Full Description
Explores independently produced media that uses science fiction to address societal and political issues
Today the genre of science fiction is widely associated with big-budget American films featuring space invaders and lab-made monsters. Outside of mainstream media, however, science fiction is often employed for political allegory, exploration of identity, and critiques of societal hierarchies and norms by diasporic, Indigenous, and independent filmmakers around the world. Science Fiction against the Margins is a compilation of fifteen essays by scholars and filmmakers that focus on B movies, television programs, independent productions, and experimental film, video, and media installations. Addressing four thematic areas—Outer Space/Out of Space, Imagining Violent Worlds, Remembering the Future, and Crossing Borders and Time—the authors examine nontraditional science fiction films for their potential to theorize social change.
Contents
Foreword by May Hong HaDuong
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Space Overture and Chorizo Coda: An Introduction against the Margins, by Chon Noriega
Part I: Outer Space/Out of Space
2. Los Angeles Sci-Fi Noir: The Bradbury Building and Its (Hidden) Latinx Contexts, by Veronica Paredes
3. Men into Space and the Spaces of Postwar TV Sci-Fi, by Shawn VanCour
4. Space is the Place: Black Cinema in Search of Speculative Fictions, by Ewa Drygalska
5. Surface, Subterrain, Sea: The Volumetric Imagination in Recent Singaporean Science Fiction, by Jasmine Nadua Trice
Part II: Imagining Violent Worlds
6. La jetée in Historical Time: Torture, Visuality, Displacement, by Matthew Croombs
7. Remembering the Disappeared: Science Fiction Film in Postdictatorship Argentina, by Everett Hamner
8. Zoom Out: Queer Apocalpyse in The Second Coming, by Amy Villarejo
9. Shadows in the Valley: The In/visible Iconography and Toxic Legacy of Computation, by Steve F. Anderson
Part III: Remembering the Future
10. Last Angel of History: Research, Writing, Performance, by Edward George
11. Black Futurist Imaginaries, by Shelleen Greene
12. "Jerusalem, We Have a Problem": Larissa Sansour's Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination, by Gil Hochberg
Part IV: Crossing Borders and Time
13. Octavia Butler's Kindred: Adaptation, Appropriation, Disposession, by Kathleen McHugh
14. Ofelia's Kiss: Racing the Sticky Fingers of Time, by Frances Negrón-Muntaner
15. The Scar and the Node: Border Science Fiction and the Mis-en-scène of Globalized Labor, by Sarah Ann Wells
16. Queering Asian-American Science Fiction Cinema: From The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu to Everything Everywhere All at Once, by Sean Metzger
Bibliography
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index
