Recent scholarship marks a shift in the way dystopia is imagined and presented in film and literature. In its canonical form, the etymological distinction between utopia as non- place (from More’s coinage) and dystopia, as bad place,  is reflected in the genre, which often  depicts a dark future based on the worldbuilding of spaces and characters: these speculative worldings operate as a warning, projecting a plausible future that serve to critique the present through the operation of estrangement (Cole (2022); Horn (2018) . Indeed, the trope of the "last man", described by Horn marks a future “seen as an open horizon of expectations” due to  this last remaining man's “fictional position of a future perfect “( 41). In this vein, Octavia Butler’s Lilith,  from her Xenogenesis series, points both to the end of a pure understanding of humanity,  as well as the dangers of nuclear global wars which destroy the world. While Atwood’s Offred goes through unimaginable tortures and objectification underlining the fragility of freedoms gained against patriarchy, she is also a sign of a future that can be avoided if the right measures are taken now. Similarly, dystopic space, whether in the sterile office spaces of eugenicist futurity in Gattaca (1997), or in the grimy streets of Detroit as an early warning of neoliberal accumulation in RoboCop (1987), is imbued with the destruction of its own spatial logic. This classic model of dystopian narratives relies on a temporal structure in which the future is imagined as an open horizon, as a space of possibility that can be both anticipated and shaped.

Recent dystopic works seem to mark a pessimistic shift:  no longer warnings in order to guarantee  our multispecies existence on earth, there seems to be no possibility of a future at all. From the meaningless death born of endless labor in Dempow Torishima’s Sisyphean to the father-daughter duo’s weird suicide in Claire Denis’ film High Life, recent works reveal a deep ontological and epistemic loss. Indeed, as McManus and Rosenfield note, this dystopic future no longer feels distinct or estranged, it feels like present  while shutting down the possibility of alternative futures.: dystopia, then, ceases to function as a warning and instead becomes an act of mourning (Rosenfield 102 ; McManus 180). Indeed, the desire to find some form of meaning or liveable future is frustrated in the repetitive and linguistically impossible spaces of Volodine’s post exotic novel Minor Angels, or the seemingly inexhaustible episodes of Netflix’s Black Mirror. If anything, these works evoke losses that await us in the not-so-distant future, losses that often feel as though they belong to the present, if not to a past that has already foreclosed the future.

It goes without saying that  current world events create an environment that is conducive to a loss of hope, so perhaps this dystopic shift towards darkness is to be expected. However , in this  seminar we are interested in exploring the conditions, the nature and the representational power of this shift: What does recent dystopic fiction and cinema tell us about our existence today and in the near future? If dystopia does not work as a warning but functions merely as  mourning (Rosenfield), what is the new telos of this form? What is represented in this new bad space, and what is silenced or excluded? Are there any alternatives being imagined to what Mark Fisher has called "capitalist realism"? Taking into account the advanced neoliberal capital accumulation at its core and with the future of both human and non-human species at stake, we invite papers that engage with these and related questions.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

Posthuman approaches to dystopia and speculative fiction, including multispecies futures.

Cinema, television, and transnational media as sites for imagining alternative futures (examples may include recent shows like Fallout, Last of Us, Severance, Plague, Silo etc...as well as older shows with dark unsolvable futures )

Animal studies perspectives on dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds.

Queer, feminist, and decolonial eco-materialist approaches to dystopia 

Ecocritical readings of environmental collapse and climate grief 

Narratives of ontological and epistemic loss in contemporary speculative literature and film.(examples may include Octavia Butler, Rivers Solomon, Karin Tidbeck, Hval, Carmen Maria Machado)

The role of estrangement and mourning  in new dystopian storytelling.

Labor, exhaustion, and the organization of suffering in speculative futures.

Comparative analyses of canonical and contemporary dystopias across literature, film, and other media.

Possibility of post-apocalyptic dystopian scenarios for the reworking of historical traumas;  inspired by turbulent histories and the urgency of the present, addressing themes such as colonization, the climate crisis, and migration.

Virulence and futurism; viral fiction, also known as "vi-fi” born during the coronavirus pandemic..

The deadline for paper proposals is Thursday, October 2, 2025 EST

To submit a proposal (approximately 300 words or 1500 characters ) and your brief bio, please visit ACLA page of the seminar and click "propose a paper" link on top

https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6
 

for questions , feel free to reach out either Dr. Elif Sendur or Dr. Allison Mackey

es1037@scarletmail.rutgers.edu   and dramackey@gmail.com

 Horn, Eva. The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Rosenfeld, Aaron S. Character and Dystopia : The Last Men. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021
McManus, Patricia. Critical Theory and Dystopia. Manchester University Press, 2022
Cole, Matthew Benjamin. Fear the Future : Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century. 1st ed., University of Michigan Press, 2022
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible : Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Edited by Raffaella Baccolini, Peter Lang, International Academic Publishers, 2014
 

https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6