This is my contribution to a seminar at ASAP/11 this past weekend in College Park, MD on NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, a text that, I am sure, needs no introduction.
The seminar was amazing and I want to thank Leif Sorensen and Jessica Hurley for organizing it and inviting me to be part of it. The other contributions were great and the conversation was among the best I have ever had at a conference–both very smart and very much a geeking out session.
In my current book project, Here at the end of all things: Fantasy after History, I begin by theorizing the relationship among fantasy, science fiction ,and horror in order to examine what avenues for thought each genre opens and closes. This theorization leads a reconsideration of fantasy’s development and reception as a genre, especially insofar as fantasy, in its fullest expression, actualizes a ground for history that history cannot provide for itself (a problem historicist genres such as sf often fail to acknowledge and one that antihistoricist genres such as horror do not acknowledge as a problem so much as a given). Fantasy thus acts as a foil for neoliberal capitalism, especially with regard to the latter’s antihistoricist operations, which dovetail with certain aspects of science fiction and, in the end, come to resemble horror. Here, I think about The Broken Earth as fantasy in the context of another of this century’s greatest crises (or constellation of interconnected crises), what we conceptualize by way of “the Anthropocene.” Under the Anthropocene (or one of the many terms competing to identify the broader concept), humanity and its institutions come to understand how the destabilization of the conditions of their history and, thereby, the destabilization of those processes of valorization or meaning-making dependent on historicist and critical thought. The Anthropocene not only reveals the impermanence or finitude of human subjectivity, institutions, nations, and so on—the very impermanence and finitiude that under whose shadow anthropocentric valorziation becomes necessary and possible. The Anthropocene also reveals the impermanence and finitude of the condition for human subjectivities, institutions, nations, and so on—the allegedly stable or “set” materialities that subtend all life on this planet. (Of course, the responsibility for, awareness of, and consequences of the Anthropocene are unevenly distributed across the abstraction “humanity,” to say the least.)
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evening redness 