Canavan, Gerry

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of11-1-2012History 1, 2, 3Gerry CanavanMarquette University, gerard.canavan@marquette.eduPublished version. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3 (November 2012): 375-376. DOI. © 2012De Pauw University. Used with permission.375SYMPOSIUM ON SF AND GLOBALIZATIONflow across complex landscapes of independence and in-dependence. And (ifHardt, Negri, Žižek, and Poster are right) they—alongside such Arab-Spring-anticipating works as Egyptian Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia (2009) andAmerican Muslim G. Willow Wilson’s Cairo (2009)—tell us a lot about theglobalized (that is, the already monetized, appropriated, and accumulated) futurewe can expect to inhabit in the auto-colonies.—Mark Bould, University of theWest of EnglandHistory 1, 2, 3. In “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (Critical Inquiry[35.2, Winter 2009]: 197-222), Dipesh Chakrabarty offers an interpretiveframework for apprehending the material and ideological conditions of a fullyglobalized world. History, he writes, has traditionally been imagined as aprogressivist Grand Narrative called the “history of civilization”—or, even moregrandiosely, “the history of the human race”—in which the everyday lives ofactual humans fall away in favor of oblique social forces that reveal themselvesto us as destiny (201-203). (For sf studies, of course, the natural reference hereis the view-from-nowhere of Asimovian psychohistory.) Intervening against thisEurocentric faux-universalism, contemporary postcolonial theory has insistedinstead on counter-histories that are characterized by multiplicity and difference;in this theoretical revision, globality collapses back into locality, and humanbeings consequently re-emerge as persons—especially the disenfranchised andthe dispossessed, those who have continually been made to suffer in the nameof “progress.”The first dialectic, then, is the familiar one between center and periphery—between a metropole that imagines itself as the pinnacle of human achievement,and the disparate localities that have been denied inclusion in this totality. ButChakrabarty complicates this picture with the addition of a third history thatexists alongside the first two: geologic time, species time. This is the momentof the Anthropocene, when the human race discovers itself to be an even morehyperbolic universal than the partisans of the Grand Narrative could have everdreamed: an immense worldwide “geological agent,” whose collective actionsare reshaping the coordinates of the natural world (208-209). In an era ofcascading, ever-escalating environmental crises, “species time” reveals itself tous as a radical destabilization of the usual stakes of human history—indeed, asa kind of a sublime terror.As Ursula Heise has noted in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: TheEnvironmental Imagination of the Global (2008), since the 1960s and 1970squestions of the global have crystallized around a particular series of science-fictional visual images that, while familiar and perhaps unremarkable today,were revelatory and even shattering in their moment: Soviet and especiallyNASA images of the Earth as viewed from space, chief among them the“Earthrise” photograph obtained by Apollo 8 in 1968 and the “Blue Marble”photograph taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. In these images of the global totality,we find all three of Chakrabarty’s histories at work at once. “Blue Marble” and“Earthrise” signify the culmination of the progressivist narrative of humancivilization (History 1)—but their shared photographic focus on the AfricanThis content downloaded  on Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:58:37 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions376 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 39 (2012)continent simultaneously reminds us of the radical particularity of that history,its costs and exclusions (History 2), while the sublime vision of the whole globeinevitably points us towards the radical fragility of our ecosystem and thedestructive environmental consequences of global capitalism (History 3). FromOctavia E. Butler’s PARABLES novels (1993-1998) to Kim Stanley Robinson’sMARS trilogy (1992-1995) to James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) to MargaretAtwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl(2009) to Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) to Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010),and on and on, the Blue Marble photographs perform in miniature the cognitivework of sf in a time of globalization: to register, interrogate, and reconcile thesethree very different histories, to uncover lurking behind the false triumphalismof History 1 other sorts of histories, and other kinds of globes. (Sincere thanksto Ian Baucom for his contributions to these thoughts.)—Gerry Canavan,Marquette UniversityWelcome to the Vegas Pyongyang. Recently I visited Las Vegas for the firsttime. During my brief stay, I explored the Strip and its famously themed spaces.An afternoon drifting through the arcades and tourist traps of Vegas’s ResortCorridor became a kaleidoscopic collage of hyper-stylized impressions of localesaround the world—from Polynesia to Rome’s Trevi district. While each “locale”was conspicuously inauthentic, what remained uncannily authentic were thesymptoms of globalization Vegas induced in me. To wander the Strip was toexperience Vegas as a city-sized work of science fiction through which manyelusive aspects of globalization became kinesthetically intelligible and intimatelyfirst-person. Finding “Mandalay Beach” yards from a decapitated statue ofLenin guarding “Red Square,” I felt the teleportal effects of “collapsingdistance.” Watching species native to the Indo-Pacific swim inside anextravagant “Shark Reef Aquarium” remote from natural water sources, I grewa new sense—a glass-and-concrete sense—of Earth’s finite resources. Roamingvast indoor acreage busy with voices speaking foreign languages, navigatingclock-deprived malls reminiscent of shops in an international airport, I lost trackof local time while somehow amassing a surplus of stray time-zones that jammedmy circadian rhythm. Artificial jetlag descended upon me. The next day, departing McCarran International (itself an extension of theStrip), I fell asleep during takeoff and dreamed of a spectral addition to Vegas’scityscape: a replica of the 105-story Ryugyong. Located in the capital of whatis arguably the world’s last communist state, Pyongyang’s “Hotel of Doom”(additional epithets: “Death Star,” “Ghostscraper”) is strikingly evocative of analien rocketship. In my dream, Ryugyong’s silhouette was eerily at home amongthe Stratosphere, “Camelot,” Luxor Pyramid, “Eiffel Tower,” and otherlandmarks anthologized in the skyline’s eclectic jumble of icons. At the hotel’sentrance stood female traffic “greeters” chiming “Welcome to the VegasPyongyang!” while directing visitors with flawlessly choreographed precision.Inside: everywhere an ambiance of simulated luxury and dissonant facades.Portraits glorifying “Dear Leader” adorned the walls of Starbucks. Billboardsadvertised the hotel’s signature spectacle: “Arirang Mass Gymnastics!” LuridThis content downloaded  on Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:58:37 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

History 1, 2, 3

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History 1, 2, 3

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