By considering settings both narrative and geographical beyond humanist scales and eschatologies, this panel tracks the racial signifiers and racializing tropes of human and civilizational end -- garbage dumps, migrant camps, toxic landscapes -- that have, over the last two decades, forced us to question the framework and form of apocalypse as we have inherited it. In place of the totalizing plunge into the ecstasy of the unthinkable proposed by traditional conceptions of the apocalypse, these works call for attention to the ways in which the local and the disparate inflect and are inflected by the universalizing energies of end-times narratives; to the instability of the category of "human" as it is called into question by the systematized denial of human rights to racialized Others; and to the transfer of racial signification onto larger objects and systems that stand in for the human future. This panel aims to go beyond the caution that we must avoid discounting the history and historicity of race within an ultimate horizon of ecological apocalypse; we also aim to focus on the specific ways that the aesthetic moves of the deindustrial film, recent migrant narratives, and contemporary climate fiction refigure racial difference within varying spatial frames and temporal scales generated by critiques of the human.
In “The Standstill Progressive: David Gordon Green’s George Washington,” Benjamin Widiss will discuss Green’s debut film, George Washington, which takes place in the pitted-out landscape of an unnamed post-industrial Southern city. The film is loosely organized around the opposed poles of a railroad depot and a dump. While materials and goods move in and out of town, the characters apparently cannot. The film presents itself under the sign of that most fundamental of American myths—that anyone can grow up to be president, as one of its impoverished adolescent protagonists prophesies he will—even as it forecloses not just mobility but even a dependable sense of futurity to its characters. At the same time, it yokes updated versions of the avant-garde filmmaking strategies of the French Nouvelle Vague and 1970s American independent cinema to a purportedly post-racial approach to casting the non-professionals who play most of the roles. Setting progressive ideology and aesthetic commitments against a digressive gaze and a narrative of near-complete stasis, then, the film challenges viewers to square intellectual, optical, and affective responses, and ultimately somatic ones as well. The film renders the spectator’s own body into an exegetical tool, demanding that it be parsed simultaneously along the axes of both universality and the extreme particularity.
In “Spaces of Stasis: Migrants without Mobility in The Jungle and Exit West,” Nasia Anam will examine the representation of the migrant encampment in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, and Joe Murphy and Joe Robinson’s play, The Jungle, set in the Calais encampment that was destroyed in 2016. The paper posits that in these works, the encampment is rendered as a space in which the migrant is denied mobility, thus demonstrating that access to mobility has been entirely decoupled from the subject position of the migrant. Indeed getting "stuck" as it were is more characteristic of the kinds of migration that appear to threaten the Global North now than the cosmopolitan fluidity that marked discussions of globalization in the twentieth century. And yet when the encampment begins to take on the qualities of a functioning city, it is promptly destroyed by the hegemonic state that denies the migrants seeking refuge and asylum citizenship and humanity. The fear of reverse colonization is what guides the hegemonic state's simultaneous refusal to grant contemporary migrants mobility and legitimacy and refusal to let the migrants form autonomous para-city spaces. The hegemonic (European) state perceives itself as being colonized by racial, ethnic, and religious others as the migrant encampment begins to take on the qualities of a permanent space of human inhabitation.
In “Archives of the Future Human,” Charles Tung examines contemporary climate fiction’s anxieties about storing and stockpiling the knowledge and resources necessary to survive apocalyptic societal collapse or to reboot civilization. As in science-fiction fantasies of the post-racial future, many cli-fi texts project human survival as possible only after an overcoming of the mere signs of human difference. Moreover, the longer timespans on which these fictions rely seem to promise a distension of the medium-scale sociological category and reality of race to the point that it disappears into the broader category of humanity as such. However, in choosing materials for such archives and in representing the state of humanity during or after apocalypse, racial signification migrates from the body to storage facility, from person to setting, from social group to temporal horizon itself. By exploring the Library of the Long Now and novels such as Claire Vaye Watkin’s Gold Fame Citrus and Paulo Bacigalupi’s Water Knife, this paper will track the way the idea and scale of race shifts and gets written into longer projections of the human future.