History and Speculative Fiction

ISBN-13: 9783031422348 / Angielski

John L. Hennessey

Spis treści

Chapter 1. Introduction to History and Speculative Fiction: Essays in Honor of Gunlög Fur.- Chapter 2. Concurrences and the Planetary Emergency: Ursula K. Le Guin in the Capitalocene.- Chapter 3. Concurrent Whiteness: Science Fiction Film’s Close Encounters in Apartheid South Africa.- Chapter 4. Settler Colonial Solutions to Settler Colonial Problems: Settler Cinemas and the Crisis of Colonization of Outer Space.- Chapter 5. The Weirdness of White Strangers: Imaginations of Westerners in Southeast Asian Lore and Tradition.- Chapter 6. How [Not] to Run a Colony in the Distant Past and the Future.- Chapter 7. “I get to exist as a Black person in the world”: Bridgerton as Speculative Romance and Alternate History on Screen.- Chapter 8. Ted Chiang’s Counterphysical Stories and History of Science Pedagogy.- Chapter 9.The Dark Past of our Bright Future: Concurrent Histories of Star Trek: Voyager.- Chapter 10. The Wild Boar Never Strikes without Cause: Monstrous Hybrids, National Identity and Gender in the Horror Movie Chawu.- Chapter 11. Heritaging and the Use of History in Margit Sandemo’s The Legend of the Ice People.- Chapter 12. Shadowing the Brutality and Cruelty of Nature: On History and Human Nature in Princess Mononoke.- Chapter 13. Intervening in the Present through Fictions of the Future.- Chapter 14. Building a Kinship Society (short story).

O autorze

John L. Hennessey is a research fellow in the History of Ideas and Sciences at Lund University. He has published on global colonial history and the history of science in journals including Science in Context, History and Anthropology, French Colonial History, Settler Colonial Studies and Japan Review. 

Blurb

"Proposing a symbiosis between history and speculative fiction, this wide-ranging collection of essays asks how critical visions of alternative possibility can help us confront the dire legacies of colonialism, the specter of ecological catastrophe, and the burdens of systemic injustice. Historians and literary scholars alike should welcome this intervention."
—John Rieder, Professor Emeritus, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa

"This volume makes a substantial contribution to the scholarship on speculative fiction by illuminating how the concept of ‘concurrences,’ as articulated and theorized by Gunlög Fur, can serve as a valuable methodological tool in the study of speculative fiction. Drawing on a wide variety of cultural and historical sources, the essays in this volume offer useful case studies that render the concept of concurrences more comprehensible through concrete application."
—Cyrus R. K. Patell, New York University

This open access book demonstrates that despite different epistemological starting points, history and speculative fiction perform similar work in “making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange” by taking their readers on journeys through space and time. Excellent history, like excellent speculative fiction, should cause readers to reconsider crucial aspects of their society that they normally overlook or lead them to reflect on radically different forms of social organization. Drawing on Gunlög Fur’s postcolonial concept of concurrences, and with contributions that explore diverse examples of speculative fiction and historical encounters using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume provides new perspectives on colonialism, ecological destruction, the nature of humanity, and how to envision a better future.

John L. Hennessey is a research fellow in the History of Ideas and Sciences at Lund University. He has published on global colonial history and the history of science in journals including Science in Context, History and Anthropology, French Colonial History, Settler Colonial Studies and Japan Review.