After forty years of neoliberalism, it might be expected that dystopian imaginaries of future Englands would be determined by capitalist realism. If, as Mark Fisher notes, the dominant economic coordinates of actually existing society have ‘colonized the dreaming life of the population’ (8), then the future promises more of the same: commodification, inequality, precarity. However, in this article, I argue that visions of turbocharged neoliberalism in the English context are often accompanied by the rejuvenation of an older, feudal tendency. The peculiar form of gentlemanly capitalism that has developed in England, where the rising bourgeoisie never toppled the old aristocracy, is registered in speculative images of the country’s future. Feudalism and neoliberalism jostle together, each reforming and changing the other.
View More Aristocratic Realism: Within and Against Feudalism in English Future FictionTag: dystopia
The Traumatised Shaman: The Woman Writer in the Age of Globalised Trauma
Arya Aryan on Hilary Mantel, the woman-writer, and trauma
View More The Traumatised Shaman: The Woman Writer in the Age of Globalised TraumaReproducing the Patriarchal Anthropocene
Female reproductive rights are linked to environmental abuse, Beth Capo explores.
View More Reproducing the Patriarchal AnthropoceneWill 2017 be 1984?
As part of Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2017, we organised a panel titled "Will 2017 be 1984" (you can listen to a podcast recording of the panel here) which considered the uncanny relevance of Orwell’s novel…
View More Will 2017 be 1984?Jordan Krall’s Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction is a paradox. Synonymous with science fiction and “genre literature,” it is also one of the most ancient modes of storytelling in literary history. One could easily identify Plato’s Atlantis…
View More Jordan Krall’s Speculative FictionLitter, Landscape and The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) presents a dystopian vision of a near-future world in which most organic vegetation has died and human life is becoming increasingly rare. It is not unusual for dystopian fiction to …
View More Litter, Landscape and The RoadThe Allure of the 1980s
When we remember, represent or consume the recent past, we often do so through the alluring prism of nostalgia. In Ali Smith’s short story ‘astute, fiery, luxurious’…
View More The Allure of the 1980sMaking Art in Dystopia
When contemporary artists work alongside scientists with “wet hands” in the bioscience laboratory, the results can test both scientific and moral imaginations. New uses of living material raise multiple ethical issues, and a concern for future…
View More Making Art in Dystopia