<i>The Girl Who Fell to Earth</i>: Sophia Al-Maria’s Retro-Futurism

Abstract

This article reads Sophia Al-Maria’s aesthetics of Gulf Futurism as a mode of retro-futurist nostalgia, nostalgia not for the past but for the future. Retro-futurism can be understood in terms of what Mark Fisher has called, following Jacques Derrida, “hauntology” (Fisher 2014), the project of interrogating the failure of the utopian promises of modernity on both personal and collective registers. Literary and cultural critics have long maintained that postmodernism marks a post-futurist moment in which imagined futures are pre-determined by the ideological imperatives of market capitalism. Yet, this “slow cancellation of the future” (Berardi 2011: 18) has paradoxically entailed a proliferation of 21st-century futurisms: Afro-Futurism, Sino-Futurism, Gulf Futurism, accelerationism, design fiction, climate fiction, and so forth. My argument is that, in its articulation of Gulf Futurism, The Girl Who Fell to Earth distorts and undermines modernity’s signature narrative of development and progress, holding up a mirror to its history of broken promises and thereby challenging its imagined foreclosure of possible futures.