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Reassembling Skins and Bones: Indigenous Posthumanism in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms
No full textWhile posthumanism has contributed to questioning the foundations of humanism and the consequent process of exclusion it engendered of all those diverging from the universal category of ‘Man,’ numerous scholars have criticized this diverse philosophical movement from Indigenous perspectives. Multiple critics suggest a tendency within posthumanist strands of thought to oppose dualistic approaches presenting them as universal without considering the preexisting non-dualistic frameworks articulated by Indigenous scholars, while also appropriating Indigenous epistemes without acknowledging them, running the risk of becoming complicit with colonial violence and with what Rauna Kuokkanen has defined ‘epistemic ignorance.’ For this reason, projects of decolonizing posthumanist scholarship entail engaging and establishing a dialogue with Indigenous studies, fostering a ‘multiepistemic literacy.’ Acknowledging the productive potential of an alliance between Indigenous and posthumanist discourses in reorienting the conversation toward issues of settler colonialism, land sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination, this paper aims to apply an Indigenous posthumanist perspective to Chickasaw author Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. In particular, the paper will focus, on the one hand, on representations within the novel of taxidermic practices, deeply tied to colonial violence, that transform animals into posthuman commodified objects, and, on the other, on instances of reassembling skins and bones in acts of regenerative creation, which, unlike taxidermy, acknowledge the need for reciprocity and processes of relational becoming. These new combinations of matter constitute on the part of the protagonist a way of envisioning new modes of being human, relating to the more-than-human, and affirming Indigenous self-determination
Desert Dystopias: Liminal Spaces and Times in Medievalist Post-Apocalyptic Works
No full textIn popular culture, the Middle Ages has often been considered a liminal dark and barbaric age at
odds with modernity (Freedman and Spiegel 677-8). Similarly, from an Eurocentric perspective tied
to histories of colonial and environmental violence, the desert—associated with emptiness,
barrenness, and decline—and its inhabitants has been regarded as belonging to a marginal, hostile
space of alterity (Osuna and Tyna 2-3). However, both the liminal temporal dimension of the
Middle Ages and the liminal space of the desert occupy a central position in numerous post
apocalyptic and dystopian works, where the respective stereotypical perceptions of both are either
repeated or critically reflected upon.
Where, during the Middle Ages, the desert was conceived in ambivalent terms—both as a
utopian paradise and as a space of temptation, conflict, and exile—in works such as Frank Herbert’s
Dune (1965), the Mad Max franchise (1979-2024), and Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz
(1959) that imagine the future as the new “Dark Ages,” the desert seems to acquire distinctively
dystopian traits. The neomedieval space of the desert becomes tied to ecological degradation,
struggles for survival and power, and social inequalities. While in each work the desert serves to
evoke multiple contemporary concerns—from colonial and imperial ventures, nuclear testing, to
climate change and resource scarcity—all use the desert and the medieval as worldbuilding tools to
characterize bleak scenarios of scarcity and ruin that adhere to what Aidan Tynan defines
“wasteland aesthetics” (16-22). By employing the framework of ecomedievalism, which considers
works of medievalism through an ecocritical lens (Johnson 31), I explore how such liminal
temporal and special dimensions become central to the representation of conflicts in the works
considered and the implications of how the modern perception of the Middle Ages and of the desert
mutually inform each other
'Make America Great Again': Ronald Reagan, Neoliberalism, and Medievalism in Octavia E. Butler's Earthseed Series
No full textThe paper discusses the Reaganite period, the rise of neoliberalism that was heavily determined by Reagan’s policies and how his neoconservative stance was often defended through a rhetoric that relied on the use of the past, and specifically of the medieval past. In particular, the paper explores how the intersection of such themes is dramatized in the Afrofuturist dystopian scenario painted by Octavia Butler in her Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, the two novels that make up her Earthseed series published in the 1990s. This discussion intends to bring attention to the dangers of the political uses of medievalism to legitimate exclusionary ideological agendas
Gut Punch: Ethical Education through Carnivalesque Shock in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker
No full textMultiple scholars criticize (post-)apocalyptic narratives for their tendency to produce defeatist
sentiments in the readers, hindering affirmative politics and action in response to anthropogenic
issues by mourning over a world ruined beyond any possibility of remediation (Garrard 2004;
Haraway 2016; Heise 2008; Malvestio 2022). For this reason, arguments have been made in favor
of moving from elegiac narratives toward ones celebrating affirmation and laughter to promote an
ecological awareness (Branch 2014; Heise 2016; Seymour 2018).
At first glance, Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker (1980) seems to comply
with the genre’s pessimistic tones. The novel presents landscapes still devastated centuries after a
nuclear event that has brought civilization to ruins. Yet, the work also defies such expectations. The
protagonist develops a puppet show, revolving around the puppet of Punch from the English Punch
and Judy tradition, that constitutes a counter-model to his society’s dominant narratives torn
between sentiments of sorrow over the mistakes of the past on the one hand and desires to repeat the
very actions, driven by greed and anthropocentrism, that led to the apocalypse on the other.
Punch’s exaggerated features and coarse, violent behavior shocks the audience both to an
ethical response of outrage and to laughter. This paper intends to analyze the puppet of Punch in
light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory in order to illustrate the latter’s usefulness for ecocritical
analyses (Casid; Gardiner; Lousley; McDowell; Murphy). Punch embodies a carnivalesque spirit
that moves the post-apocalyptic society beyond sorrow, and forces it to confront the basest aspects
of humanity in order to transcend them through laughter and develop new communal ethical
guidelines. Through such analysis, the paper demonstrates that the post-apocalyptic genre is not
defined by a single, monolithic body of literature and that it may overcome mournful tones by
mingling serious ecological concerns with shocking carnival irreverence
Undoing Dualisms: Ecomedievalism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
No full textWhile many critics have commented on Ursula K. Le Guin’s medievalism, discussions have mainly focused on her Earthsea series. While her science fictional works are just as rich with references to the Middle Ages and to medieval culture and literature, they have not received the same critical attention. In this light, this paper aims to analyze how The Left Hand of Darkness, one of the novels of the Hainish cycle, engages with the medieval. The novel depicts the arrival of Genly Ai, an envoy of an intergalactic federation of planets, on the planet Gethen. Gethen presents two main alien societies, Karhide and Orgoreyn, that showcase forms of government that echo respectively medieval and modern political and cultural structures. The medieval and modern are therefore made coeval. The protagonist initially perceives Karhide as an obscure and irrational embodiment of the Dark Ages, while he sees Orgoreyn as an enlightened and modern society. With the progression of the plot, however, Genly starts to revise his original impressions. By presenting his change of heart, the novel appears to question linear and progressive notions of history that conceive the modern as superseding the medieval. The paper intends to argue that the blurring of the medieval/modern divide is inscribed within the work’s concomitant questioning of dichotomic thinking in general, and specifically of the nature/culture divide. Karhide is in fact entertains a respectful and horizontal relationship with the more-than-human realm. By showing how Genly Ai learns to understand and accept the “medieval” Others and their modes of being with the world, the work presents the medieval society as an alternative model of engaging with nature that departs from hegemonic concepts of progress and that embraces multiple forms of alterity that cross species boundaries
From Medieval Travel Narratives to the Planetary Romance: Alien Encounters in Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars
No full textEdgar Rice Burroughs, one of the most popular authors of early science fiction, has been credited with the invention of the science fictional subgenre of the planetary romance, consisting in escapist tales set on another planet among alien species. The planetary romance departs from traditional science fictional conventions in that it does not adhere to plausible scientific laws as science fictional stories generally do, often giving special attention to monsters, exotic settings, swordplay, supernatural powers, and romance as well as to the encounters between the main hero and alien beings whose society often resembles that of Earth’s premodern past. This kind of plotline was heavily influenced not only by frontier narratives describing the US expansion westward, but also by travelogues and what John Rieder has defined as “medievalist and imperial” stories about lost races and marvelous journeys of the late nineteenth century, in turn taking inspiration from medieval travel narratives.
In this light, the paper aims to analyze the way Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, the first novel of his Barsoom series, depicts the encounter between self and Other articulated through the attitude of the main hero John Carter toward the alien species he encounter and interacts with during his travels on Mars. In particular, the paper argues that the novel’s attentive descriptions of the flora, fauna, and hybrid inhabitants on the planet, which show an indebtedness on the part of Burroughs to travelogues and ethnographic writing, reveals a similar anxiety, engendered by the alien Others’ hybridity and blurring of boundaries between human and nonhuman, to that expressed toward the monstrous beings populating medieval travel narratives, encyclopedias, mappae mundi, and chivarlic romances. Thus, the paper aims to demonstrate that, just as these medieval sources present journeying as a source of anxiety derived from the encounter with monstrous Others, so Burroughs's depiction of the uncivilized medieval-like monstrous creatures Carter encounters in the strange and hostile wilderness upon his arrival on Mars serves to reassert the boundaries of the human or, rather, of the normative exclusionary conception of the human as white, western male
Blackness as Infectious: Plagues and Anti-Plagues in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
No full textWith the outbreak of Covid-19, the virus has made a second ‘pandemic’ spreading worldwide increasingly visible, that of racial discrimination, leading to higher mortality rates among people of color and unequal access to healthcare on racial grounds, along with pervasive phenomena of xenophobia and hate crimes. In such times that many critics have already called science fictional, the genre of science fiction can contribute to shedding light on the relation between fears of contagious diseases, and notions of race and racism. Within numerous works of science fiction, and in particular within what Priscilla Wald has called ‘outbreak narratives,’ a common and problematic narrative trope establishes a connection between infectious diseases plaguing societies and fears of racial contamination, where black people are perceived as the main culprits of contagion. In this light, the paper aims to contrast this widespread trope with an Afrofuturist text that manages to turn this narrative on its head. Indeed, in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the infectious Jes Grew is seen not as a plague, but rather as an anti-plague, one that represents a tool of resistance and affirmation for African Americans against the attempts of a white supremacist group to marginalize African American communities and to stop the spreading of this life-affirming, dance-inducing ‘virus.’ Jes Grew, then, informs us of the fundamental role and power of collective action and movements, such as the Black Lives Matter one, to spread ‘virally’ in order to fight for social and racial justice
Seeds of Hope: Exploring Inclusive and Exclusive Religions in Octavia Butler’s Earthseed Series
No full textReligion bears a strong ideological and cultural power, capable both of building inclusive communities on the one hand, and of producing social discrimination and exclusion on the grounds of gender, race, class, religious belief, sexual orientation and even species on the other. In this light, the dystopian and utopian modes of science fiction, by providing readers with both warnings and potential alternatives, appear as particularly fruitful arenas where to address social, political, and cultural dynamics of the present, including the potential and dangers of religion. For this reason, borrowing notions from sociology of religion, this paper will explore how religion affects social inclusion and exclusion in Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, while also negotiating between dystopian and utopian modes within the novels. On the one hand, the novels present a dystopian scenario, where social injustice is tied to environmental disaster and is aggravated by a religious totalitarian regime that leads to the discrimination and persecution of multiple social groups. On the other, the paper will also consider instances of utopian counterimpulses within the novels. In fact, the protagonist Lauren Olamina, recognizing the power of religious belief in prompting action, holding together communities, and providing hope, founds the religious community of Earthseed, grounded on inclusive values such as diversity, equality, and environmentalism. Although the novels problematize the notion of Earthseed as entirely utopian, they show that religion can contribute to the construction and development of inclusive communities, planting seeds of hope in the midst of a dystopian scenario where social exclusion is the norm. The paper will employ an environmental justice perspective, acknowledging the connection between social and environmental justice/injustice, and believing that true social inclusion should not only embrace people regardless of their gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and physical ability, but should also be extended to nonhuman species
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