The worlds that form the backdrop of speculative fiction -- whether radically different from our own or different only in small particulars -- compel reconceptualizing human experience and human being itself. This session considers the possibilities, limits, and the constructions of human being through provocative examples of invented spaces. Presenters examine transfiguration, monstrosity and cannibalism in _Lovecraft Country_ from a Womanist/Afrofuturist reading; the ritualized body conceived in _Herland_, and _News from Nowhere_ through Fredric Jameson's views of utopia; issues of transcendence, artificiality, control and prophetic control in human histories and futures as pedagogical goals in _Arrival_, _Blade Runner_, and _Dune_.
Lovecraft Country is a genre-bending television series created by screenwriter and director, Misha Green, which spans the categories of speculative fiction, horror, historical fiction, fantasy, and drama. I will interrogate Lovecraft as an instrument of metaphysics that exposes the way power, violence, coloniality, anti-Blackness, and kinship function in religious and cultural imaginations. In the face of unyielding gratuitous violence—physical and psychic—against Black people, I contend that “making a way out of no way,” a core assumption in womanist methodologies, is a practice of transubstantiating reversal magic against intractable colonial sorcery/colonialcraft, which is illustrated throughout the limited HBO series. This portal of speculative fiction offers an exploration of magic that seeks to seed possibilities for releasing the discursive grip on the humanist axiological framework, as we remember and recollect sources of imaginational, lingual/linguistic, sensorial, material, affective, and divine power which are not dependent upon legibility as “human.”
The question that Jameson poses to utopian literature, “Can culture be political?” incites an understanding of cultural embodiment informing the consideration of ritual. While many utopian novels in the period of their late 19th century popularity seem essentially anti-artistic and anti-religious, Jameson’s criticism prompts us to examine the formations and transformations of the body that utopian fiction also explored. In this paper, I argue that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s *Herland* and William Morris’s *News From Nowhere* imagine aesthetics as a ritualized embodiment of the societal ideal, by which a sacramental power is afforded to everyday utopian life. I aim to elucidate a broader *fin-de-siècle* paradigm in which utopia’s internal and productive challenges were mobilized toward the progressive, political reinvention of the human, by way of the reinvention of religion and art.
The proposed presentation uses three works of science fiction to explore significant characteristics and demands of being human today: self-transcendence is analyzed with the help of Arrival, the importance of simulation and artificiality through Blade Runner, and the temptation to exercise prophetic authority at the expense of others with Dune. These works compel readers/viewers to nurture understandings of religion and the supernatural transcending superstition, notions of the human and education overcoming unilateral rational control of the body, in favor of embracing the inherent indeterminacy of natural and human evolution and history. Human finitude can indeed be conceived and embraced as responsible openness to the transcendent welcoming the other/Other in its/her difference, enabling the formation of authentic community and communion.