By Misbah Ahmed and C.J. Griffin This issue of Alluvium focuses on World Literature and the alter|native. The featured articles are written in the context…
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Category: Issue 9.5 – Special Issue “World Literature and the alter|native”
Ecopoetics, Intermediality, and the Language of Caroline Bergvall
By Martin Schauss It’s fair to say that ecocriticism as a literary hermeneutic has moved on from what Greg Garrard called “the poetics of authenticity”…
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Malaysian Speculative Fiction as Alter|native Text
Foo Sek Han’s “Extracts from DMZine #13 (January 2115)” (thereafter, “Extracts”) takes the form of zine extracts showcasing life in fictionalised Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, almost twenty years after a cyber-attack in 2098. Zen Cho, the editor of the anthology Cyberpunk: Malaysia (2015) which contains “Extracts”, describes it as a story about revolutions, one that is conscious of the “nation’s failings” but also optimistic about its people’s resilience (Cho, “Intro” 9).
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Energy Futures, Science Fiction, and the Failure of Mastery
The After Oil Research Collective argue that ‘a genuine global transition away from fossil fuels will require not only a reworking of our energy infrastructures, but a transformation of the petroculture itself’ (After Oil, 9). In this statement, the collective refer to how petroculture has come to shape values, feelings, and societal norms. Petroculture is a field that argues that energy, and crude oil in particular, has shaped the social and cultural imaginary of the twenty first century. Their argument is that a cultural and societal transition must take place to conceive of a future free from present violent and imperialist modes of resource extraction.
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The Impossibility of Nativising Marginality
Kamau Braithwaite’s concept of the ‘alter|native’ is defined in his essay ‘Caliban’s Guarden as the alteration of the nature of our shared consciousness, which has been shaped in response to colonial subjugation (4). When we consider the alter|native in conjunction with World Literature’s concerns with the marginalised in a global system, we can see how it is coterminous with postcolonial struggles that seek to reclaim lost histories and identities.
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