"Those Who Stay: Black and Indigenous Worldmaking Against Worldleaving in the Age of Astrofuturism"

6 p.m. c.t., Rabinstr. 8, Seminarraum 9

While the American government is dismantling decades of environmental regulations, aggressively ramping up fossil fuel production, and abolishing protections for vulnerable communities on the frontlines of toxicity, climate change, and extractivism, the tech billionaires—cowboy hats and survivalist fantasies of technological transcendence in tow—are firing up their spaceships. Following the well-rehearsed logic of settler-colonialism, outer space is simultaneously serenaded as a limitless dumping ground, new resource frontier, and refuge—both a spatial and a technological fix for escaping pollution, depletion, and socio-ecological complexity on Earth. For those who can afford it and look the type, that is.

This talk is about those who stay. I offer a discussion of contemporary works of speculative fiction that center Black and Indigenous communities who refuse—or are refused—an escape pod, instead working to reclaim everyday worlds and survive in a post-apocalypse not of their own making, after White people have left for the proverbial stars. Drawing on examples that include Tochi Onyebuchi’s novel Goliath (2022), Thirza Cuthand’s (Plains Cree/Scottish/Irish) speculative documentary Reclamation (2018), Adam Garnet Jones’s (Cree/Métis/Danish) “History of the World” (2020), and Simon Ortiz’s (Acoma Pueblo) “Men on the Moon” (1999), I examine the emergent topos of those who stay as an element of what might be understood as mundane futurism. In conversation with what Nishnaabeg philosopher and poet Leanne Simpson (building on Glen Coulthard) calls “grounded normativity,” what Donna Haraway invokes as “staying with the trouble,” and what Lauren Berlant describes as the building of “affective infrastructures,” such SF imaginaries of worldmakings against worldleavings focus modes of resistance, community-building, and uneasy futurity that counter the spatialized logics of environmental racism and extractive colonialism by which some populations are enabled to thrive and survive, while others are deemed expendable.