The Marxist Literary Group invites three scholars to spotlight how Marxist analysis informs the expanding field of speculative fiction studies. Speculative fiction is an umbrella term that covers modes of irrealism like science fiction, fantasy, the fantastic, the gothic, and others, popularly used in rebuttal to the harsh genre boundaries drawn up by Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). His book is perhaps the best-known example of the longstanding intersection between Marxism and science fiction, but its tendency to dismiss other modes of speculation as unreflexive has drawn fierce criticism since its publication. Later works, like Mark Bould and China Miéville’s Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (2009) advocate for a broadened understanding of the boundaries of science fiction and its intersections with Marxist thought but still implicitly privilege science fiction over other speculative genres. But recent years have seen an explosion of studies on global speculative fictions which have demonstrated that the previously held boundaries of science fiction – and its privileged relationship to Marxist thought over other non-realist genres – are unsustainable. Works like Ashleigh Harris’s Afropolitanism and the Novel (2020) on African speculative writing, as well as the 2018 special issues of Paradoxa and Latin American Literature Today on the genre in Latin America, form part of a larger movement bringing to the fore how the field of speculative literature, science fictions included, has always been marked by a productive hybridity between non-realist modes of writing.

In a collaborative effort to contribute to this reshaping of the field, scholars of anglophone literatures are reevaluating our understanding of the relationship between different irrealist genres, rethinking the traditionally separate genealogies of genres like the fantastic, fantasy, the gothic, or the Weird. As a result, we bring previously unseen unifying threads to the fore, revealing common political commitments among types of irrealist literature typically siloed into separate academic conversations. The goal of this panel is to highlight one of those threads: a shared commitment to Marxist thought. To this end, we have invited three scholars to share twelve-minute papers rethinking different genres – the gothic, the alternate history novel, and the New Weird – in light of these new understandings of the relationship between Marxism and speculative literatures.

Joshua Gooch begins by resituating the gothic within speculative fictions, arguing that the longstanding relation between capitalism and the gothic results from the structure of the genre. Beginning with Marx’s references to the gothic, Gooch makes the provocative claim that the genre provides a code to articulate the emergence of an economic system predicated on market exchange, the disfiguring exploitation of wage labor, and the temporal problems unleashed by the dependency of the accumulation of wealth on the disconnection of use and exchange. He then discusses how this generic structure persists into the present through analysis of Zombi Child (2019) and In Fabric (2018), arguing that the contemporary gothic evokes bodily effects and affects that uncover shifts in capitalist exploitation.

Gunner Taylor will bring similar structural patterns to the fore through an analysis of the contemporary alternate history novel, arguing that it does not, as has been traditionally assumed, emerge solely from science fiction. Rather, through analysis of The Intuitionist (1999) and The Plot Against America (2004), Taylor contends that the contemporary alternate history novel has roots in a current of postmodern thinking that interrogates how popular genres shape our understanding of our personal and national histories. These novels do so, he suggests, by depicting individuals placing themselves in alternate American pasts. He suggests that by creating alternate Americas that operate under different generic rules, these novels destabilize triumphalist, racialized narratives of capitalist progress.

Finally, Elif Sendur will examine the little-studied relationship between the New Weird and Marxist thought by analyzing their shared understanding of the mode of production as an ontologically determining form. She examines ontological space in Jeff VanderMeer's early works, including Finch (2009) and the Area X trilogy (2014), and Octavia Butler's Bloodchild (1995), along with scenes from Yorgos Lanthimos' 2015 film Lobster, claiming that New Weird opens up the possibility of glimpsing beyond the capitalist mode of production by creating affective disturbances in the way the normal, the orderly, and the possible is imagined.

In examining how Marxist thought operates in these three speculative genres, these presentations open space for further discussion of the ways in which Marxist political commitments continue to shape the expanding field of speculative fiction studies.