Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Observing the pink cloud from Greece and the Southern Cone: Crisis, critique and the promise of queer feminist cinema

Abstract: A series of entangled crisis-scapes have been unfolding in the past decade in Chile, Argentina and Brazil – geographies that have been central to discourses of and about the Global South. Ranging from presidential impeachment and military control to inflation and austerity, Chilean, Argentinian and Brazilian crisis-scapes have given rise to filmic expressions of queer feminist critique that challenge neo-liberal governmentality. This article focuses on indicative cinematic tendencies in these three countries, while taking into account the author’s positionality as a (Greek) researcher engaged in the anthropology of cinema and neo-liberalism. Swinging back and forth from Greece to the Southern Cone, the aim of the article is to extract what is affectively shared between seemingly disparate subjectivities and experiences of coping with the present of crises. One of the things shared is queer survivalism, as manifested in the short fiction films Apodrasi apo ton Efthrafsto Planiti (Escaping the Fragile Planet, 2020) by Thanasis Tsimpinis and Os últimos românticos do mundo (The Last Romantics of the World, 2020) by Henrique Arruda – both featuring a gay couple getting through their last day on Earth while a toxic pink cloud destroys the planet.

Rebellion of main character in lauren destefano’s wither

Abstract: This study aims to reveal rebellion of main character in Lauren DeStefano’s Wither . The discussion is focused on Rhine’s rebellion which is trigerred by dystopian-life happened in the society. In revealing the rebellion reflected in the novel, Mercuse’s theory of rebellion and Millner’s theory of dystopian-life are applied. The research method applied in this study is descriptive qualitative with intrinsic and extrinsic approaches. Based on the analysis, the writer finds out that among the nine dystopian society characteristics, the writer has found five characteristics that are reflected in Wither , namely the society is an illusion of utopia world; the natural world is being a banished and distrusted world; perception under constant surveillance; fear ot the outside world; and information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted. In addition, the analysis of the main character’s rebellion shows that the rebellion happens as the impact of dystopian society faced by the main character. Rhine’s rebellion is done in four ways – having intention to escape from Linden’s house, refusing to be consummated by her husband, having relationship with Gabriel, and escaping. The reasons of Rhine’s rebellion are wanting to be reunited with her brother and wanting to have freedom. After doing the analysis, the writer finds out that science and technology should be developed for human’s better condition. Science and technology must not be expected beyond God’s power. When science and technology is developed without consideration in terms of humanity, it will result in chaosness.

The Radical Imagination: Imagining the future in financial capitalism

Abstract: Why the radical imagination? Today more than ever we need a theoretical debate on the potentialities as well as the vicissitudes of imagination — the capacity of economies and societies to produce ideas and visions of the future that materially condition the present. We argue that while dominant future projections serve to quietly construct the ‘radical dystopias’ of today’s financial capitalism, radical imagination also contains the much-needed alternative visions that are able to challenge such dystopias.

Indigenous Posthumans: Cyberpunk Surgeries and Biotech Boarding Schools in File under Miscellaneous and SyFy's Helix

Abstract: Indigenous science fiction often extrapolates the horrifying conditions of ongoing colonial abuse into darkly futuristic settings, exploring possibilities for adaptation and survivance in an apocalyptic world. As Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) observes in her introduction to the anthology Walking the Clouds (2012), science fiction provides a space where Indigenous writers and artists can write narratives of "biskaabiiyang," or "returning to ourselves" where one can "[discover] how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt to our post-Native-Apocalypse world" (10). These forms of "apocalyptic storytelling" go beyond the impulse to simply acknowledge the often erased abuses faced by Indigenous communities. As Dillon argues, stories of Native Apocalypse "[show] the ruptures, the scars, and the trauma in [an] effort ultimately to provide healing" and restore a sense of "bimaadiziwin," or balance, an Anishinaabemowin word that carries the sense of recovering from sickness as well as finding strategies for decolonization and survivance (Dillon 9). Apocalyptic and dystopian fiction therefore often functions as a regenerative genre in Indigenous sf, bringing together resistant politics of Indigenous sovereignty with scenes of injury and healing that can be productively understood as biomedical.I am looking specifically at two science fiction texts-the cyberpunk horror film File Under Miscellaneous (2010), by Mi'gMaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, and the recent SyFy channel zombie show Helix (2014- )-which connect the survivance or victimhood of Indigenous characters in these apocalyptic settings to forms of biomedical posthumanism. Gerald Vizenor defines his concept of Indigenous "survivance" as consisting of "more than survival, more than endurance or mere response [...] survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy [...] and victimry" (Fugitive Poses 15). The posthuman possibilities of Vizenor's concept of survivance are closely related to Achille Mbembe's discussion of how biopolitics functions alongside colonization. In his essay on necropolitics Mbembe considers how the space of the colony complicates Foucualt's descriptions of biopower and Agamben's figure of the homo sacer because these biopolitical structures become combined with a particular racial logic characterized by the "state of siege" and the "state of exception" (165). The violence with which these states are reinforced creates subjectivities in which the biopolitical apparatuses of making live and letting die are perversely combined. In particular, Mbembe discusses the biopolitics of slavery, in which subjects are "kept alive but in a state of injury" (170, italics in original), a form of making live that is more explicitly violent and leads to "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead" (186).Mbembe's work differs greatly from that of Vizenor in imagining a form of resistance to this state of living death for colonized subjects. While Vizenor juxtaposes endurance and tragedy with survivance, Mbembe outlines competing logics of "martyrdom" and "survival" as responses to biopolitical control. The logic of survival, for Mbembe, necessitates a feeling of satisfaction at the death of the Other. The survivor feels more secure the more he kills, and understands death as a conflict with a clear victor (182). The martyr, who represents a more resistant form of agency for Mbembe, is exemplified by suicide bombers, who transform their bodies into weapons. In order to kill the enemy, the martyr must first change the body into a "mask" of the body of the enemy, strategically simulating identities through this material transformation (183). The figure of the martyr, for Mbembe, operates through an "ecstatic notion of temporality and politics" (186, italics in original) by collapsing the subject's desire for futurity or "eternity" into the present (184). …

Introduction a critique of posthuman futures

Abstract: F rancis Fukuyama's latest book, Our Posthuman Future: Conse- quences of the Biotechnology Revolution, opens with a description of Aldous Huxley's scientiWcally engineered dystopia in Brave New World. "The aim of this book," states Fukuyama, "is to argue that Huxley was right, that the most signiWcant threat posed by contem- porary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a 'posthuman' stage of history" (7). Both sympathetic and critical readers of Fukuyama's previous work may be able to discern how the book proceeds; it is an impassioned de- fense of liberal humanism against contemporary cultures of laissez- faire individualism and unregulated corporate technoscience. While scientiWc progress is needed and desired for the good of all, if un- checked that progress threatens to alter the conditions of our com- mon humanity with the prospect of terrible social costs. The threat here is fundamental for Fukuyama; genetic technologies will alter the material and biological basis of the natural human equality that serves as the basis of political equality and human rights. Fukuyama asks, "(W)hat will happen to political rights once we are able to, in effect, breed some people with saddles on their backs, and others with boots and spurs?" (9-10). Fukuyama's book is timely, not for the persuasiveness of his arguments, but for his staunch defense of the state regulation of biotechnology grounded in an Enlightenment narrative of a shared and inviolable human essence. In a world increasingly populated with genetically modiWed organisms and artiWcial life of all kinds, including the practical and potential manipulation of the biology of