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History and Speculative Fiction
This book demonstrates that despite different epistemological starting points, history and speculative fiction perform similar work in “making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange” by taking their readers on journeys through space and time. Excellent history, like excellent speculative fiction, should cause readers to reconsider crucial aspects of their society that they normally overlook or lead them to reflect on radically different forms of social organization. Drawing on Gunlög Fur’s postcolonial concept of concurrences , and with contributions that explore diverse examples of speculative fiction and historical encounters using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume provides new perspectives on colonialism, ecological destruction, the nature of humanity, and how to envision a better future.
This is an open access book.
This is an open access book.
- GenresResearch
307 pages, Hardcover
Published December 15, 2023
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June 9, 2024
Read mainly for the fascinating chapter by Ashleigh Harris entitled 'Concurrent Whiteness: Science Fiction Film’s Close Encounters in Apartheid South Africa'.
Amidst these swathes of grand history was a banal event of 23 March 1979: the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster science fiction film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977; hereafter CE3K) in South African cinemas. The mundaneness of this event gives us pause when we stop to consider the concurrent realities occurring in the country at the time. How did cultural behavior as superficial and banal as going to watch science fiction films occur in a country where, only a stone’s throw away from whites-only cinemas, Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrillas were putting their lives on the line daily to bring down the apartheid state?
Harris argues that:
...popular culture also operated as a kind of justification to maintain the status quo that secured middle-class white life at the time. The white, middle-class suburban lives lived out in American television programs, for example, confirmed white South Africans’ sense of belonging to a global community.
Which makes the mere existence, and critical and popular success of a South African SF movie like 'District 9', quite an anomaly.
Amidst these swathes of grand history was a banal event of 23 March 1979: the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster science fiction film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977; hereafter CE3K) in South African cinemas. The mundaneness of this event gives us pause when we stop to consider the concurrent realities occurring in the country at the time. How did cultural behavior as superficial and banal as going to watch science fiction films occur in a country where, only a stone’s throw away from whites-only cinemas, Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrillas were putting their lives on the line daily to bring down the apartheid state?
Harris argues that:
...popular culture also operated as a kind of justification to maintain the status quo that secured middle-class white life at the time. The white, middle-class suburban lives lived out in American television programs, for example, confirmed white South Africans’ sense of belonging to a global community.
Which makes the mere existence, and critical and popular success of a South African SF movie like 'District 9', quite an anomaly.
Displaying 1 of 1 review