Congratulations on completing the final exam! Here are some last-minute reminders to make sure you wrap up all the loose ends:
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science fiction today
autochthony & indigenization in Moons of palmares
I prefer to think of decolonization as indigenization and I like the thinking of folks like Jeanette Armstrong and Bob Lovelace on this issue. As I understand their teachings, land is core to the question of indigenization—not bloodlines, skin colour, or cultural heritage. To be indigenous is to take direction on how to live from a specific place (a bio-region) where all of life-forms model sustainability, interdependence, and “good mind” in relation to how to live well in that area. To people like Bob and Jeanette, anyone can become indigenous to a place. In our context on Turtle Island, taking direction from the First Peoples who have the longest standing relationships with these lands is a first step. When you ultimately tease out the teachings and implications of understanding indigeneity in this way, it has implications for all the affairs of two-leggeds: governance, economy, education, health care, forming and maintaining community, land tenure, food production, equity issues, et cetera. Fundamentally, it would involve a huge shift of mindset because if you can’t understand and imagine an alternative to the current dysfunctionality of colonial society, then you can’t transform it. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that everyone has to “become Indian.” You keep your stories and identities but everyone’s culture is modified to fit what is sustainable on this land. I think that is healthier and more desirable—in fact, it’s more survivable than modifying culture to fit the colonial Canadian or U.S. mythologies. -- Zainab Amadahy in an interview for Feral Feminisms magazine reflection10 minutes: I am proposing that there is a shift in The Moons of Palmares's plot. As the novel progresses, the conflict between the Consortium and the Menchista movement becomes more and more about the production and control of knowledge about this conflict. The latter half of the novel abounds in revelations that follow one another breathlessly. Here are some examples:
In writing, reflect on the implications of this shift to the narrative focus on knowledge. Consider the implications in both political, moral, and aesthetic terms (that is, in terms of the conventional practice of writing long fictional stories). What might be the problems of the novel's resolving itself in this way? Here are some suggestions:
the dakota access pipeline as context for palmares
reflection5 minutes: Based on your understanding of the overall political situation of the U.S. (and the world) today and of the tools for social analysis that Science Fiction offers as a literary genre, what kind of science fiction do you think our culture needs most? What kind of science fiction would you be most interested in reading? for thursday 8/10
amadahy's science fiction & multinational capitalism
recapitulating Our discussions of Samuel R. Delany's works
overarching questions for Moons of palmares
neo-colonialism
This benevolent multi-culturalism is one of the problems of neocolonialist knowledge-production...The Los Angeles festival a couple of years ago was much advertised as a multicultural event. There was a small sector where a group of female Indian adolescents did some sort of classical Indian dance. First of all the history of the production of these classical dances, their elitization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and what happened to the old dancers, is a story that is extremely important for feminist work in India. But apart from that, we felt, some Indians, that on the Indian subcontinent we have not yet been able to work out what it is to be "Indian" and as a result at this point the country is drowning in blood. But America knows. America knows: that is the Indian sector in the multicultural festival. Now this is an object lesson of the way in which neocolonialist, multiculturalist, culturally relativist knowledge-production once again leaves the heterogeneity of other spaces aside, and produces an easier, politically correct brand of cultural studies. (Spivak and Young 226) the anthropocene
The Anthropocene, in its crudest definition, is the new geological Epoch we have entered, following the Holocene. The “anthropos” prefix aims at reflecting the idea that anthropogenic changes, that is, changes resulting from human actions on this world, are so large and ubiquitous that humans are now behaving as geological forces, playing a similar role as volcanoes, large meteors, earthquakes and the like. The precise moment when the Holocene became Anthropocene is still under discussion, and scientists belonging to the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy are expected to reach a conclusion on the subject soon. Jan Zalasiewicz et al. (2014), for instance, suggest the moment when the first nuclear bomb was exploded, on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The nuclear fallout resulting from this bomb and the subsequent bombs that were exploded at an average rate of one bomb every 9.6 days from 1945 to 1988 can be identified in what is called the “chemostatigraphic record,” a measure used by geologists to analyze the chemical deposits in the strata. This boundary coincides with what has been termed “the Great Acceleration” of the mid-twentieth century, when we, humans, started using plastic at large, aluminum, and vast quantities of resources to keep up with the newly inaugurated Western model of production and consumption. (Savi 2017, 945-946) names & description in moons of palmaresfor wednesday 8/9
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