Richard Powers's Bewilderment (2021) tackles what Amitav Ghosh calls "the Great Derangement," a collective indifference toward environmental crises, alongside neuroscience to illustrate the ghostly connection between humans and nonhuman others. Through the lens of Jacques Derrida's hauntology, this article argues that Powers represents the Great Derangement as a cognitive failure to tune into what I call the frequency of animacy, a frequency through which life speaks to humans. Powers uses the spectrality of a given frequency to illuminate the epistemological continuity between a certain numbness in Western life and the Great Derangement. Through the connection, Powers portrays a possibility for people in the anthropocentric capitalist world to tune into said frequency and listen to life itself.
As the #OctaviaKnew hashtag proliferated on social media, the lauding of Octavia E. Butler's Parable series spurred feminist and de-colonial works concerning what humanity must learn from the novel's religion, Earthseed. At the same time, Terasem-a new-age, technology-worshipping religion borrowing the namesake of Earthseed-promised deliverance to its believers through conjectured advances in computing intelligence and space travel. This paper grapples with seemingly opposing ideologies simultaneously laying claim to the same belief system. Archival analysis of Octavia E. Butler's papers is employed to reckon with representational complexity concerning the evolution of the human, posthuman destiny, and space travel in the novels.
In this paper, the authors analyze the process of making a filmic artwork called Time Animals (2021) as a long-term collaboration across the disciplines of art, science, and science and technology studies (STS). Joining a growing literature that situates such collaborations as part of an emerging discipline of art, science, and technology studies (ASTS), the authors explore some of the methodologies and institutional contexts that facilitated the production of this creative artwork inspired by the science of chronobiology. Following John Law and Wen-yuan Lin's notion of a "knowing space," the authors interrogate the ways practitioners from different disciplinary backgrounds collaborated to make an art commission inspired by chronobiological experiments-tracing the frictions and often spontaneous synchronicities of an exploratory research project occurring over many years and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. They argue that bringing STS into art-science collaborations creates space for artists to "play seriously" with science. The production of the paper itself also represents an experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration. Jointly authored by an STS scholar, a science communication scholar, and a visual artist, it draws on the approaches and languages of each of these disciplines to forge a critical reflection on ASTS in practice.
This interview essay between Larissa Lai and Edmond Y. Chang is based on the closing seminar presented online as part of the 2022-23 Maria Zambrano Fellowship Online Public Lecture Series entitled "Insurgencies: Speculative Fiction, Cultural Organizing, and Utopian Thought" for the University of Huelva in Spain. In the essay, Lai and Chang discuss the critical and political possibilities of speculative literature and media, in particular from BIPOC and LGBTQ artists and writers, and frame out working definitions of Asianfuturism, which re-imagines and "re-valences the racist modes of techno-Orientalism or short-circuits them to find other routes to the future in which [Asian identities and bodies] have presence, agency and perhaps even humanity."
This article examines the fantasies of species revival through the lens of William Burroughs's literary ecomodernism-a characterization tied to his practice of the cut-up, and expanded through a reading of his late novella Ghost of Chance (1991). The first section traces Burroughs's connection to the interdisciplinary cultures surrounding the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-71) and CoEvolution Quarterly (1974-85). The second reads de-extinction's dreams of genetic agency through the lens of the cut-up, which helps to understand the implications of DNA's linguistic analogy for species revival. The final section reads Ghost of Chance as a satirically misanthropic vision of species resurrection.
This essay considers the de-extinction prospects for Aotearoa New Zealand's endemic group of avian megaherbivores. It examines a wide range of narratives concerned with the moa's extinction, possible endurance, and potential resurrection, focusing on the way these multispecies histories define prehuman baselines, claim and contest founding myths, and promise restorative futures. It considers the fraught implications of extinction and de-extinction in a settler nation still negotiating a history of colonial dispossession and the terms of bicultural sovereignty.
This essay criticizes the neocolonialist narrative modes that Colossal Biosciences uses to promote its Alaskan mammoth de-extinction and rewilding project. Drawing on the scholarship of Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi), it argues that the company deploys a series of crisis-oriented stories to position itself as the savior of an environment on the brink of annihilation. First, the essay elaborates the history of these stories in Alaska, demonstrating that they have fueled interest in and support for numerous harmful scientific and industrial projects. Then, it examines their manifestations in Colossal's various promotional materials. The essay concludes by describing an ongoing-and less crisis-oriented-rewilding project involving wood bison in Shageluk, Alaska.
This essay examines the convergence between de-extinction science and transhumanist philosophy, arguing that the technologies and ideologies driving the revival of extinct species are increasingly aligned with transhumanist aspirations to overcome mortality. While de-extinction is often framed in terms of ecological restoration and conservation, the essay contends that it is also imbricated within a broader biotechnological project aimed at life extension, species enhancement, and the indefinite postponement of death. Drawing on critical theory, science studies, and existential philosophy, the essay interrogates the ontological and ethical status of de-extinct animals as entities situated between conservation and invention, between mortal and postmortal existence. It questions whether postmortality entails the loss of essential values tied to finitude and care, and highlights the unresolved tensions between transhumanist ambitions and ecological ethics.
