropologist, contacts both native communities and the virus, thus getting enmeshed with othered alien bodies in her new habitat. Throughout her journey, space remains “[not] as a neutral backdrop against which events unfold,” reminding us of Barad’s spacetimemattering, since “space and society [in Jeep] are mutually constituted and that space is an agent of change, that is, it plays an active role in the unfolding of events” (Meeting 224). Coexisting nominally, geographically, and physically, the planet and the virus both lead Marghe to biological and mental reproductions. She oscillates between assimilation and integration, along with power and powerlessness in her encounters with new alterities and ‘alien’ naturecultures, while revisiting the ideas of belonging, being, and becoming by herself and with other bodies. 

    Griffith thus shatters binaries in Ammonite first by excluding the male sex from Jeep and then by blurring subject/object, nature/culture, and human/nonhuman dichotomies. The virus, which poses an environmental threat to the well-being of men and the earthly continuation of heteropatriarchy, stands as the ultimate nonhuman other, subverting the worldly systems. It replaces those systems with vivid unforeseen multiplicities and feminist reproductive futurities. The elimination of the male sex underlines the false fixation of the dominant anthropocentric vantage on sexist, speciesist, xenophobic practices based on a set of so-called superiorities in contemporary Western culture. Having “fluid instead of rigid boundaries” (Farwell 97), Jeep—in its two senses—narrates the explorations of porous bodies and landscapes that constantly interact and intra-act with (but not oppose) one another. With their own agentic properties, these bodies and landscapes are in a state of perpetual emergence, as everything in between active and passive.  

    “Meeting” each other “halfway” in a new spacetime, as Barad would call it, Jeep’s and Marghe’s tales “emerge from the intra-action of human creativity and the narrative agency of matter” (Iovino and Oppermann 8). The reader can observe “this shared creativity of human and nonhuman agents” (Iovino and Oppermann 8) in Ammonite, first with Marghe’s attempts to preserve her earthly, supposedly pristine, uncontaminated body, and then with her viscous becomings with the virus. These becomings resemble the labor pains of a new identity formation, which is “a contingent and contested ongoing material process” (Barad, Meeting 40-41). In such “dynamic intra-relationship with the iterative (re)configuring of relations of power,” as Barad contends, “identities are mutually constituted and (re)configured through one another” (Meeting 40-41). Therefore, as none of us can, Marghe becomes unable to escape a new identity formation. Beyond contacting it, she connects with and ‘becomes with’ the Jeep virus, thus giving birth to her new transcorporeal self, which, when infected, possesses virus-sharp senses and illustrates a new form of parthenogenesis.

This newly emergent transcorporeality shatters the stereotypical stigmas of the dualistic human. The collection of Marghe’s embodied self and consciousness transgresses the borders of her skin and mind as her viral becoming has turned her into a new entity. As she senses that her body does not belong anymore to her human self and mind, she experiences the porosity of her body. She “did not want to return to her body. It was no longer entirely hers. The virus lived in it now, in every pore, every cell, every blood vessel and organ. . . . [S]he would never be sure what dreams and memories were her own, and which were alien. She belonged to Jeep” (Griffith 195; emphases added). In Marghe’s viral becoming, this material-semiotic assemblage of skin and consciousness refers to a sense of uncleanliness, an experience of being infected and possessed. “That is why she feels “[u]nclean” (Griffith 195). Her partner, Thenike responds: “Unclean? No. Your body is changing, just as it does every time you get sick and another little piece of something else comes to live inside you. . . . Is this unclean? No. It’s life. All life connects” (Griffith 195; emphases added). This expression is where nonhuman matter comes to shape the narrative as it articulates how we get constantly reconfigured in our everyday experiences with nonhuman microorganisms. Ammonite thus invites us to reconsider our so-called hegemonic story-telling nature as there exist multiple reformulated materialities that manifest their tales, and hence, reconfigured senses of realities.As these literary and mediatic manifestations of the nonhuman in Contagion, Plague Inc., Plague Inc.: Evolved, and Ammonite showcase, everything, regardless of its species, molecular structures, or anthropocentric taxonomy, has its own polymorphous layers of onto-epistemological textuality. If everything, from the biosphere to its human and nonhuman inhabitants, is interconnected, these narratives of the nonhuman attest to a set of intersectional crossroads, where there is a strong and complex cluster of dynamic relations between matter and narrativity. The nonhuman agentic bodies hold their own narrative voices, which always already blends with that of the humans, creating a fusion of stories in an intricate web of relationalities that co-emerge as they intra-act with and on one another.

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WORKS CITED

Barad, Karen. “Erasers and Erasures: Pinch’s Unfortunate ‘Uncertainty Principle’.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 41, no. 3, 2011, pp. 443-54.

—. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine, 1972.

Beaumont, Matthew. “Imagining the End Times: Ideology, the Contemporary Disaster Movie, Contagion.” Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader, edited by Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 79-89.

Bradford, Clare. “Looking for My Corpse: Video Games and Player Positioning.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 33, no. 1, 2010, pp. 54-64.

Dahiya, Annu. “The Phenomenology of Contagion.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 4, 2020, pp. 519-23.

DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Farwell, Marilyn. “Heterosexual Subplots and Lesbian Subtexts: Towards a Theory of Lesbian Narrative Space.” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, New York UP, 1990, pp. 91-103.

Griffith, Nicola. Ammonite. Del Rey, 1992.

Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” Material Ecocriticism, edited by Iovino and Oppermann, Indiana UP, 2014, pp. 1-17.

Macnaughton, Jane. “Making Breath Visible: Reflections on Relations between Bodies, Breath and World in the Critical Medical Humanities.” Body & Society, vol. 26, no. 2, 2020, pp. 30-54.

Mitchell, Scott, and Sheryl N. Hamilton. “Playing at Apocalypse: Reading Plague Inc. in Pandemic Culture.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 24, no. 6, 2018, pp. 587-606.

Servitje, Lorenzo. “H5N1 for Angry Birds: Plague Inc., Mobile Games, and the Biopolitics of Outbreak Narratives.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2016, pp. 85-103.

Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke UP, 2008.

Weisberg, Edmund. “The Psychos Are Coming, the Psychos Are Coming… They’re Already Here: Contagion of Corporation.” Voices in Bioethics, vol. 2, 2016, pp. 1-5.Wilbert, Chris. “Profit, Plague and Poultry: The Intra-Active Worlds of Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu.” Radical Philosophy, vol. 139, Sept./Oct. 2006, pp. 2-8.

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Başak Ağın, PhD, is Associate Professor of English literature. She teaches English at METU, Ankara, Turkey. Her monograph, Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu (2020), explores and exemplifies posthumanism through literary and filmic analyses. Interested in the merger of posthumanities and environmental humanities, Başak is currently editing the Turkish translation of Simon Estok’s The Ecophobia Hypothesis (2018, Routledge) (forthcoming Cappadocia UP) and co-editing a volume with Şafak Horzum, Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media (under review by Brill, Critical Posthumanism Series). A TÜBİTAK 2219 fellow (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant), Başak will join the EH research group at the University of Leeds after the pandemic.

Şafak Horzum is a PhD Candidate in English at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, and a former Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University. In 2016, he was awarded the Translation Grant of the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) with his Turkish-English translation project of Oya Baydar’s metafictional post-apocalyptic novel The General of the Garbage Dump, under review by Transnational London Press. Horzum is currently co-editing a volume with Başak Ağın, Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media (under review by Brill, Critical Posthumanism Series). As a researcher focusing on Turkish-English literary translations at Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey, he also works in project groups of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. 

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The “Living in the End Times” Conference

Nora Castle, Heather Alberro, Emrah Atasoy, Rhiannon Firth and Conrad Scott

On the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. He gazes at it with rapture; there is no other word for it. Rapture. The heart seized, carried away, as if by some large bird of prey. After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is. From the offshore towers come the avian shrieks and cries that sound like nothing human. (439)

– Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

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Clark looks up at the evening activity on the tarmac, at the planes that have been grounded for twenty years, the reflection of his candle flickering in the glass. He has no expectation of seeing an airplane rise again in his lifetime, but is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? (332)

– Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

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As Kim Stanley Robinson put it in his keynote address, the “Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film, and Culture” conference was “both a symptom and a diagnostic of the time that we’re in.” Hosted by Cappadocia University in Turkey, the conference took place virtually on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Discord from Jan 13 to Jan 15, 2021. It sought to explore not only representations of pandemics in a variety of narratives, but also to examine what might come after, searching for that faint glint of hope amongst the despair and destruction — an echoing of the dystopian, utopian, posthuman, and even personal seen through key pandemic texts like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). “Living in the End Times” featured 4 keynotes and 50 panels, with a total of 200 speakers from 40 different countries. The keynotes included scholar-authors Kim Stanley Robsinson, Larissa Lai, and Maggie Gee, as well as Professor Elizabeth Outka and the members of the newly-formed Dystopia Project (Raffaella Baccolini, Laurence Davis, Patricia McManus, Tom Moylan, Darko Suvin, and Phillip E. Wegner). This truly international endeavor — whose multiple timezones and myriad concurrent panels certainly kept the organizing committee up at night — was ironically made possible by the very pandemic that has kept us all physically apart. 

Its inception began, however, in the flesh. Many of the conference organizers met at the Utopian Studies Society Europe’s 2019 conference in Prato, Italy, and the friendships and camaraderie that began there found their way to the core of this virtual endeavor. The pandemic formed the backdrop of the conference not only as its subject-matter, but also its materiality — we very much missed the visceral and embodied aspects of an in-person conference. We reminisced about the Utopian comrade spirit that we developed during the heatwave in Prato, which involved chats over coffee and cakes, drinks together on balmy terraces, and swimming in lakes. Instead, we found ourselves sitting in front of computer screens in different rooms, climates, and time zones. Some of us had birdsong in the background, while others had hammer drills and building noise. In some ways, our separation and alienation could be seen to resemble a dystopian landscape in comparison to our adventure in Prato.

Nevertheless, the utopian impulse is no stranger to genre-bending and working through different forms and mediums. The online conference created other types of relationships and engagement that we could not otherwise have imagined. The sheer amount of work that went into the logistical effort of organizing the conference meant that the organizers bonded strongly over the adventure despite living in different time zones for the duration. We learnt the tech together, we experienced the tech failures together, and we had a ‘backstage chat’ in a WhatsApp group that was an ongoing source of mutual support and laughter. We are grateful to the representatives from Cappadocia University, who showed their generosity through their virtual presence and support throughout the conference, including their participation in the Opening Ceremony. We are also very grateful to the Cappadocia IT team, who spent hours and hours creating links, prepping how-to documents, and monitoring panels. The Cappadocia cat, Black Mirror, was also a source of joy in stressful times—and indeed part of the fun of the virtual format more generally were the cameos from presenters’ pets.

The format of the conference also meant that it was much larger, more diverse and more inclusive than an in-person conference, where people would be required to acquire visas, pay for travel, and book their accommodation. This had its pitfalls as well as benefits, and when several speakers dropped-out at the last minute, we learned the lesson that offering a virtual conference for free does not necessarily generate the same levels of commitment in some attendees, despite taking at least as much work to organize. We also experienced the dystopian side of virtual events thanks to a Zoom-bombing during the “Musical Oasis” concert performed by Natali Boghossian and Hans van Beelen, just prior to the arrival of the Ambassador of Canada to Turkey, who was making a surprise appearance to kick off Larissa Lai and Maggie Gee’s keynote address. Luckily, with help from the Cappadocian IT team, we were able to pivot to new, locked links (paired with YouTube simul-streaming), allowing the conference to continue.

Despite this interruption, the conference was a resounding success, and we were consistently taken aback by the multiplicity of approaches and imaginaries that went into the presentations we saw. Even if we had several books worth of space, it would be impossible to do justice to this diversity, but in this symposium collection, we have gathered 11 papers demonstrating the breadth of work that was presented and discussed at “Living in the End Times.” The authors hail from a wide range of countries, including Turkey, Australia, the UK, Portugal, Hungary, Uruguay, and Canada, and their research subjects range from podcasts to posthumanism, from queer theory to mountain anthropology, and from postcolonialism to creative practice. We hope that this symposium will act as a taster, rousing your curiosity and prompting you to seek out more utopian perspectives and spaces in, against, and beyond the end times. With that in mind, we also attempt here to summarize some of the most important key themes to come out of the conference — those which merit further thought, exploration, and utopian adventures. 

The outbreak of COVID-19 wrought spatial, socioeconomic, and political upheavals and laid bare existing structural inequalities within global capitalist systems. Several papers at the conference found resonances of the severity and scale of the pandemic in eco-dystopian fiction works such as Margaret Atwood’s increasingly prescient MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). A key theme here is using dystopian ‘end time’ extrapolations to disrupt our blindness to the stark inequities and injustices of our own times. While multitudes face the economic hardships of a looming global recession, the planet’s wealthy elite have found refuge in their exclusive ‘utopias’ of private medical and security staff, escape mansions, and luxury doomsday bunkers. Kroon (this issue) argues against seeking inclusion in the oppressive and debased structures of the status quo through policy change and reformism, arguing instead for the radical hope of the ‘queer utopia,’ which says ‘yes’ to ‘non-normative ways of being.’ The pandemic, and its dystopian reflections and representations, serves as an augur of further socio-ecological perturbations to come should global capitalism’s relentless exploitation of species and ecosystems continue unabated. 

This brings us to another key theme: the posthuman, and our relationships with non-human beings, the viral, and to nature and technology. In this vein, Horn and Martin mobilize concepts from posthumanism and feminist new materialism to identify an ‘ontology of networked agency’ in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio. Ağın and Horzum focus on the entanglement of (diseased) human bodies with non-human bodies and matter, from ecto-parasites in hair follicles to microbiota in our gut, asking: How, then, are we to understand ourselves and our own agency? Pandemics bring to light the intricate and inextricable entanglements between humans and myriad Earth others, and the realization that we are far from the only actors with the agency to engender world-shattering transformations.

Such times of widespread upheaval render the perennial utopian (and dystopian) imaginary especially valuable, namely through the key utopian and dystopian function of educating desire through critique and consciousness-raising—another key conference theme. The educative function of utopia can be explicit and enacted through pedagogy within and beyond higher education institutions, which was explored during the conference in lively detail by Dan Byrne Smith, Caroline Edwards, Adam Stock, and Darren Web in their Roundtable, “Whither Hope? Teaching Utopia(nism) Through the Pandemic Crisis,” which was a highlight of the event for many. The educative function of utopia also takes place in the cultural sphere. Burt finds a potential grassroots, collectivist utopianism in Brazilian podcasts using audio drama as a medium for dystopian storytelling.

While utopias offer imaginative projections of better worlds and ways of being, dystopias extrapolate from the deficient ‘present’ and offer projections of potentially nightmarish futures. Inherent within both are critique, imagination, and desire for the ‘better,’ or the queering and transgression of taken-for-granted borders and boundaries (Sargisson). Thinking beyond the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of the decaying status quo is essential for building beyond the current ‘eco-dystopian’ era of pandemics, extinctions, and ecological collapse. Marks explores how the utopian, messianic conception of history found in the works of Walter Benjamin transgresses the homogeneous empty time of capitalism. Denning expresses a utopian aesthetics of temporality that transgresses egotistical mainstream conceptions in which humans place themselves at the centre.

Pandemics and the spectre of eco-apocalypse do not signal the end of all worlds or times but merely of the world as presently constituted. For this is a world of many worlds (de la Cadena & Blaser), with other modes of being long preceding, existing alongside, and yet to come after Western capitalist modernity. Our interdisciplinary conference critically and imaginatively explored the vital question of what might come after capitalism and the Anthropocene. The spectacular array of excellent papers that were presented at this conference touched on many pertinent themes. Discussions often centered around posthuman reflections on the reworking of borders and boundaries—conceptual, bodily, spatial, temporal—engendered by viral happenings, effects that ‘end-time’ events like pandemics have upon hope and utopian imaginaries more generally, as well as how we ought to co-construct more ethical and liveable worlds after the ‘end’ imposed by late-stage capitalism on so many earthly collectives. Our final keynote roundtable with veterans in the fields of science fiction, utopian and dystopian studies—Raffaella Baccolini, Laurence Davis, Patricia McManus, Tom Moylan, Darko Suvin and Phillip Wegener—ended on a suitably hopeful note with Tom Moylan concluding: “This conference has responded to the ‘end times’ and resoundingly said, ‘No, another world is possible!’”

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WORKS CITED

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.

de la Cadena, Marisol, and Mario Blaser. A World of Many Worlds. Duke UP, 2018.

Sargisson, Lucy. Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression. Routledge, 2000.

St. John Mandel, Emily. Station Eleven. HarperCollins, 2014. 

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Nora Castle is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research, funded by the Chancellor’s International Scholarship, is at the intersection of environmental humanities, food studies, and science fiction studies. Her project, entitled ‘Food, Foodways, and Environmental Crisis in Contemporary Speculative Fiction’, focuses on the future of food in sf narratives of ecological stress. Nora has recently published a chapter on Sixth Extinction cannibalism in contemporary sf in Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There (Routledge, 2021) and has a forthcoming chapter (with Esthie Hugo) in Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction (Palgrave) on food technology and feminism in contemporary sf from the Global South. She has previously published in the field of East Asian Studies. Nora is co-editing a special issue of Science Fiction Studies on ‘Food Futures’ with Graeme Macdonald (March 2022) as well as a special issue of Green Letters on ‘Animal Futurity’ with Giulia Champion (Jan/Feb 2022). 

Heather Alberro recently completed her PhD at Nottingham Trent University’s Department of Politics and International Relations. Her background and interests span a range of disciplines including green utopianism, critical posthuman theory, environmental ethics, and political ecology. Her publications include the 2020 article, ‘“Valuing Life Itself”: On Radical Environmental Activists’ Post-Anthropocentric Worldviews’ published in the Journal of Environmental Values, and ‘Interspecies’ in the upcoming The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Heather also serves as co-convenor for the Political Studies Association’s (PSA) environmental politics specialist group, and as Chair of the PSA’s Early Career Network (ECN).

Emrah Atasoy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities at Cappadocia University, Turkey. He completed his PhD at Hacettepe University’s Department of English Language and Literature in 2019 with a dissertation on twentieth-century dystopian fiction entitled “From Ignorance to Experience: Epistemology and Power in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed and P. D. James’s The Children of Men.” He spent an academic year as a visiting scholar under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor at Penn State University between 2015 and 2016. His most recent publications include the article, “Pandemics and Epidemics in Speculative Fiction” (2020), published by Ankara University Journal of Languages and History-Geography and the chapter “Epistemological Warfare(s) in Dystopian Narrative: Zülfü Livaneli’s Son Ada and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed” in Speculations of War: Essays on Conflict in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Utopian Literature (2021), edited by Annette M. Magid. He is a member of both Utopian Studies Society-Europe and the Society for Utopias Studies (SUS). His fields of scholarly interest include speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, science fiction, apocalyptic fiction, Turkish utopianism, and twentieth-century literature.  

Rhiannon Firth is a political theorist and writer, a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Essex and author of Utopian Politics: Citizenship and Practice (Routledge 2012). She has written two books on anarchist disaster relief social movements: Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the UK (with John Preston, Palgrave 2020) and Disaster Anarchy (forthcoming, Pluto, 2021). She wrote the Afterword for the new edition of M.L. Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia (PM Press, 2019) She can be found on Twitter at @RhiFirth.

Conrad Scott

Conrad Scott holds a PhD from and is an Instructor in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, on Treaty 6 / Métis lands. He researches contemporary sf and environmental literature, and his current project examines the interconnection between place, culture, and literature in a study of environment and dystopia in contemporary North American fiction. His reviews and essays have appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, Paradoxa, The Goose, Environmental Philosophy, UnderCurrents, and Canadian Literature. He is also the author of Waterline Immersion (Frontenac House 2019).