Disruptive Imaginations, Joint Annual Conference of the Science Fiction Research Association and the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung, TU Dresden, Germany, August 15–19, 2023

Disruptive Imaginations was the combined celebration of the fourteenth annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GfF, German Association for Research in the Fantastic) and the fifty-fifth annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA). As both the SFRA and the GfF stated in their call for papers, the associations’ common visions and overlapping memberships made this hybrid (technologically and disciplinarily) joint conference possible, as well as fruitful and dynamic. The conference explored how aesthetic forms and genres are challenging contemporary capitalist ideological formations. Thus, the term “disruption”—as a trope as well as a formal strategy—became the key for investigating ways of thinking about various possibilities for resistance or subversion.Seven categories comprising eighty-seven panels reflected an ample genre and media diversity, including talks on: general SF and fantasy (SFF); environmental SFF; Co-Futurisms (intersectional encounters in African and Afro-futurisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Queer and Trans Futurisms, Crip Futurisms and Latinx Futurisms), and specific German-language panels. The blurring of generic boundaries is evidence of an effort to attract reflections on disruption from scholars and artists of multiple disciplines, and to create a space to mingle and think together. By way of example, the panel “Disruption in Horror and the Gothic” not only brought the fantastic forward into a heavily SF-oriented conference but also showcased how speculation, in its many forms and narrative strategies, can contribute to disruptive potentialities.The specific advantages of different media was another area of emphasis, with presentations on prose fiction, poetry, film (including a screening of Eolomea [1972] directed by Herrmann Zschoche), performance art, video games, podcasts, visual art and design, and even architecture. There were interdisciplinary dialogues among political and environmental scientists, historians, geographers, and literary scholars regarding the sites and forms of ideological and social disruption.The panelists represented global perspectives, from Latinx Futurist approaches and visions from the Global South to the regional specificities of Scandinavian, Slavic, and Turkish science fiction. Queer and Indigenous perspectives were apparent throughout—and particularly in two of three keynotes.David Higgins, senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a public SF scholar (Inver Hills College), published the award-winning book Reverse Colonization (2021). In his opening keynote, “Alt-History and Reactionary Worldbuilding,” Higgins focused on links between pop culture, textual reception, and political action. According to Higgins, radical-right sympathizers draw inspiration from speculative fiction, adopting science-fiction-style worldbuilding to mobilize a conservative cultural image of a “rebel hero” fighting against hegemonic or imperialist liberal institutions. Proposing an SF subgenre of “ALT-HISTORY” (as opposed to the more progressive “alternative history”), Higgins defines an alt-right narrative mode in which the storyworld centers on supposedly “objective, hidden, secret historical truths obscured by the colonizing conspiracy of left-wing control.” Higgins introduces a related notion he calls “imperial masochism”—the pleasure of imagining oneself—even as a cis-het white man who has benefited the most from imperial social structures—as a colonized victim or subaltern.After describing common settings and ideas that appear within ALT-HISTORY—a “liberal” fascism, socialist totalitarianism, Republican anti-racism, the Democratic (Party) Plantation, women’s rights movements as eugenicist, climate alarmism as a threat to the free market, and so on—and sharing his own red-state hometown experiences, Higgins articulated examples of the rhetorical logic and world-building techniques used by “post-truth” figure such as Dinesh D’Souza, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Jonah Goldberg, and others. He also mentioned popular alt-right feature films and documentaries such as God’s Not Dead (2014), Death of a Nation (2018), Hillary’s America (2016), and America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014). Higgins’s keynote traced the discursive origins of conspiracy fantasies and theorized how SF and SF-adjacent genres were hijacked to undermine any kind of documentable and factual basis for governance. He described this as a “massively deceptive work of disinformation,” especially as the communities and people who subscribe to ALT-HISTORY worldbuilding tend to take these stories at face value. Sharing this dilemma with the audience, Higgins posed the question of the possibility, necessity, and implications of future-proofing stories.Mary Louise Pratt claims that the Anthropocene is a chronotope characterized by a crisis of imagination regarding the uncertain outcomes of global warming, pandemics, and an overall maximized industrial system. According to Pratt, the Anthropocene is also the moment when knowledge-makers respond through world-building beyond hegemonic practices and institutions. Pratt finds that speculative literature and other artistic productions provide spaces where authors can showcase the link between the sciences and the humanities and create knowledges about the human and the nonhuman.1The daily schedule featured panels on environmental genres such as solarpunk and cli-fi. Many sessions explored the interdisciplinary study of SF and the environment, showcasing innovative approaches which blend scientific disciplines with literary theory. The presentations discussed literary works addressing topics like geoengineering, environmental politics, multispecies interactions, and environmental estrangements, highlighting interdisciplinary research in emerging fields like biosemiotics, which explores the blurred boundaries between nature and culture.The panel “Ecotopian Architectures and Emancipatory Dwelling” explored the relationship between storytelling and architectural representation. José Ibarra (University of Colorado Denver) discussed architecture’s “New Weird” turn, while Anke Schwarz (TU Dresden) analyzed classical science fiction narratives by authors such as Octavia Butler, Becky Chambers, and Nnedi Okorafor. They examined how these narratives could influence the rethinking of urban design, the development of slower cities, and the concept of “emancipatory homemaking,” bringing reflections on utopian environmental imagination to tangible and geopolitical levels.The panel “Blue Utopias & Dystopias” explored speculative approaches to water. Papers like Keren Omry’s (University of Haifa) study of “hydrofictions,” such as Assaf Gavron’s Hydromania (2011), discussed potential solutions for the water crisis from feminist disruptive viewpoints. Eleonora Rossi (University of London) and Sumeyra Buran (Istanbul Medeniyet University and University of Florida) shared insights from “aquatopias” and science fiction TV shows depicting water as a utopic element of homemaking, displacement, or transit. This international panel highlighted emerging approaches in the blue humanities, emphasizing the importance of speculative and interdisciplinary imagination in addressing the current environmental crisis.Last, the panel “Research Creation: Critical Worldmaking as Pedagogy and Practice,” chaired by Anke Schwarz & Pauline Mai (TU Dresden), was a space where students and teachers from TU Dresden shared the research developed in the seminar “Critical Worldbuilding | Kritische Weltbildung” (Summer 2023). The panel was created to showcase the work of student groups from the university’s Geography and English departments, who co-designed creative strategies to foster sustainable and equitable worldmaking in times of crisis.Priscilla Layne from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill delivered a keynote on “Utopias of Restorative Justice,” examining speculative fiction by Black women writers Schwarz Rund, and Sharon Dodua Otoo. Layne’s analysis is part of a broader archival project aiming to differentiate gender-ideal worlds envisioned by African diasporic feminist writers from those of white European writers. By referencing Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist works by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nnedi Okorafor, Layne praised Afro-Diasporic female writers for tackling complex issues of institutional violence. She highlighted the historical context of Black German feminists prioritizing gender equality within the larger framework of liberation for all people, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. She also pointed out that oftentimes these authors use child characters to counteract pessimistic stereotypes projected onto Black communities by white Germans. According to Layne, their works also create spaces for envisioning queer futures and alternative temporalities, reflecting an intersectional trend among Black German feminist activists since the 1980s to include men in their struggle through community and arts organizing.Layne’s reading of the queer Afro-Dominican novel Biskaya (2016), as an example, discussed how author Schwarz Rund advances an LGBTQIA+ consciousness in designing her utopia, wherein people of all genders and sexualities live together, and frequent character conversations arise on gender- and sexuality-themed topics. This story world comprises made-up geography where people of African descent come both voluntarily and involuntarily, with Rund’s intersectional worldbuilding highlighting motifs of care (e.g., mental health, racial trauma, and intergenerational emotional dynamics) and of diversity in kinship (due to, for instance, diasporic motifs from immigrant characters and blood versus chosen family relations questions), demonstrating how social factors affect the present and make it challenging to envision one-size-fits-all formulas for reparations.In her analysis of the 2023 novel Ada’s Realm, Layne highlighted Sharon Dodua Otoo’s portrayal of four characters named Ada, each representing women from different countries, racial-ethnic backgrounds, and historical periods. These characters, despite their diverse experiences, share narratives of survival in the face of patriarchy, yet often meet tragic ends due to structural exploitation. Set in fifteenth-century Ghana, nineteenth-century UK, World War II Germany, and twentieth-century Berlin, the Adas’ lives intersect with that of a sentient being symbolizing the loss of safety and life experienced by women. Layne emphasized the importance of motherhood as a source of kinship and reconciliation, even amidst past and present violence.The keynote by Lou Cornum (Diné/Bilagáana) (New York University), a wide-ranging presentation on the conference’s last day, showcased the strengths of an interdisciplinary approach to Indigenous futurisms: one that covers both the flaws of historical moon-travel launches/landings by a Western empire headed beyond earth to settle and extract capital in space, and the parallel efforts within colonial-scientific, popular culture, and in Native epistemologies of science and storytelling, to engage the very notion of the moon via contrasting frameworks.Starting with an accounting of underpublicized rocket-launch failures by NASA and intertwining such events with discursive analyses of current moon-travel propaganda that draws upon retrofuturist images to market corporate space tourism on behalf of the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Cornum exposed the connection between otherworld exploration and tourism economy. Although often portrayed as a benefit for “all humanity,” the Trump-era publicity push for a Space Force exhibited a rigid “US Manifest Destiny among the stars” orientation reminiscent of the crude “final frontier” logic of the past. However, in Biden’s administration, the new bipartisan space age of the Artemis mission, takes the market interplanetary and furthers US dominance of the globe, often without challenge.Cornum, focusing on critical Indigenous studies centered on Native persistence, assessed the contemporary Artemis voyage in relation to the 1969 lunar launch and Apollo moon landing. This widely televised event, watched by audiences at home, exposed a contradiction between NASA’s “for all mankind” propaganda and the act of planting the US flag on the moon during a period of international conflict. Noting that this same flag had fallen over immediately, Cornum expanded the moon discourse away from flat conceptual grapplings within the imaginary of imperial science and US militarism, asserting that we have had centuries of moon stories and many different ways to narrate the moon. According to Cornum, everyone has their own moon story, song, or poem, and they added that before published works that represented the moon’s presence in writerly consciousness, there was a “prehistory of modern lunar stories.” Cornum urged the audience to help co-create a “lunar canon” and to contact them with personal entries of storytelling moon traditions. “Not just [for] poets and science-fiction writers,” Cornum explained, “but the moon has always been a constant presence for the earth, a space between.” For centuries, mentioning the moon conjured up the idea of a new world (and now, mentioning Mars); Cornum observed that in Western scientific history, Galileo’s telescope technology had revealed the then-disturbing notion that multiple worlds existed. Now lunar entrepreneurs, viewing the moon as lifeless, propose to import life there, but “what constitutes life?” The idea of multiple worlds raises theoretical issues on epistemologies of knowledge and how accurate and ethical this scientific tradition is. The telescope helped aid in celestial observation but was also placed on imperial ships to support the colonization of other worlds. To enrich our “recursive transhistorical turn to the moon,” Cornum mentioned seventeenth-century astronomer Michael Van Langren, the Afronauts of Zambia, the 1960s Lebanese Rocket Society, and even the recent talk by SFRA Executive Committee-sponsored DEI/EDI speaker, Native Aymara Bolivian graduate student Ruben Chambi Mayta (the last on the increasingly globalized nature of Indigenous speculative storytelling). They afterward provided a close reading of a short story about the moon landing by Simón Ortiz (Pueblo) from Acoma, Sky City (a community mainly close to the sky, being on top of a large mesa). Published in Grace Dillon’s edited collection, Walking the Clouds (2012), the Indigenous characters in Ortiz’s story point out that the men who went looking for knowledge to the moon only brought back rocks, ignoring where knowledge truly lies.In the height of the postwar era, during civil rights struggles, poor people’s movements, and women’s and queer/trans protests, the rebellious and deep thinking in US society had wanted the government to prioritize economic justice, while globally, former territories and colonies fought for people’s independence from the empire. Cornum’s talk shone a light on this larger political perspective. During preparations and propaganda for the Apollo launch, marginalized communities within the US marched against the space program, urging the government to attend instead to poverty and economically struggling groups’ lives, using slogans such as “Rockets or Rickets” in their signs.Cornum concluded the presentation by comparing the romanticized portrayal of space travel, which suggests it offers a chance to recreate the miracle of life as depicted in literature, with the real-life consequences of adopting a “growth, development, innovation” approach to (inter)planetary relations, which leads to the destruction of the ecosphere and its living systems.During the closing remarks, co-organizer Moritz Ingwersen (TU Dresden) underscored the conference’s mission to explore the imaginative realms of disruption that are trying to counterbalance the impacts of capitalism and the pressing climate crisis.The event achieved this by nurturing the exploration of radical and thought-provoking speculative art and literature. It celebrated the richness, diversity, and interdisciplinary nature inherent in the study of science fiction and fantasy. Moreover, the conference embraced the concept of pluralistic imagination, rejecting singular and individualistic notions and welcoming a myriad of theoretical perspectives and scholars from diverse backgrounds.Similar to the evolution of SF itself and the ongoing reinterpretations within its study, the conference served as a pivotal moment for reevaluating scholarly reflections on the genre and the professional implications of dedicating research to SF.Ingwersen also stressed the collaborative spirit of the endeavor, emphasizing the necessity for inclusivity and scale to foster a fruitful and multidisciplinary experience. The event welcomed participants from various fields, cultures, and scholarly traditions, ensuring a comprehensive exploration of SF and its intersections.In conclusion, the conference provided a platform for radical reflection and substantive critique, challenging the status quo and envisioning alternative futures. It facilitated scholarly dialogues on pressing issues such as imperialism, colonialism, violence, and exploitation. Notably, the conversations that emerged around exploring alternative futures and engaging with non-Western perspectives stood out as the most significant accomplishments of the event.