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

In its canonical form, dystopia often depicts a dark future based on the worldbuilding of spaces and characters: these worldings operate as a warning, projecting a plausible future that serve to critique the present through the operation of estrangement (Cole (2022); Horn (2018).The trope of the "last man" marks a future “seen as an open horizon of expectations” due to their “fictional position of a future perfect"(Horn 41). For instance, while Atwood’s Offred goes through unimaginable tortures 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, 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), dystopic space 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 a space of possibility that can be both anticipated and shaped.

There seems to be a shift: no longer warnings 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 Torishima’s Sisyphean to the father-daughter duo’s weird suicide in Denis’ film High Life(2018), recent works reveal a deep ontological and epistemic loss. Indeed, as McManus(2022) and Rosenfield(2021) note, this dystopic future 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 . Indeed, the desire to find some form of meaning is frustrated in the repetitive and linguistically impossible spaces of Volodine’s post exotic novels, or the seemingly inexhaustible episodes of 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, or worse, an already foreclosed future

We are interested in exploring the conditions, the nature and the 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 a mourning, what is its new telos? What is represented in this new bad space, and what is silenced or excluded? Taking into account the advanced neoliberal capital accumulation's damage and the future of human and non-human animals, we invite questions including but not limited to:

Posthuman and animal approaches to dystopia including multispecies futures.

Cinema and TV as sites for imagining alternative futures.

Queer, feminist, and decolonial eco-materialist approaches

Environmental collapse and climate grief

Ontological and epistemic loss in contemporary dystopias

Labor, exhaustion, and suffering in speculative futures.