Exploring the Outer and Meta Spaces of Resilience

deadline for submissions: 
March 23, 2023
full name / name of organization: 
Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention
contact email: 

This panel focuses on the political, cultural, and societal narratives of outer space. We suggest that the narratives and discourses that surround space exploration, threats from space, or even future colonization of space can provide insights into the logics and counter-logics of resilience as they inform how we ought to and who ought to live with environmental destruction, information capitalism, neoliberalism, and the remaining infrastructures of colonialism. We invite critical engagements with narratives of resilience that encourage us to live with and escape from the underlying systemic conditions of neoliberalism, and that consider what resilience might do or fail to do in combating anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism. Potential paper topics might include narratives and discourses around corporate, individual, and state outer space and cyberspace exploration, such as, Big Tech’s successful rocket launches, Russia and US relations on the ISS, the development of the metaverse, the potential colonization of Mars, or the tracking of multi-galaxy telescopes, as well as explorations of science fiction and its subgenres, including Afrofuturism, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, ecofiction, feminist science fiction, etc.