Papers by Hugh C O'Connell
The MIT Press eBooks, Dec 20, 2022
Modern Fiction Studies, 2012
Cr-the New Centennial Review, 2013
This special issue on the British SF Boom is dedicated to IainM. Banks, whoseworks haveinspiredal... more This special issue on the British SF Boom is dedicated to IainM. Banks, whoseworks haveinspiredallofus todaretobeutopianaswellascritical intheexaminationofour futures, our pasts, and our presents. Anauthorwho stridently believed that “altruism is, arguably, our most noble belief, our most decent and human and humane drive, ourbest instinct, . . . onebornoutof strength,notweakness; outof confidence,not fear; out of security, not insecurity,” even if that core of humanity was to be most readily found in his spectacularmachines.
Science Fiction Film and Television, Feb 1, 2020
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Sep 1, 2016
Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemon... more Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes. In this light,Lagoonsubverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues thatLagoonutilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SFnovumitself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be seen as a placeholder for the unknowable, unforeseeable eruption of a radical, historical event: the reawakening of a seemingly structurally unrepresentable anticolonial subjectivity that is pitched against the ideological confines of the neoliberal present.
Extrapolation, Mar 1, 2020
This essay examines Tade Thompson’s 2016 novel Rosewater as an exploration of political and envir... more This essay examines Tade Thompson’s 2016 novel Rosewater as an exploration of political and environmental apocalypse, and what, invoking Jacques Derrida by way of Walter Benjamin, I am going to arg...
Routledge eBooks, Nov 28, 2019
The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020, 2022
The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, 2019
In order to delimit this expansive and growing body of SF, then, this chapter primarily considers... more In order to delimit this expansive and growing body of SF, then, this chapter primarily considers twenty-first-century Global South SF from Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Rather than offering a comprehensive overview of each one of these locations, it highlights key thematic and historical points of reference for the development of Global South SF, as well as significant authors and anthologies, with particular attention paid to Africa as the largest growth area. This approach is in no way meant to efface the very real social, historical, cultural, and political differences that proliferate within each region, let alone across them. Instead, it is meant to highlight the strategies that this wider body of Global South SF employs in its often-fraught relationship to the advent of global modernity. What unites the SF of the Global South perhaps more than other traits is its decentering of the West as the singular site and progenitor of futurity. Global South SF places its own original and striking futures – utopian, dystopian, ambiguous, and/or ambivalent – at the center of its SF worldbuilding.
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2019
What happens to speculative fiction (sf) under a perpetual winter of financial crisis? If, as Joh... more What happens to speculative fiction (sf) under a perpetual winter of financial crisis? If, as John Rieder (2008) and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (2003) have argued, sf’s advent is coterminous with and ideologically pinned to the rise of imperialism, its development also takes place from within the regime of productive, Fordist capitalism. Sf’s technological novums—from the Nautilus to the time machine, faster than light engines to robots, quantum computing to nanotechnology—bare this imprint of production’s dominance. But what happens to sf as the mode of production shifts from the material to the immaterial, from the dominance of the commodity form to the dominance of
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2016
Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemon... more Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes. In this light,Lagoonsubverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues thatLagoonutilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SFnovumitself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be ...
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2012
Most criticism of Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has concentrate... more Most criticism of Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has concentrated on the pessimistic aspects of the text, highlighting the failures of postcolonial nationalist movements, and ranking Armah’s work “among the bleakest and most disenabling texts to be produced during the first decade of independence in Africa” (Lazarus, “(Re)turn to the People” in The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, ed. Charles Cantalupo [Trenton, NJ: African World, 1995]). This article contests such readings and works towards the recovery of a latent, weak utopianism that works similarly to Derrida’s conception of messianicity without messianism and the promise for the event yet to-come. Instead of viewing the novel as an historical account of the failures of postcolonial nationalism, this weak-utopian reading privileges the promise and possibility that arise from the text itself. Thus the article underscores the need for a negative dialectical or weak-utopian politics, recognizing, in Adorno’s words, the “consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately [ … ], the creation of a reconciled non-identity” (55).
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2012
Utopian Studies, 2019
ABSTRACT This article reconsiders Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 film Bamako as a formal example... more ABSTRACT This article reconsiders Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 film Bamako as a formal example of sf predicated upon an African-utopian impulse that intervenes in the political closure of capitalist realism and the ontology of debt perpetuated by structural adjustment programs. Due to the radically unlikely events of the film's narrative, in which international financial institutions can be put on trial by ordinary citizens, this article argues that Bamako is best understood as an sf “alternate cosmology” narrative. Moreover, given the pseudo-utopian ideologies of neoliberal and neo-imperial enterprises, this article examines how Bamako operates as the preconceptual figuration of African-utopianism itself. To do so, it first raises a pseudo-African-utopianism in order to negate it and point the way toward the structurally unenunciable, inconceivable content of a radical African-utopianism. As such, Bamako needs to be read as both a desire for and a preconceptual harbinger of African-utopianism and situated alongside the rise of African sf more broadly.
Extrapolation 61, 1-2, 2020
This essay examines Tade Thompson’s 2016 novel Rosewater as an exploration of political and envi... more This essay examines Tade Thompson’s 2016 novel Rosewater as an exploration of political and environmental apocalypse, and what, invoking Jacques Derrida by way of Walter Benjamin, I am going to argue for as a weak utopianism: a utopicity without utopianism. Intervening in a number of related discourses – African sf, African futurism, and African-utopianism – what I find of most interest, as my title suggests, is the way that Thompson’s novel wrestles with futurity at a time when so many potential futures seem to be cancelled or annulled by the twinned forces of economic globalization and the Anthropocene.
Legacies of Blade Runner, A Special Issue of Science Fiction Film and Television, 2020
This essay examines how the intervention of Anthropocene theory into the Blade Runner storyworld ... more This essay examines how the intervention of Anthropocene theory into the Blade Runner storyworld comes into conflict with the aesthetics of the franchise. On one hand, the world of Blade Runner 2049 is ravaged by climate change, creating an inhospitable environment. On the other, the film profoundly disavows this new anthropogenic condition by foregrounding the iconic designs of the first film to counterintuitively produce a neon
world of technological consumption, reproductive futurity and human perfectibility. The economic franchise logic that demands uncritical repetition of elements directly derived from the much earlier original film in order to build brand continuity for its core audience produces a fundamental tension between the franchise storyworld (a known narrative past that leads to a predictable narrative future) and the Anthropocene world (an unseen and unsettling event that has resulted in an unpredictable present and unknown future). The logics of inheritance and reproduction that fuel both franchise and 2049’s plot thus intersect, producing a narrative drive and visual register that actively disavows the conditions of
catastrophic climate change that the film’s worldbuilding otherwise makes visible. And it is this contradiction that makes 2049 truly of and for the Anthropocene as we know it; it is hard built into its ontology yet ignored at the level of human action.
Legacies of Blade Runner: A Special Issue of Science Fiction Film and Television, 2020
A critical introduction to the Legacies of Blade Runner Special Issue of Science Fiction Film and... more A critical introduction to the Legacies of Blade Runner Special Issue of Science Fiction Film and Television 13.1.
Utopian Studies: Articulating Race and Utopia, ed. by Edward Chan and Patricia Ventura, 2019
This article reconsiders Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako as a formal example of sf predic... more This article reconsiders Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako as a formal example of sf predicated upon an African-utopian impulse that intervenes in the political closure of capitalist realism and the ontology of debt perpetuated by structural adjustment programs. Due to the radically unlikely events of the film’s narrative, in which international financial institutions can be put on trial by ordinary citizens, this article argues that Bamako is best understood as an sf “alternate cosmology” narrative. Moreover, given the pseudoutopian ideologies of neoliberal and neo imperial enterprises, this article examines how Bamako operates as the preconceptual figuration of African-utopianism itself. To do so, it first raises a pseudo-African-utopianism in order to negate it and point the way toward the structurally unenunciable, inconceivable content of a radical African utopianism. As such, Bamako needs to be read as both a desire for and a preconceptual harbinger of Africanutopianism and situated alongside the rise of African sf more broadly.
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Papers by Hugh C O'Connell
world of technological consumption, reproductive futurity and human perfectibility. The economic franchise logic that demands uncritical repetition of elements directly derived from the much earlier original film in order to build brand continuity for its core audience produces a fundamental tension between the franchise storyworld (a known narrative past that leads to a predictable narrative future) and the Anthropocene world (an unseen and unsettling event that has resulted in an unpredictable present and unknown future). The logics of inheritance and reproduction that fuel both franchise and 2049’s plot thus intersect, producing a narrative drive and visual register that actively disavows the conditions of
catastrophic climate change that the film’s worldbuilding otherwise makes visible. And it is this contradiction that makes 2049 truly of and for the Anthropocene as we know it; it is hard built into its ontology yet ignored at the level of human action.
world of technological consumption, reproductive futurity and human perfectibility. The economic franchise logic that demands uncritical repetition of elements directly derived from the much earlier original film in order to build brand continuity for its core audience produces a fundamental tension between the franchise storyworld (a known narrative past that leads to a predictable narrative future) and the Anthropocene world (an unseen and unsettling event that has resulted in an unpredictable present and unknown future). The logics of inheritance and reproduction that fuel both franchise and 2049’s plot thus intersect, producing a narrative drive and visual register that actively disavows the conditions of
catastrophic climate change that the film’s worldbuilding otherwise makes visible. And it is this contradiction that makes 2049 truly of and for the Anthropocene as we know it; it is hard built into its ontology yet ignored at the level of human action.
Full Text available through Project Muse
“Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction” joins a number of recent attempts to think through this epoch-defining condition by examining the relationship of the speculative financial turn to cultural production.1 Its signal contribution is its focus on the genres of speculative fiction; the volume’s organizing principle is that speculative fiction, as a particularly modern form, has often (if not always) been attuned to the speculative and fantastical nature of capitalist economics. Like many such endeavors, this issue launched from a seemingly straightforward question: What is the relation between the speculative of speculative finance and the speculative of speculative fiction? Many contributors echo Steven Shaviro’s argument that speculative finance works to delimit the future by arresting uncertainty, while speculative fiction, in contrast, embraces the alterity of futurity as a riposte to finance’s predations on the future (Shaviro 2015, 11). Nonetheless, a straightforward answer to this initial question remains elusive. In part, this is due to the transformation of sociopolitical and aesthetic conditions wrought by the financial turn itself, resulting in what we can today, without rhetorical bluster, simply term “the age of speculative finance.”
Contents:
Introduction: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction
David M. Higgins and Hugh C. O’Connell
Promissory Futures: Reality and Imagination in Finance and Fiction
Sherryl Vint
The Realism of Speculation: Contemporary Speculative Fiction as Immanent Critique of Finance Capitalism
Mathias Nilges
A Glorious Mythology of Loss: Speculative Finance in Alan Moore’s Jerusalem
David M. Higgins
The Great Dividuation [A Theory-Fiction]
Joel E. Mason, Michael Hornblow, anique yael vered
Future Fluctuations: Economy, Exchange, and Subjectivity in Recent English-Language Speculative Fiction
Mark Soderstrom
The Novums of Fiscalmancy: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction in Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House
Hugh C. O’Connell
Frank Herbert's Dune and the Financialization of Heroic Masculinity
Joshua Pearson
Apocalypse, Inc.: Incorporating the Environment into the Boom/Bust Cycle in Fin-de-Siècle Science Fiction
Steve Asselin
“Trust Me”: Volatile Markets in Twilight and The Hunger Games
Meghanne Flynn and Sarah Hardstaff
Currencies of Control: Black Mirror, In Time, and the Monetary Policies of Dystopia
Joe Conway
Speculative Finance and Network Temporality in Duncan Jones’s Moon and Source Code
David P. Pierson
Of Time Loops and Derivatives: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and the Logic of the Futures Market
Marcia Klotz