Podcast: High Theory

Outdated Futures

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Saronik talks with Manish Melwani about outdated visions of the future and stale science fiction ideas that just won’t die.

Manish is a Singaporean writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and then completed a master’s thesis at NYU entitled Starports, Portals and Port Cities: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Empire’s Wake. (That’s where he met Saronik.) Manish has published several short stories, with several more—and a novel—on the way.

They talk about science fiction’s imperialist heritage and how going to Mars is just a distraction from the imaginative (and literal) dead end our civilization faces. They also throw shade on Cecil Rhodes and certain tech moguls who have completely missed the point of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels.

Manish’s perspective has been shaped by many other writers and theorists including: John Rieder’s work on Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Samuel R. Delany’s seminal essays, Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding, a group biography of John W. Campbell and other figures from the Golden Age of science fiction, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent climate sci-fi oeuvre.

Further reading includes Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri, and Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland.

Image created by Saronik Bosu using open source vectors.

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Intersectionality

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Saronik interviews Kim about intersectionality, a concept developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Kim references two essays by Crenshaw in the episode: one that she read, and one that our previous podcast guest, Chad Hegelmeyer taught.

“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039 (Kim read this one)

“Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Iss. 1 (1989) https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/ (Chad taught this one)

Kim recommends that you read the latter.

This week’s image is a painting by Alma Thomas, titled “Light Blue Nursery” (1968). The image is made available under a Creative Commons license by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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Hurricanes

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Kim talks with Sonya Posmentier about hurricanes.

Sonya writes about hurricanes and diaspora in her book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

In the episode she references Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “The History of the Voice” and Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence, Harvard University Press, 2011.

She also talks about a genre of Jamaican dancehall music that grew in the wake of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. To hear some of that music and learn more about the musical resonances of hurricanes, you can read her “Hurricane Season Playlist” on the Johns Hopkins University Press blog.

Sonya teaches African American literature in the English Department at New York University (where she is an excellent dissertation advisor for literary scholars and future podcasters).

This week’s image of a spiral evoking hurricane wind patterns was borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. Creative commons license, CC By Share Alike.

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Border as Method

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Saronik talks to Kim about Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s seminal 2013 book Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labor, where they use the concept and ubiquity of border and border-thinking for political innovation.

Other works touched upon are Biju Matthew’s Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, The Communist Manifesto, and Kenichi Omae’s The Borderless World.

The image is from the cover of Taxis as Public Transport: A Bibliography, published in 1979 by the US Department of Transportation.

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Settler Colonialism

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Kim talks with Margaret Nash about settler colonialism.

Margaret Nash is an Emeritus Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California Riverside.

You can watch her explain her research on settler colonialism and land grant universities in her talk: “An Unacknowledged Legacy.“

Her recent article “Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession” Higher Education Quarterly 59 No. 4 (November 2019) examines the long reach of settler colonialism in US Higher Education.

In the episode, Margaret references a book of political theory by Adam Dahl, titled Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought.

The image is taken from the cover of a 1992 booklet on HIV Prevention in Native American Communities.

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Death Drive

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Kim talks with Michelle Rada about the death drive in psychoanalysis.

Michelle references Todd McGowan’s Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
She also recommends Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, by Todd McGowan.
In our longer conversation, she also quoted, What IS Sex? by Alenka Zupančič, MIT Press, 2017.
She also recommends a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies on “Constructing the Death Drive.”  This issue includes an article by Luce Cantin, “The Drive, the Untreatable Quest of Desire” which she discusses in the epidsode. Michelle thinks the whole issue is worth checking out, and especially recommends the article in there by Tracy McNulty as well, “Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive” and the piece by Willy Apollon, “Psychoanalysis and the Freudian Rupture.”
She also highly recommends Life and Death in Psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche (Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), which really informs her understanding of the economics/psychic structure of the drive.
and of course….Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud.
And “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud’s 1914 essay on primary/secondary narcissism.

Michelle Rada is a PhD candidate in English at Brown University and Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College. Her research is on modernist aesthetics, form, the novel, and psychoanalysis. Michelle’s work has appeared in Room One-Thousand, The Comparatist, The James Joyce Quarterly, The Journal of Beckett Studies, and The Journal of Modern Literature. She is Senior Assistant Editor at differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.

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Halloween Special: Alice Walker’s Cat

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Saronik tells Kim about Alice Walker’s book Anything We Love Can Be Saved, where she talks about her many cats over the years, and how they represented her connection with the cosmos.

Image: “Rescued from the rough streets of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Princess Marmalade earned her PhD in Meowological Studies in 2019, with an advanced certificate in acritical napping.”

Halloween Special: Jacques Derrida’s Cat

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Saronik talks with Kim about Jacques Derrida’s cat.

Derrida writes about his cat, who makes him rather anxious, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276

Image: “Beatrix or Bea or BeaBea is a tiny cat living her tiny cat life.”

Halloween Special: Schrödinger’s Cat Redux

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Kim talks with Gina Dominick about Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” and the philosophical stakes of Schrödinger’s thought experiment.

Le Guin’s story was published in her collection, The Compass Rose (Harper Collins, 1982). There are many PDFs of it scattered across the internet.

Gina mentions Jacques Derrida’s writing on “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago UP, 1981). Much the same is true of the PDF scattering here.

Gina Dominick is a medievalist, anti-capitalist rebel, and co-conspirator in the original high theory. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at NYU, who teaches high school philosophy and spent Halloween afternoon re-caulking her tub. She knows way more about Adorno than Kim does. By far.

Image: “Leo was rescued off the streets of Harlem 3.5 years ago and has lived comfortably in a town house with two humans ever since.”

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Halloween Special: Schrödinger’s Cat

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Kim talks with George Gibson about Schrödinger’s cat. This cat is a thought experiment proposed by Erwin Schrödinger, and taken up in correspondence with Albert Einstein, in the 1930s.

Schrödinger’s original paper on the subject, “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik” (Naturwissenschaften 23 no. 48 (November 1935): 807–812) doi: 10.1007/BF01491891 was translated by John D. Trimmer and published as “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper.”  (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124, No. 5 (Oct. 1980): 323-338) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/986572>. Schrödinger presents the cat as something of a joke.

George Gibson is a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut and an excellent pianist.

Image: “Leo was rescued off the streets of Harlem 3.5 years ago and has lived comfortably in a town house with two humans ever since.”

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