TVA can’t capture networks of care

Temporal Geographies of the Speculative Undercommons The texts I examine herein posit critiques and alternatives to the speculations of globalization and interject radical revisions of progress narratives by attending to the markedly uneven accumulation of wealth of late capitalism. These counterspeculations tend to refuse strictly utopian or dystopian trajectories for technoculture, and they attempt to intervene in developmental teleologies by denaturalizing linear arrangements of time. These speculative fictions enact what Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd have called “the excavation and connection of alternative histories and their different temporalities that cannot be contained by the progressive narrative of Western developmentalism.”60 In the recent years of rampant speculation, late capitalism has insistently faced forward, driving Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History along, if not attempting to push it aside. When speculative futures run wild, excavation, historicization, and haunting become increasingly important modes of contingency to slow the storm of progress.61

The speculative fictions that I discuss come from a wide range of geographical contexts, each the site of some form of U.S. imperialism. Under the rubric of speculative fiction, various historical networks of affiliations (among Asian immigrants to the Caribbean and Mexico, Malaysian workers in Singapore, and Asian Brazilians who migrate for a second time to Southern California) are evoked that decenter the United States in the narrative of immigration to the Americas. The authors I examine posit the geographical loci of the Brazilian Amazon, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the Southeast Asian archipelago as speculative spaces, wherein histories of colonization and labor exploitation have produced markedly different relationships to Western science and technology. My project, therefore, suggests that these speculative fictions forge transnational affiliations by positing diasporic movement as a technology that works covalently with other intensified global flows. Migrant Futures considers speculative fictions that create transnational affiliations among communities of color that extend networks of care beyond national narratives of “risky subjects” and the calculations of global financialization.

I write at a moment when Asian Americanists and queer theorists alike have witnessed neoliberalism’s all-too-easy co-optation of rights-based advocacy work. Queer theorists have named a homonormativity, homonationalism, and queer liberalism that point to the limitations of social movements for legal recognition, one that ultimately locks the struggle into a juridical framework that demands the production of a fixed subject, tethered to the nation as its citizen.63 A similar dissatisfaction has emerged among Asian Americanists who not only continue to grapple with the inadequacy of a term that attempts to span an unwieldy range of disparate economic living and working conditions as well as diverse histories of migration and cultural negotiations but also grow impatient with the false prophecies of multicultural triumphalism, model minority achievements and beneficent refuge.64

Given these frustrations with neoliberal pluralism, it is heartening that the search for sociopolitical alternatives, or the will to “imagine otherwise” is still on, especially via a “critique of subjectification rather than the desire for subjectivity.”65 In her formulation of “subjectlessness, as a conceptual tool, [which] points to the need to manufacture ‘Asian American’ situationally,”66 Kandice Chuh discusses Lowe’s demonstration in Immigrant Acts of how the nation-state advances Enlightenment liberalism’s promises of citizenship as key to freedom even as capitalism requires differentiation and uneven distributions of power. Chuh indicates the limitations of rightsbased advocacy that is already orienting the battle toward a notion of the liberal citizen-subject who might find herself knee-deep in multiculturalism but still without much in the way of justice or equity.67 Chuh’s call for a redefinition of the political involves a departure from a nation-framed politics of inclusion and the positivism of identity politics. Calling critical attention to the rights-bearing subject as one tethered to Enlightenment ideals of citizenship and notions of universal subjectivity that emerged from a historically specific moment when slavery and other institutions excluded many from the category of the human, practitioners of queer theory and ethnic studies have pointed to the limitations of a politics that seeks recognition from a system fundamentally bound to prerequisties of normative belonging.68

Queer critiques, in particular, offer alternatives to the developmental and aspirational drives ascribed to heteronormative life courses. “Queer subcultures,” writes Jack Halberstam, “produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined INTRODUCTION - 19 according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”69 One of the reasons Halberstam looks to Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is to illustrate how “queers use space and time in ways that challenge conventional logics of development, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility.”70 Rather than seeing “no future” in systems driven by the clock time of sexual and social reproduction,71 Halberstam—along with Elizabeth Freeman, for starters—limns the political potentiality of queer failure, refusal, recalcitrance, withholding, and other techniques of disrupting what Benjamin calls “homogeneous empty time.”72 As “denizens of times out of joint,” queers unsettle the temporal ordering practices of “chrononormativity.”73

Freeman’s attention to the ways laboring bodies in the industrial era are “bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation” and tempered into normative rhythms of work and productivity directs us to consider the pivotal role temporality plays in producing modern subjectivities and marching out the tempo of modernity itself. The aspirational “chronobiopolitics” (to borrow Dana Luciano’s term)74 of neoliberal futurity capitalizes on subjective orientations toward flexible temporalities (such as the use of “flex time” to obscure the increased number of overtime hours) and perpetual self-improvement (with achievement badges for every stage of endlessly upgradeable life). Lauren Berlant’s notion of the impasse seems particularly apt as a refusal of this relentlessly anticipatory trajectory of time.75

In the chapters that follow, I emphasize the continuity across finance speculation’s harnessing of futurity and an older imperialist practice of leveraging white supremacist notions of modernity toward the same end of extracting profit. I draw on the work of historians of science and technology who trace how technoscience—from its material inventions to its ideological disseminations—has aided and abetted (and sought to rationalize) colonizing forces in the conquest, subjugation, and/or exploitation of other peoples.76 At the same time, rather than approaching science as a hegemonic force, my readings of speculative fictions emphasize the reciprocal, dialectical relationships in technocultural formation. I investigate how speculative fiction helps shift the conventional framework of “technology” to consider other types of knowledge-networks that cut across center-periphery models of scientific production. My attention to a more inclusive account of scientific practice is motivated by an effort to recognize the often invisible labor that supports scientific enterprises and dis- covery claims. From the explorer’s indigenous translator to the factory worker who assembles laboratory instruments, the production of scientific knowledge has been contingent upon a labor force that takes a much more central role in the speculative fictions I analyze in this project. Labor becomes more visible in these narratives as part of more cooperative models of intellectual, and material, production that emphasize cross-class, interethnic collaborations and transnational circulations of knowledge. I argue that speculative fiction can foster alternative forms of connectivity that exceed and defy the privatizing logics of nation, corporation, and nuclear family. The fictions I examine formulate innovative structures of belonging and possible coalition building across conventional differences that emerge from alternative genealogies of speculative fiction, including 1960s Latin American magical realism, Caribbean carnival, Afro futurism, manga, anime, Chinese folklore, and rasquachismo. These paraliterary genealogies call our attention to the significance of imaginative literary forms that arise out of paracapitalist contexts and therefore might provide even more grounds for imagining the world beyond capitalist realism.

Speculation is the ultimate starting point for creating ideal futures – prefer our FW Lothian 19 [Alexis Lothian is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Core Faculty in the Design Cultures & Creativity Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. “Old Futures Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility.” Book. NYU Scholarship Online. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Accessed July 11 2023.]

Futures imagined through engagements with history’s structural ex- clusions tell us much both about dominant ways of thinking about time and about how we might create alternatives. Speculative imaginings that have not been encoded into the everyday realities of the science fiction present help to demonstrate that the future need not be closed down into familiar, straight lines. The lingering presences and possibilities of past futures open possibilities for thinking and living the present in differ- ent, deviant ways. If a forward-oriented narrative of historical develop- ment signifies the time of capitalism and colonialism, then the time of the colonized, excluded, and othered is most frequently to be found in the past.66 The temporalities of ghosts, the supernatural, and myth are those that discourses of European Enlightenment seek to associate with childhood, alterity, unseriousness, times gone by. Bliss Cua Lim writes about how the cinematic fantastic “translates” between what Wal- ter Benjamin called homogeneous, empty time and other temporalities that are supposed to have been wiped out but that surface as ghosts;67 Avery Gordon’s sociology of haunting similarly describes the perpetu- ation of the past in the present and the impossibility of ever leaving it behind.68 The old futures this project follows suggest that technological, scientific, and reproductive futurisms can exceed the homogenization of time. Appearing in modes both desirable and discomfiting, these are fu- tures for sexual, gendered, racialized ways of being that dominant tem- poral politics have tried and failed to eradicate. They deviate both from the conventional timelines of familial norms and from the successes and failures associated with life under capitalism. During the time between this project’s beginnings and its comple- tion, the logics and politics of speculative fiction have become more central to the worlds of critical theory. This has not so much changed the relationship between theory and genre studies as it has begun to suggest new ways of thinking speculation, a term that applies to finance capital as much as to possibilities and alternatives.69 Speculative theory is work that grapples with the dense futurity of the present, altering concepts of reality even as the real itself is continually cast into ques- tion. In 2012, Jayna Brown and I gathered a dossier for Social Text’s online Periscope on a theme of “Speculative Life.” Our introduction ex- presses this mode: To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining. And, as Ernst Bloch said, it may be in our imaginative worlds that we catch glimpses of utopian possibility beyond our present paradigm. At a moment when so many have been strug- gling to enact alternatives to the depressing world produced by Wall Street’s speculative failures, we need to practice imagining now more than ever.70 Speculation in this modality is both the prospect of temporal elsewheres and a logic that enforces capitalism’s here and now, through the domi- nance of financial speculation. Speculative critique, as Brown and I articulated it and as I seek to extend here, embraces the potentiality of utopias, forward-looking timelines, and possibilities of radically different and better elsewheres. It also acknowledges the embeddedness of such imagination in the often dismal logics of the present’s inequalities. This structure underlies the queer possibility inherent in the cultural politics of speculative fiction, which provides tools for vernacular theorizing about the politics of the future. In their production of alternatives and deviations from and/or within predetermined progress narratives, returning to the possibilities embedded in old futures may allow such narratives to be occupied dif- ferently. Old futures insist that we acknowledge the extent to which temporal norms are not easy to repudiate; they force us to linger over processes of articulating what other ways of being in the world, anti- futurist lives, or non-normative temporalities might feel like. In writing scholarship that seeks to be in dialogue with its political, cultural, or technological moment, it is difficult to resist the pressures, the inspirations and disappointments, of trying to keep up with a rapidly moving target. One begins a project focused on what is happening now, galvanized by the possible futures it portends, then finds that social and technological shifts have rendered one’s insights out of date before the first draft of writing is completed. This book’s emphasis on old futures offers, I hope, a way to sidestep such anxieties, lingering instead with the futures of the past and their effects in multiple presents. Attending to old futures might suggest some ways to redistribute the future in the present.