Abstracts

 

 

Robert Nguyen

Cybernetics and Ancillary Justice: Embodiment, Crisis, and Resistance

 

Ann Leckie’s space opera Ancillary Justice represents the cybernetic logics of modern life as a galactic empire of always-connected starships, artificial intelligences, and soldiers. In doing so, Leckie’s novel transforms cybernetics from its current state—a seemingly immaterial, dominant set of logics described by Seb Franklin, building on Deleuze and Foucault, as a “control episteme”—into corporeal form. This materialization occurs through that lyrical mimesis that Seo-Young Chu describes as characteristic of science fiction, a genre that is a “mimetic discourse whose objects of representation are nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging.”

This act of representation exposes the vulnerabilities of cybernetic systems as inevitably, ultimately embodied, and reminds us of cybernetic logics’ origins in military technologies. I argue that Leckie’s novel opens a path for how these systems might be resisted: by individuals exercising ethical action and performing acts of care in the face of world-ending crises.

 

Hogan D. Schaak

Wronging Wrongs: The Haunting Transmotion of the Enchanted Gothic in John Keats’s Lamia

 

In this article, I argue that Gerald Vizenor’s theory of “transmotion” and C. Ree and Eve Tuck’s theory of haunting in western narratives help us understand why John Keats thought Lamia to be his best gothic poem. Scholars have traditionally thought Lamia to be one of Keats’s worst poems, chafing at its ambiguity. However, by piecing together Keats’s uses of the gothic over his career and then examining Lamia’s narrative structure and colorful visual imagery through the lens of transmotion and Ree and Tuck’s theory of haunting, I argue that Lamia foregrounds traditionally western expectations of narrative satisfaction and then frustrates them in order to haunt the reader through what I call the “enchanted gothic.” In this way, Lamia can transform the ways in which western readers interpret monsters and patriarchal societal structures. This article joins an ongoing project of interpreting art by way of Vizenor’s ideas and adds new considerations on the role of the gothic and the application of transmotion.

 

Eliza Rose

Transmissions from a Friend: Worlding and Unworlding Central Europe with Ursula K. LeGuin

 

In her youth, Ursula K. Le Guin set her first novel manuscript in an “unimportant country of middle Europe” called Orsinia. This invented country became a near-constant in her career, providing the setting of two novel manuscripts, thirteen stories, and three poems written over four decades. To correct scholarship’s neglect of the Orsinian corpus, this article offers two possible explanations for Le Guin’s sustained use of Central Europe as setting. The first pertains to her curiosity about the challenges of real socialism in Eastern Europe, and the second to her evolving perception of cultural difference as narrative fodder. Through their work as anthropologists and authors, her parents (Alfred and Theodora Kroeber) gave her a model for retelling others’ stories that Le Guin later contested and revised. Drawing from postcolonial critiques of “worlding” as a literary operation with real consequences, the article explores ethnology and fiction as relatedly fraught ways of knowing the Other. The Orsinian fiction, however, can ultimately be read as a reparative project within which Le Guin developed fair protocols for transmitting others’ stories.

 

 

Julia DaSilva

Turning the Hinge: “Radical Fantasy,” Magic, and Eco-phenomenology in N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and Laurie Marks’s Fire Logic

 

Fredric Jameson argues that a core element of “radical fantasy” is the use of magic as a figure for the extension to the limit of human creative powers and the ways in which historical conditions bear on those powers.  Jameson’s framework is here extended through a comparative phenomenological analysis of magical practice in N. K. Jemisin’s Fifth Season and Laurie Marks’ Fire Logic, both centered around “hinge” moments of existential political crisis, where the extension of human creative powers is violently called into question.  Both navigate this violence through elemental magic systems, employing similar central metaphors useful in conjunction with Jameson’s problem of history: Jemisin’s “Fulcrum” and Marks’ “hinge” (of history).  Irene Klaver’s “Phenomenology on (the) Rocks” helps locate Jameson’s framework within an eco-phenomenological one, illuminating how magical practice functions in radical texts as “turning the hinge:” opening spaces of radical indeterminacy and mutuality that use obscurities against established power.