Estranging history: alterity and capitalism in speculative fiction
View/ Open
Date
31/07/2021Author
Vergara Ibacache, Tomás
Metadata
Abstract
Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko
Suvin’s paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple
subgenres in terms of their assumed inherent political value. By drawing on an alternative
genealogy of Marxist criticism, my dissertation attempts to achieve a non-hierarchical
understanding of the estrangement connecting all varieties of speculative fiction. The objective of
my thesis is to outline the political potential shared across the full spectrum of speculative fiction,
along with its specific narrative strategies by which it critically engages with its historical context
of production. My main point of contention is that speculative fiction performs an estrangement
effect on historical reality that can potentially render visible the role of fantasies in the organisation
of capitalist social practice. This narrative effect enables an anamorphic perspective by which the
novel interprets and interrogates and conceptualises historical reality in a totalising manner.
Each chapter deals with texts that productively engage with their context of production and
are exemplary of major currents in contemporary speculative fiction. Chapter 1 deals with China
Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy and its metaphorical use of Weird manifestations to assert a Marxist
understanding of economic crises and promote revolutionary praxis. Chapter 2 examines neo-slave
narratives in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and
argues that these novels implement speculative fiction tropes to render visible the afterlives of
slavery in contemporary conditions of existence. Chapter 3 explores contemporary dystopian
fiction in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars and Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma, showing
how the texts challenge cultural studies of postmodern schizophrenia. Chapter 4 analyses the use
of social reproduction as the basis for patriarchal violence in the feminist narratives of Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time.