Desirable Futures: Write Me a Letter

'Scientific people/ proceeded Time Traveller, after pause required for proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space' (The Time Machine 268). What is at stake in treating time a kind of space, politically, philosophi cally, and narratologically? While time travel has often been dismissed as merely a popular science-fictional gimmick, it seems far more productive to regard it as an in scription of a specific ideology of temporality. The roots of this ideology are in evolutionary debate of fin-de-siecle but its contemporary offshoots have become part of postmodernity's problematic relationship with time and history. The post modern trouble with time finds its expression in turn in narrativity, which includes topos of time travel (Smethurst 37). In this essay, I will trace development of time travel, from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine to postmodern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity. As opposed to most narrative conventions, time travel originates in a single text, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895).1 In his first novel, Wells invents not just a new plot but a new chronotope. Chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is spa tial-temporal configuration of narrative text, the intrinsic connectedness of tem poral and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature (15). The

The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice

When approaching the internet, as subject or object, academics risk reinforcing colonial logics unless we acknowledge these histories and adapt our knowledge production accordingly. Yet, within academic institutions, Western values narrow the options for “valid” knowledge production - in a process recognized as “epistemic colonialism” (Fanon, 1963). In response to these histories and pressures, Black feminists, Indigenous scholars and activist-researchers have created a breadth of perspectives, theories, techniques, and methods to resist the hierarchical mandates within academia that fail to acknowledge other ways of knowing that doesn't fit the mold of hegemonic “scientific” perspectives. Our panel brings together individuals engaged in active resistance both within and beyond academia. We reflect on the theoretical grounding and lived experiences of those working in communities committed to grassroots epistemological approaches and methodological alternatives. Our discussion is shaped by expertise in Indigenous studies, militant/insurgent research, transgender data epistemologies, Latin American Black feminist perspectives, and citizen/grassroots science and data. Collectively, we argue that liberatory research must be informed by local contexts and grassroots perspectives, critically engaging with the power structures shaping knowledge production. We emphasize an approach that remains critically attentive to the power structures shaping our own knowledge-making practices. Our panel explores how scholarly work can serve as a practice of resistance, subversion, solidarity, and transformation - both within and beyond institutional settings. This strengthens and unites our collectives to ultimately: resist and dismantle the coloniality of internet infrastructure.

Presented as a series of notes, this article explores scavenging as a methodology of refusal, anchored in black studies, black feminist thought, queer studies and indigenous studies, and thinks of the possibilities it offers for rethinking feminist research. Engaging with the works of Katherine McKittrick and of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in particular, I unravel scavenging and interrogate the possibilities it offers for feminist, queer and decolonial scholarship. I argue that scavenging cultivates wonder; resists extractive logics pervasive in academic research; refuses disciplinarity; demands attention; offers possibilities for repair; channels feeling, desire and the erotic; and, finally, encourages us to think about form in academic writing. Throughout, scavenging is therefore sketched out as a methodology for worldmaking.

Reading Faulkner as a Chickasaw scholar can, at times, be disorienting in the juxtapositions of history, remembrance, family, and fiction; the experience itself relocates and displaces as much as it coheres a sense of the past or of a place. Mired in the scenes of settlement, Faulkner’s world-building helped set into motion contradictory and cacophonous discourses of blackness, whiteness, and indigeneity in the American South, and in doing so, provided the imaginative terrains through which we continue think about the intersections of slavery and colonialism. Taking up Absalom, Absalom! alongside critical work in indigenous studies, black feminism, and queer of color critique, this chapter will consider how indigeneity interrupts the temporalities and spatialities that are often taken for granted in how we understand the South as prologue for race in America.

This Companion offers a capacious overview of American environmental literature and criticism. Tracing environmental literatures from the gates of the Manzanar War Relocation Camp in California to the island of St. Croix, from the notebooks of eighteenth-century naturalists to the practices of contemporary activists, this book offers readers a broad, multimedia definition of 'literature', a transnational, settler colonial comprehension of America, and a more-than-green definition of 'environment'. Demonstrating links between ecocriticism and such fields as Black feminism, food studies, decolonial activism, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and carceral studies, the volume reveals the persistent relevance of literary methods within the increasingly interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, while also modeling practices of literary reading shaped by this interdisciplinary turn. The result is a volume that will prove indispensable both to students seeking an overview of American environmental literature/criticism and to established scholars seeking new approaches to the field.

This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of ‘skin’ in Shakespeare’s works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Shakespeare / Skindeparts from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres ‘skin’ in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare’s time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such asTitus Andronicus, The TempestandA Midsummer Night’s Dream,and work by Borderlands Theater,Los Colochosand Satyajit Ray, among many others. For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.

Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns Krista Comer (bio) In the turbulent summer of 2020—amidst an uncontrolled pandemic and massive protests against police brutality on US streets—op-ed writers reported a "great white awakening on racism," an assault on white innocence without the typical hem and haw, the fragility or defenses of white guilt (Thornton). Springing up in geographies not on anyone's antiracist map of America, the first draft of a new history of race relations in this country seemed to be in process. Older white people stood with signs on unlikely suburban street corners. Throngs of multiracial young folks were getting in front of tear gas, putting their bodies on the line. Terms like "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" circulated in public discourse with new legitimacy and ubiquity while the white studies scholar Robin DiAngelo made the rounds on cable TV, astounded her 2018 book White Fragility was sold out. The election of 2020 reveals the roughness of this first draft of a new history of race relations, how potent white supremacy remains as a political force, and how divided the US West is between red and blue states, urban and rural political culture. Now that the results are in, and Donald Trump defeated, the tens of millions who signed on for another term of white nationalist rule will not go away. Indeed, the affective discourse of white grievance that brought Trump to power is stronger. The famous "suburban white woman's" vote showed her to be less tired of Trumpism than predicted. Whatever racial reckoning was happening among white progressives about white women's politics has, however, been eclipsed by the January 6 insurrection of white nationalist patriarchs at the US Capitol. While horrifying, the action was also familiar to US West [End Page 101] researchers tracking extremism in the region. NPR's Kirk Siegler, in the "Roots of U.S. Capitol Insurrectionists Run Through American West," reports on extremist street activities, since 2014, of the People's Rights movement led by Ammon Bundy. Bundy has called his followers to live and die as "free men" as they stormed federal buildings and threatened officials, in effect providing a "Western ethos" playbook for Trump loyalists like the Proud Boys (Siegler). Escalated white violence makes understanding grievance politics all the more urgent. Do white progressives have anything to offer those who occupy this aggressive injured standpoint other than critique, superiority, or condemnation? Can feminists who are white (by descriptive definition, white feminists) not flinch at the term "white feminist," perhaps use it to engage the trope of "white feminism" that women of color feminisms continue to invoke as meaningful to them? Such questions about whiteness, the social geographies of the nation, and to what feminist politics are accountable are among the most pressing for feminism and for critical regional theory and action. The pervasive suspicion of feminism as "white feminism" (unless it is otherwise named, i.e., black feminism) fundamentally structures feminist alliances. This relational strain, so familiar to feminist histories and persistent, is white women's problem to fix. To do so, white feminists need to understand the problem of whiteness for white women so much better. I begin through recent political events to keep the stakes of whiteness at the top of the ticket, so to speak, at the forefront of critical concerns. Certainly, the fact of racial hierarchies in histories of conquest has been one center for the field of western American literary and cultural studies over the last thirty years and including, in the last ten years, a transformative turn to frameworks from Indigenous studies and settler theory. This essay continues that trajectory as well as builds on work over the last several years to theorize the political and aesthetic concerns an explicitly feminist critical regionalism can help critics analyze. If the advent of more "critical" regional frameworks in the field of western literary and cultural studies substantiated and gave name to a problem that too often had no name, the problem of whiteness, I will be [End Page 102] concerned here with whiteness not from the more familiar vantage point of critique or disavowal but rather from the perspective...

This paper explores power, voice and representation as dynamics in Beloved by Toni Morrison with reference to narrative discourse critically. This study examines the ways that Morrison uses narrative techniques, including changing viewpoint, polyphony, fragmentation, and temporal displacement, to rewrite the history of the dominant US to re- figure the voices of the oppressed by slavery. The study relies on the narrative theory (Genette, Bakhtin), the Black feminist thought (hooks, Lorde), the postcolonial criticism (Bhabha, Fanon) to analyze ways in which storytelling becomes the place of negotiation between the authority and the marginality. These findings show that the narrative discourse of Morrison does not just disrupt the conventional power structure but also recreate the process of representation by foregrounding the lived experiences and culture of the memory and emotional truth of the enslaved people. Beloved, by its unique style, turns narrative into resistance, giving silenced subjects the way to enter history again with agency and voice.

This article offers a new tool for women of color scholars to write and analyze the data and archive from their own life journals and journeys. Coining a new concept of theomethaxis, a Black Womanist Theomethaxis framework is an integration of theory, methodology, and praxis focused on the intersection of race, gender, and spirituality. It uses Black women’s autobiography, critical praxis autoethnography, counter-storytelling, and Black girl cartography as methodological tools. Drawing from cultural studies, feminist theories, African American history, women’s history, and childhood studies, it integrates theoretical constructs from Black feminist thought, Black girlhood studies, Critical Black Feminism, Hip-Hop Feminism, Crunk Feminism, New Black Feminism, Womanist thought, Womanist theology, and the Wild Woman Archetype. Integrating personal narrative, the article illustrates how the framework facilitated the praxis of analyzing 45 years of journals, revealing revolutionary and transformational themes in the initiation journey from Black girlhood to Black womanhood. The concept of a womanist theomethaxis may also provide a framework for application to other academic areas and studies, such as Chicana/Latina feminist studies, Asian American feminist studies, and Indigenous feminist studies.

"I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE AND I WON'T GO"The Comic Vision of Craig Strete's Science Fiction Stories Kristina Baudemann (bio) I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE AND I WON'T GO. (popular folksong from 2074.) (Crazy Horse, his dying words, 1876.) —Craig Strete, "A Horse of a Different Technicolor" Indigenous science fiction (SF) is not a new genre. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Indigenous speculative voices presented an Indigenous-centered take on time travel, apocalypse, and other worlds with publications such as Gerald Vizenor's "Custer on the Slipstream" (1978) and Darkness in Saint Louis: Bearheart (1978), and Craig Kee Strete's The Bleeding Man and Other Science Fiction Stories (1977) and If All Else Fails. … (1980).1 As Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon has pointed out, "Indigenous sf [science fiction] is not so new—just overlooked" (2). With her 2012 anthology Walking the Clouds, Dillon has introduced the term Indigenous futurisms for Indigenous-centered SF: spanning almost three decades of Indigenous speculative writing, from 1978 (Vizenor) to 2006 (Andrea Hairston's Mindscape), the collection exhibits how Indigenous writers reimagine SF tropes and alter their audience's perception of "what 'serious' Native authors are supposed to write" (3). Notably absent from Dillon's canon, however, is Cherokee writer Craig Strete—arguably the first Indigenous author widely recognized within the science fiction community. Strete's fiction was three times shortlisted for the Nebula Award and drew the attention and praise of renowned writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Hamilton, who provided forewords to Strete's short story collections.2 Strete's fanzine Red Planet Earth (1974) was the first SF magazine dedicated to Indigenous-authored speculative fiction. Since [End Page 76] the early 1980s, however, Strete has been largely forgotten: his collections are out of print, and mentions of his work in academic publications on SF throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are rare. Strete's identity is hard to pinpoint, and not only because his fame as a writer ebbed away three decades ago. He has also admitted to using multiple pseudonyms ("Strete, Craig"), and the attempt to verify facts about his personality and works has proven to be difficult at best: his most successful book, Burn Down the Night (1982), in which Strete depicts a wild party night with the Doors frontman Jim Morrison, is either autobiographical or entirely made up; his biographical statement in If All Else Fails … indicates that Strete has been nominated for a Hugo Award, but Strete's name is not on the shortlists for any year; the introduction for Strete's short story collection Death Chants (1988) is attributed to Salvador Dalí, but whether this means that the poem was written by the legendary painter for Strete personally or whether "Salvador Dalí" is in this case one of Strete's pseudonyms remains unclear. Strete has been praised as brilliant and denounced as a fraud (Manzarek and Moddemann), which should make scholars cautious regarding the egregious issues of ethnic fraud currently under discussion within the Indigenous North American literature and arts communities. However, when attempting to unearth facts about Strete's Indigenous heritage one comes up equally empty-handed: Strete positioned himself as a Cherokee author during the 1970s but does not seem to be affiliated with one of the Cherokee tribes; his claims to an Indigenous ancestry have, to this day, been neither confirmed nor refuted. Strete's fiction was received as Indigenous-authored SF and was a source of inspiration to Indigenous scholars and writers of the 1980s and 1990s. The enigmatic identity of this author notwithstanding, I believe that his works and their reception require revisiting in light of the present turn within Indigenous literary studies toward Indigenous speculative fictions. This article collects critical voices on Strete's SF and explores reasons for the academic silence that followed in the track of his acclaim as an aspiring SF author of the 1970s. Approaching Strete's fiction with the help of paradigms for Indigenous literature, most notably, Lawrence Gross's comic vision, Vizenor's trickster discourse and survivance, Dillon's Indigenous futurism, and Gross's, Daniel Heath Justice's, and Sidner Larson's Native apocalypse, I will explore what...

This article explores radical learning rituals deployed during an experimental intensive course targeting first-year students at a Hispanic Serving Institution. Using the Radical Imagination Laboratory (RIL) as a template, the course explores imagination through a Black Feminist lens, specifically engaging the works of Angela Davis, Sylvia Wynter, and Audre Lorde. The article chronicles the lessons and challenges of coteaching, creating and practicing innovative teaching methodologies, and race-conscious pedagogy, while grappling with differences in race and gender positionality among instructors and students. Each of the class activities highlighted here represents a foundational theorist for the course (in conjunction/conversation with contemporary theorists). While describing these examples of alternate ways of understanding and experiencing the classroom as a laboratory for time travel and world-making, the article also investigates both students’ resistance to and their embracing of the Black Feminist framing of imagination that is at the core of the class. The article concludes that attempts to nurture imagination through an explicit centering of Black Feminist ways of knowing and being serve to stretch and elevate students’ understanding of imagination’s relationship to the past and present and the collective responsibility, costs, and power of this birthright.

In their Point, Wenzel, Cabantous, and Koch set out how future making encompasses a broad range of future‐oriented practices, including but not limited to planning, foresight, agile, and design‐driven approaches. In this Counterpoint, we contest that viewing future making as any future‐oriented practice may also encompass unsuitable and detrimental practices, and may blur the concept to the point of hindering, rather than sustaining efforts at theorizing future making. Adopting a Pragmatist perspective, we suggest viewing future making as an emancipatory inquiry aimed at imagining and reifying desirable futures, that is, collective, value‐based judgements of what the future might and should be. This entails a reflective conversation with the social and material world, whereby concerned actors collectively deliberate, based on values, what futures are desirable – for themselves, for future generations, and the natural environment. In advancing this view, we also reject Wright's Counterpoint on future making as a management fad that ignores long‐standing research on scenario planning, and instead, we argue that future making should depart from the managerialism of scenario planning. The main contribution of our Counterpoint is to suggest a theoretical perspective for advancing our understanding of how desirable futures can be crafted in practice.

Akwugo Emejulu discusses changes to 'collective public politics' – including the third sector, activism, community development and political and union campaigning – alongside Black feminist activism, her own intellectual development, and institutional racism at British universities. In these right-wing times, she argues 'we need people in lot of different kinds of spaces and places to take back power'. She outlines the consequences of the defeat of the left since the 1980s and the rise of neoliberal technocratic managerialism in the third sector: how it put already-vulnerable people further at risk and destabilised the political power of NGOS. More recently there has been a surge of interest in political education and in campaigning on 'the bigger political picture' amongst community activists. We need a far more expansive conception of 'activism': for more attention to be given to its role in everyday life, its intersectionality and its sustainability. To do this, and to foreground the diverse contributions of women of colour activists, is to address and redress the 'raceless discussions of the white left'. The interview concludes by considering academia in a neoliberal climate. 'We do not have to be vicious, competitive, or managerial', she says: all academics need to behave well at every level to change institutional racism.

My article ‘The Sounded-Word Aesthetics’ explores the ways that Black girls make spirit felt as found in the music created in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT). SOLHOT is a collective space of organizing with Black girls to celebrate Black girlhood. Using personal narrative alongside black feminist, womanist, and black girlhood scholarship, I argue that spirit is made felt through the aesthetics of Black girl covenant and the fire commandments. I conclude that sounded-word aesthetics allows Black girls to be heard differently while resisting dominant narratives of black girls and pushes us into a desirable future.