Response 2: Time Travelling to Utopia

The utopias found in Angry Planet tend to be spatially and temporally contingent. In Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), a Los Angeles homeless community takes over a section of the Harbor Freeway, calling it the “FreeZone.”1 Evoking the Reclaim the Streets movement that made up a facet of 1990s anti-globalization protesting, the residents of the FreeZone garden build a barter economy and create performance art while shielded from police intervention by car pileups and fires burning at either end of the occupied stretch of US route 110. The FreeZone’s lifespan is temporarily extended when the sun gets caught in the sky at the peak of the summer solstice, but it is only a matter of time before the full military violence of the neoliberal state violently forces its way through Yamashita’s best-laid temporal and spatial boundaries. The same is true for John Edgar Wideman’s depiction of the MOVE house in Philadelphia Fire (1991), and the “sovereign circle” of “sacred cedar trees” that makes up a kind of idealized reserve-within-the-reserve in Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990).2 The human actors in angry-planet fiction are able to carve out small utopian spaces across Turtle Island and defend them for limited periods of time, but in the end, the colonial-capitalist state reconsolidates its violent authority.While I characterize this impasse to decolonial futurity in Angry Planet as a spatial contest, reading the work of K. Allison Hammer and Patrick Whitmarsh as part of this authors’ roundtable also reminds me that when it comes to utopian aspirations, temporality is as crucial to our projects as is spatiality. Hammer’s discussion of their book, Masculinity in Transition (2023), begins with a salutary example of the importance of critical temporality in utopian studies: “We are living in a time crisis,” Hammer writes, “one of selective care and empathy.” Not a time of crisis, importantly, but a “time crisis,” as in a crisis over what or whose time occupies the present. Betty Joseph calls this an era of intensified chronopolitics, a time of political contest centering on what counts as the present, as progress or revanchism, on what makes up matters of concern and of care in this moment.3 The selective care and empathy that Hammer evokes emerges during periods of chronopolitical strife, and I would suggest that this chronopolitical strife swirls around the temporal locations of our utopias. Even as the Anthropocene and its “emergent catastrophisms,” as Whitmarsh puts it, “reframe the earth as a narrative subject wrapped up in extremely long, more-than-human timelines of environmental crisis and collapse,”4 the exact nature and duration of these timelines are contested. They are overlaid with the competing timelines of distinct historical experiences that refuse absorption into the seemingly triumphal force of one geological deep timeline to rule us all. In this context, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s question over who (the agentic human subject) or what (human species-being) becomes the subject of history under the sign of the Anthropocene takes on a SF cast: the question is not one of “whose history” but of “whose timeline dominates.”5Joe PL Davidson stresses the significance of utopian desires running along competing timelines in his work on the temporality of Black utopias. Drawing on Mannheim’s modes of utopian temporality, Davidson asserts that “utopian time maps are shaped by the experience of the social groups that produce them.”6 For example, “the declining classes in capitalist society, particularly the aristocracy, turn . . . back to the past to reimagine a world where they [a]re again dominant; and the socialist focus on the future is an expression of the status of the proletariat.”7 While Davidson is careful to qualify Mannheim’s modes as sketching the broadest of possible strokes, his point that utopian desires offer insight into the differing and competing timelines occupied by differing social groups speaks to Hammer’s articulation of a time crisis as a crisis of care. Is American great again? as in, are we in a time of “return” to what white nationalists might define as “traditional values”? And if so, where do we locate our care and empathy: in the struggle of storming the Capitol, in those masculinities that refuse to transition, those whose actions are driven by fear of being “left behind” by the twenty-first century?Conversely, on the opposite end of the political spectrum, what does it mean, in terms of care, to realize the temporality of Land Back, a call for the resurgence of spatial conditions effectively annihilated by the history of colonial land theft and capitalist exploitation? How might the advanced knowledge contained in Indigenous land relations create an opening into a survivable environmental future? Into expressions of care and empathy that extend to the nonhuman and in doing so, invite the age of the Anthropocene into a more expansive, care-filled and caring understanding of what constitutes the human? It is not insignificant that in terms of these two competing timelines, the former advocates a form of selective care, narrowing the scope of bodies that matter to refocus history on those who feel excluded by the late twentieth century’s new orders of liberal inclusion and equality, while the latter example demands that care “scale up,” as Hammer puts it, to much more expansive understandings of relationality.A crisis over whose time it is encourages me to think about utopian desire not only as hope for a better future, but also as a form of time travel. Davidson, citing Kara Keeling’s work in Queer Times, Black Futures, argues that “in the African American tradition, a place for the memory of slavery and its aftermath must be found within the alternative society imagined; past and future need to be held together. Black utopias, then, exist ‘after the future, blossoming in spite of what presently seems destined to be the future.’”8 In these terms, Black utopian time travels not into, but forward with the past as a necessary precondition to a future that does not repeat the material conditions and social relations plotted by the so-called plantationocene. Similarly, for Indigenous futurists, resurgence is not so much a call to return to a precolonial world but a call to harness “advanced knowledge about how not only to survive on this planet but to thrive on a cosmic level.”9 When Indigenous land-based intelligence is framed as galactic in its implications, it becomes knowledge not only about the future, but as Keeling and Davidson suggest, from “after the future.”I am inspired to think about traveling through timelines by both Hammer’s discussion of the unruly alliances that emerge through queer challenges to dominant masculinities, and by Whitmarsh’s discussion of the prospect of extinction inscribed into the earth by what he calls the “vertical sciences” of twentieth-century post-industrial capitalist development. For Whitmarsh, it is important that any sustained meditation on extinction, “emphasiz[e] the contingency of our historical predicament. The current global situation of climate and environmental crisis is not set in stone.” Rather, “the capacity for imagining alternative futures, extinctive or otherwise, is already inscribed into the present. The multiple possible contours of the future begin taking shape today.”10 This is a kind of time travel, wherein, as Whitmarsh suggests, the present becomes the history of the future but is at the same time, by virtue of being the present, an alterable history. This, of course, is one of the dreams of time travel: to change history.On a different but not too far distant timeline, Hammer concludes that although normative masculinity “is seductive, and it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refuse its terms entirely within the current conditions and the bounds and binds of racial capitalism,” their project’s imperative is nonetheless to “invite the space of the ‘not yet’ as one of possibility . . . by becoming acquainted with uncertainty and chance, we become responsible for collectively thinking and sustaining the future”11 Here, José Muñoz’s famous assertion “that queerness is primarily about futurity and hope”12 begins to take shape as an articulation of the queer self as a time traveler: queerness not so much as a horizon of potentiality, but as a visit from the future, an entire world history of travelers from a future made up of those “exuberant, utopic possibilities” that Hammer describes existing “for masculinities that reject sexual domination, nationalism, and this more insidious trait of impenetrability.” Another dream of time travel: visitors from the future who offer glimpses of a world yet to come.Both projects help me think about the Blochian “still unclosed determinateness of existence”13 as an orientation toward not only other possible futures but other possible pasts, and the fundamental indeterminacy of the present as the temporal space of utopian action. This, in turn, allows me to historicize some of the pessimism that inflects Angry Planet in different ways. The literary and cultural archive contained in my project is itself profoundly hopeful about the possibility of environmental crisis generating the conditions for radical decolonial action. It envisions the earth’s planetary body in all-out rebellion against the damage being gouged across its terrestrial surface by colonial land expropriation and capitalist resource exploitation. But this imaginary falters, as my book argues, again and again at the threshold to decolonial futurity. Writing on the aftermath of the L.A. riots, for example, Wideman compares the mood of the 1990s to the sense of hope that pervaded the radicalism of the 1960s and asserts that “what’s different, what’s diminishing is the possibility that change, the change that’s gotta come, will occur in my lifetime. Or the lifetime of the U.S.A.”14Wideman’s sense of the diminishing window for hope seems borne out by a twenty-first century in which it is clear that hurricanes do not empower but devastate poor communities of color. Wildfires become opportunities for corporations to pick up lucrative state contracts allowing for the restructuring of communities and social services that spatially and economically disenfranchise already precarious populations. Indigenous land defenders take stands to protect traditional territories, but those territories do not automatically protect their defenders. And urban decay, like urban uprisings, create opportunities for new frontiers of gentrification that exacerbate rather than resolve social and environmental injustices. Angry Planet argues that what has unfolded over the last several decades is the collapse of the nonhuman agency of the angry planet into the agency of a collective anthropogenic subject; the effective dissolution of the planet-as-subject-agent into the human species-agent as the driver of planetary motion and upheaval.But perhaps I have reasoned, in these terms, too unflaggingly and in too totalizing a sense along the timeline of colonial-capitalist progress, triumphalism, and planetary subsumption. If other timelines are possible, if travelers from the future are among us, if knowledge about how to live with the earth is waiting for us somewhere after the future, if our extinction might become part of a speculative history of our present rather than a speculative future, then perhaps the angry planet is not so much a failed imaginary as a timeline that has not yet had its day. Perhaps we are all living on the angry planet’s utopian timeline, and we just don’t know it yet.