Spectral Futures: Fabulations of Worlds to Come

(Hardback)

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What colour is the future or rather, what colors are the futures Broad and enlightening in its coverage, this collection explores the notion that there is not just one visualization of the future, but many, stretching across and beyond shades of utopian brightness and dystopian darks. Visiting futures that belong to the realm of ghosts, it calls for a hauntology that deals not only with spectres of the past but also the of future, offering a fascinating engagement with both colonial history and hyper-accelerated societies.

Guided by a diversity of colours, contributors speculate on non-anthropogenic futurities, theorising on the richness of an essentially complex and disordered material universe. The volumes critical approaches range from speculative realism, oceanic biology, and philosophy and politics, to posthumanism and queer theory. What all these offerings have in common is a strong focus on materiality, the in|human, and the innovative possibilities that are brought into light by this fabulated spectrum. They combine the potentialities of philosophy, art, and science, in that they all forge a relation to chaos, or, an undeterminable new. Powerful and thought-provoking, this book illuminates different possibilities of gazing upon futures in nuanced and novel ways.

Author Bio

Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Literature and Culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (Rodopi, 1999) and An American Body/Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (UPNE, 2010). His other publications include the collections media | matter (Bloomsbury, 2015), Sonic Thinking (Bloomsbury, 2017), Film as Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is a main editor of the media-philosophical book series thinking | media with Bloomsbury.