The Colonial Fantasy of American Futurities

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

“The Colonial Fantasy of American Futurities” is interested in how the afterlives, narratives, and gendered practices of conquest and chattel slavery specifically, and racial and political violence generally, work as pedagogical and disciplining tools that fashions our imagining of possible futures. Jodi Byrd’s paper theorizes indigenous pessimism and its intimacy with “dystopic collapse” and “colonial fantasies”; Tiffany King’s reading of post-human, post-identitarian theories indicate that these philosophies redound on the gendered structures of antiblackness and settler occupation, to which Native and Black feminism offers a significant riposte; Chad Infante’s paper theorizes the dream of white transcendent and the emergence of the technocratic order; Marci Kwon’s paper centers on 1930’s anthropological art and the rise of media technology: Collectively, these papers indicate that technological innovation and scientific discovery is not merely coterminous but determined by slavery and conquest; and despite their “objective neutrality” continuously deploy antiblackness and indigenous primitiveness as foil for the false transcendence of white techno-imperialism. Futurist imaginings are forestalled in their flight by an anterior and present-continuous antiblack violence and occupation of Indian land and body that also serves as the opening between past, present, and future. The Black and Indian body always seem to linger at the frontier of all spaces—landed, oceanic, virtual, intergalactic. As white people such as Elon Musk begin to dream of Mars maybe it is time to remember James Baldwin’s words, “There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.” And the words of Helen Red Feather, “...these people are out to kill the whole world...Like my grandpa said, ‘tell them there’s land up on the moon they’ll be up there;’ sure enough, they went up there too. They’ll go and destroy that too.”

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Alexander Weheliye, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Technocraticisim and the Reinvention of Discovery - Chad B Infante, Northwestern University

• Fire and Flood: Settler Colonialism and Pessimistic Indigenous Futurisms - Jodi Byrd, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Techno-Primitivism and the Networked World - Marci Kwon, Stanford University

• Of ‘Decolonial Refusal’ and ‘Abolitionist Skepticism’ - Tiffany King, Georgia State University