Speculating the Future from Our Apocalyptic Present

Abstract

Speculating the Future from Our Apocalyptic Present Samuel Ginsburg (bio) BLACK UTOPIAS: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. By Jayna Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2021. THE LATINX FILES: Race, Migration and Space Aliens. By Matthew David Goodwin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2021. MIGRANT FUTURES: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. By Aimee Bahng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2018. The future is a contested space, a battleground with no shortage of fronts, all of which are oriented forward but remain firmly rooted in the present context in which they are written. This combination of known and unknown, of is and not yet, deeply fortified and open-sourced, makes the act of speculation a highly [End Page 45] political and consequential practice. While this may mean that there are openings for alternative and rebellious speculating, the other consequence is that our understandings of the range of potential futures, the spectrum of possibilities that we can envision, can shift as quickly as the current situation changes. For example, at the end of the acknowledgements section that opens Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021), Jayna Brown inserts a coda that both positions the text to come within our dystopic present and highlights some of the challenges involved in studying the future. She writes, “Since I began writing this book the world has become ever more apocalyptic as we face, among other conditions, a global pandemic; the climate crisis; a rampant, voracious, and brutal system of global capitalism; and authoritarianism and white supremacy” (ix). The quickness with which potential futures can be uprooted by a present that feels more and more like the worst possible scenario does not necessarily align with the time, rigor, and patience involved in writing and publishing an academic book, which tends to act as a snapshot within a historical context and scholarly lineage. Still, Brown acknowledges that these shifts do not make writing about the future a futile task, but instead underline the urgency of such a project. She continues, “I dedicate this book to our collective endeavor as we try to imagine other possibilities after the final days to come” (ix). Just as the push for utopia is framed as an ongoing process of radical longing and an exercise in testing boundaries and exceeding limits, the apocalyptic present also appears to be an ongoing procession of final days, like the ones previously survived, like the ones we know are waiting for us just out of sight. All of the books reviewed here—Brown’s Black Utopias along with Matthew David Goodwin’s Latinx Files: Race, Migration and Space Aliens (2021) and Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (2018)—are forced to contend with how the ever-moving present enhances or inhibits the study of the future. For example, in her introduction, Bahng notes that “As Migrant Futures headed into the final stages of production,” the United States witnessed the election of Donald Trump and the corresponding effects on global financial markets, an example of how “electoral projections produced economic reality” (3). Staking a claim for the urgency of this kind of analysis of the fight over futurity, she explains that this example “yokes the abstract violence of finance capitalism to more overt manifestations of state violence as exacted through the police force disproportionately on black and brown, queer and trans bodies in the United States” (4). In this case, referencing our chaotic and violent present proves Bahng’s thesis about the material dangers within state, corporate, and neoliberal speculation. On the other hand, Goodwin’s Latinx Files ends with the assertion that none of the imagined futures and resistances previously discussed in his book will matter if we do not survive the current climate crisis: “Humanity is on direct course to make the planet uninhabitable through our use of fossil fuels rather than solar, wind, and waterpower. … There will be no alien consciousness if we destroy our planet” (119). Caught within a conjunction of fields and subfields (Science Fiction Studies, Latinx Studies, Literary Studies, the Humanities, etc.) [End Page 46] that seem to constantly need to prove their worth and significance, Goodwin’s admission...