2026-2027 Amit Rai's seminar: The ‘Long Revolution’: Science Fiction and the Arts of Dystopia
The seminar is conceived and offered by: Amit S. Rai
The seminar from Confluence to Confluence
Seminar participants second year: Josse Vessies, Amalie Sveske Ourø, Veronika Marxer, Rikke Lundgaard Ebling
Seminar participants first year:
The ‘Long Revolution’: Science Fiction and the Arts of Dystopia
INTRODUCTION:
This is a seminar about the theory and practice of science fiction in relation to emancipatory movements that seek to exit from racial and colonial capital. We will focus mostly on literary science fiction (we will also encounter amazing SF cinema/anime!), and we will navigate our way through this site of literary production by understanding it, firstly, as a historically specific cultural form, with its own, but not entirely invented narrative conventions, affective and movement images, sensorimotor circuits and embodied associations, dynamic interpretive communities, technological and commercial infrastructures, and marketized relations of literary and aesthetic value dominated by the fetish in exchange value. In this seminar we will consider the literary production of SF as a heterogeneous form of art whose assemblage includes disparate aesthetic elements and cultural tendencies, from early Romantic (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1817 novella Frankenstein is a warning against Western science’s unbridled and patriarchal pursuit of pure reason), to imperialist, eugenicist, heteropatriarchal, and queer science fiction in the 19th and 20th century, and towards today’s Indigenous futurisms, Dalit SF, Cli-fi, Gulf futurisms, and Afrofuturisms. These emergent genres exist in some tension with the administered norms of good sense and common sense that are both constructed and contested in the SF genre, in its ideologies of human mastery over equipment/technology, and its estranging attention ecologies. When sometimes SF breaks through a culture’s good sense and its common sense (as the bedrock of bourgeois habituation), when an insurgent SF attains a productive opacity in relation to both Western science and Platonic/Hegelian philosophy, when SF becomes a spacetime of radical healing and emancipatory prefiguration sparking untimely becomings in relation to our genocidal, ecocidal and extractivist present, when SF opens our imaginaries to the monstrosity of a future that is never finally nor fully given but always also potentializing, then the encounter with SF becomes ontological demanding new modes of attention. In our seminar we will experiment with making movement diagrams of these untimely becomings and these speculative and insurgent dystopias.
In the book from which this seminar borrows its name, Raymond Williams refers to three enduring revolutions that since the late 18th century have transformed everyday life in ‘advanced capitalist economies,’ the political, economic, and cultural revolutions. The unprecedented rise of capitalist metabolisms, mass consumer society and democratic institutions in Europe was doubled by the enslavement of African peoples, the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples, mass immiseration with entrenched inequality at ‘home’, and necropolitics and strategic genocide for ‘surplus’ populations in the colony … and in the ghettos, barrios, casbah, Black town, and Bantustans of settler and administrative colonialisms and apartheid a very different kind of revolution, tied to the continuous insurgency and lines of flight of enslaved, Indigenous, and colonized peoples, was lived and fought. Indeed, the economic, political, and cultural advance of the global north has been predicated on this monstrous doubling, the ontological double bind of anti-Blackness, indigenous genocide, and ecocidal accumulation for accumulation’s sake, very clearly mapped as a question of social reproduction of the commodity labor power and women’s unpaid labor in the home by Marxist feminists such as Silvia Federici and Elena Baglioni. Raymond Williams’s idea of the long, progressively more and more enlightened European revolution that would actualize the supposed promises of revolutionary Marxism has given way to the political ontologies of Fortress Europe, the AfD in Germany, Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Netanyahu in Israel, Modi in India, Milei in Argentina, and Farage’s Reform Party in the UK. Meanwhile, and not behind our backs, a generalised norm of Zionist racism, hegemonic throughout much of the global North and parts of the global South, has enabled the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people to not only proceed but to now implement a program for the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
It is in relation to the actuality of this our dystopic present that we would situate the experiments in hope (at their best) that we understand as constituting the genre of Science Fiction. We will read SF from the global south, focusing on Indian, Arab and Palestinian writers of science fiction and speculative fiction, putting them in conversation with Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, China Miéville, and Philip K. Dick (among others). We will simultaneously put these SF works also in relation to queer, feminist, Marxist, decolonial/postcolonial, and Black radical political and aesthetic/literary theory. Beginning with the work of Frederick Jameson on Dick and Le Guin, we will recursively consider throughout the seminar what the history and praxis of revolutionary Marxism, peasant and Indigenous insurgency, from maroonage to quilombismo, and glocal anarchism can teach us about SF’s long revolutions.
Readings:
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Marx, K. Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 24: “The So-Called Original Accumulation”
Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (selections)
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of science fiction (1978) (selections)
Hanah Arendt, On Revolution (1963) (selections)
Raymond Williams, selections from Culture and Society and The Long Revolution
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Introduction: https://www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/introduction.htm
Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (1979)
Selections from the Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF
Ghalayini Basma (2019) Introduction. In: Ghalayini B (ed.) Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba. Comma Press.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (2022)
Wynter, Sylvia, 2003. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The new centennial review, 3(3), pp. 257-337.
Sexton, Jared 2019. Affirmation in the dark: Racial Slavery and philosophical Pessimism. The Comparatist, 43(1), pp.90-111.
Selections from The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF
Selections from Ghalayini B (ed.) Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba.
Marx, K., from the Grundrisse, “The Fragment on Machines”
Selected Essays from The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2024)
William Morris, News from Nowhere (selections)
Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (selections)
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1978) (selections)
Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton (1976)
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (selections)
Frederic Jameson, et al, Dual Power and the Universal Army (selections)
Fred Moten, The Universal Machine (2018)
Phillip K. Dick, Selected short stories
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry of the Future (2020)
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Novels of Phillip K. Dick (selections)