Speculative fiction is concerned with imagining futures within and beyond capitalism, but it is also a genre in which the limits of those futures, and of art’s capacity to imagine them, are tested. In Immediacy, or the Style of Too-Late Capitalism (2023) Anna Kornbluh argues that immediacy is the defining category for understanding the present, frustrating art’s efforts to imagine things other than what is. In imagining possible futures, speculative fiction may focus on many different elements, including materials, ways of relating to (and dwelling on) the land, modes of economic organization, etc. But while speculative fiction’s treatment of such issues is built upon a critique of present practices, capitalism often forecloses the possibility of making meaning beyond itself. This panel will consider how recent speculative literature and cinema critique the materials and forms of contemporary capital, and also envision the capitalist, and post-capitalist future even as the possibilities for doing so become occluded. The session will have three 15 minute papers, allowing for an extended discussion. The speakers represent a variety of types of academic institution, and bring a broad range of expertise to this discussion, from contemporary American literature to African cinema.

Tatun Harrison-Turnbull considers plastic as an exemplary material of advanced capitalism, examining how it is depicted across three novels: Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), William Gibson's The Peripheral (2014), and Scott Guild's Plastic: A Novel (2024). Drawing on Heather Davis's account of plastic's promise for a 'world of sealed, perfect, clean, smooth abundance,' the paper attends to specific objects: garbage bags, landfill linings and animated plastic bodies. In Underworld, plastic's failure to contain decomposing waste becomes a catalyst for sexual arousal, producing eroticized encounters with what Julia Kristeva describes as the abject. In The Peripheral, plastics are explicitly entwined with petrochemical capital, facilitating further resource extraction and manipulation of local economies. In Plastic: A Novel, traumatic experiences result in the literal plasticization of the vulnerable body. The novels present a trajectory, from initial encounters with vast, expanding waste and persistent attempts to keep the refuse and detritus of modern life at bay, to the emergence of synthetic, plasticised beings. Together they trace a progressive disembodiment, as the products of capitalism permeate human bodies and their environments.

Steven Thomas shifts the focus to land use, analyzing African movies in which ghostly possession and haunting are speculative, otherworldly figures for engaging with the effects of capitalism. In the 2019 film Atlantics (dir. Mati Diop, Senegal), laborers are exploited by a real-estate developer in Dakar, Senegal, and drown in the Atlantic while trying to emigrate, only for their ghosts to inhabit their girlfriends who enact revenge on the corrupt developer. The paper compares Atlantics to two other movies: This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (dir. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, South Africa, 2019) and Ashkal (dir. Youssef Chebi, Tunisia, 2022) in order to situate speculative African cinema within a context of an ongoing dialogue among filmmakers about global capitalism and the speculative future of African economies. The South African movie depicts a community forced to relocate because the government plans to build a hydroelectric dam that will flood their land, which requires them to excavate their burial sites to transport the dead. Ashkal takes places after the Arab Spring in Tunisia, in which the political act of self-immolation takes on an undead quality against a backdrop of a speculative economy of ghostly real estate developments.

Kirill Veselkin asks: How does speculative fiction imagine economic life under conditions of systemic collapse? This paper argues that post-nuclear fiction functions as a site of economic experimentation, constructing models of value, exchange, and survival that reflect on capitalism’s limits and transformations. It focuses on Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb by Philip K. Dick (1965) and Termush by Sven Holm (1967) as experiments in economic organization. In Dick’s novel, economic life becomes contingent and decentralized, oriented toward survival rather than accumulation. In contrast, Holm’s Termush imagines a highly controlled survival economy, in which access to resources, care, and protection is tightly regulated, producing a stratified system defined by exclusion and managed scarcity. Rather than presenting a clean break from capitalism, these texts trace its transformation under extreme conditions. Veselkin argues that these fictional economies reveal capitalism’s capacity to persist by reorganizing crises into structure. Speculative fiction does not merely imagine alternative futures; it models how economic systems adapt and endure. Extinction no longer appears as a singular event but as an ongoing pressure that reorganizes value, labor, and social hierarchy.