This panel takes up the AAR's theme of La Labor de Nuestras Manos and how "work" is an ambivalent act. In the infinite imagination of speculative fictions, the effects of human labor serve epic outcomes that can spell either the salvation of human species-being, or humanity's final destruction. The papers on this panel ask how individuals submit to, negotiate with, or resist institutions of power with profound consequences for humanity. Moving across the genres of speculative historical fiction, horror podcast, and Africanfuturism, this session reveals the ambiguous outcomes and meanings behind human productive action in the absence of a supernatural, loving, or even attentive deity.
Set in “an alternate or shadow Appalachia . . . where these mountains were never meant to be inhabited,” the horror anthology podcast Old Gods of Appalachia is a work of speculative fiction that addresses themes of labor, ecology, and industry in Central Appalachia. After a coal mine disaster in 1917, horror awakens in the town of Barlo, KY. The horror serves to dramatize and draw attention to the historical and ongoing social concerns of the region, portraying the pain and difficulties of working-class life through the story’s supernatural frame. My analysis of Season One of Old Gods of Appalachia will bring the emerging field of Monster Theory together into conversation with working-class religion and ecocriticism.
Anthony Doerr’s recent novel Cloud Cuckoo Land focuses on the healing power of story through three apocalypses spanning centuries. This story follows characters across time and space. From early fifteenth-century Constantinople and its destruction, to the late twentieth century middle-America, and finally an uncertain future period in the middle of space where humans have rendered Earth unlivable, this novel provides a vision of how destructive human actions shape our world and the possibility of resistance and healing through themes of displacement, war, and the othering of bodies. This paper will explore the many human actions of construction and destruction and the religious element of healing as it appears throughout the novel, opening up a theological and ethical imagination of restoration, wholeness, and the future of our world.
This paper explores the often paradoxically disruptive force of efforts to achieve harmony in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy of novellas. With Binti, her protagonist for Binti (2015), Binti: Home (2017), and Binti: The Night Masquerade (2018), as well as an accompanying short story, “Binti: Sacred Fire” (2019), Okorafor offers a futuristic character rooted in African tradition whose work as a “master harmonizer” bridges the technological and social. With her mystical access to the spiritual resonances of mathematics, Binti is both an expert designer of “astrolabes,” a form of highly advanced smart phone, and a skilled mediator of division. As Binti sums up, master harmonizers can “create harmony anywhere,” yet her choices in pursuing her vocation undercut tribal expectations and gender roles while complicating assumed distinctions between individuals and groups. Okorafor’s Africanfuturist and postcolonial vision, meanwhile, disrupts traditionally perceived limits of science fiction as a field.