This panel is being organized as part of NeMLA 2025, centered around the theme of (R)Evolution.

Description:

In dialogue with theorists of (post)humanism, this panel seeks to examine how science fiction has historically been used to bolster erroneous and destructive "scientific" discourses, such as social Darwinism, and, conversely, how science fiction has been used toward revolutionary ends to imagine alternative formations of (post)humanity that defy socially constructed taxonomies and hierarchies.

Abstract: 

Popular narratives of evolution often blur the boundaries between scientific fact and ideological fantasy, depending on discourses of race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality to form limited ontologies of being human. Within (post)humanism, scholars are increasingly turning to decolonial thinkers, such as Sylvia Wynter, to critique the ideological weaponization of evolutionary theories toward colonial, imperial, and racist ends. Wynter exposes how (r)evolutionary theories of origin and transformation were used to justify the myths of social Darwinism, becoming a “master code of the bourgeoisie and of its ethnoclass conception of the human” in which rational European ‘Man’ is defined as genetically superior (Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, 315).

In turn, influential science fiction scholars highlight Darwinian theory's influence on the emerging genre. While many early science fiction texts use evolution to rationalize socially constructed hierarchies and categories of difference, more recent works have reappropriated evolutionary discourses as revolutionary, depicting evolution as a nonlinear and unpredictable process that reveals the interconnectedness of life and the fiction of discrete categories of race, gender, and species. One may think of Louise Erdrich’s use of evolution to challenge settler colonial projects in Future Home of the Living God or Octavia Butler’s complex representations of symbiosis and co-evolution in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy.

This panel seeks to examine how science fiction has historically been used to bolster erroneous and destructive ‘scientific’ discourses and, conversely, how science fiction has been retooled to imagine alternative formations of (post)humanity. How do authors expose scientific racism and biological essentialism to work towards what Wynter calls a “mutational new answer” to the destructive overrepresentation of Western patriarchal Man?

Work is welcome on any science fiction text concerning the speculative possibilities of mutation and evolution, particularly as they are entangled with race, coloniality, gender, and sexuality.

Please submit a 200-300 word abstract and a short bio. Abstracts accepted now through Sep 30, 2024. 

Abstracts must be submitted through the NeMLA online portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP

The 56th NeMLA Annual Convention will take place in Philadelphia, PA March 6-9 2025