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Keynote: Humanization and Belonging: Reproduction, Environment, Futurity
November 5, 2020 @ 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Note: This is a virtual event, part of the Environmentalism, Fantasy, and Intersectionality: A Comparison Between the US and the EU conference held at UNC–Chapel Hill on November 5–6, 2020.
This paper will argue that speculative genres ably convey how politics of migration are grounded in a racialized discourse of the human. Anxieties about national belonging and a “proper” relationship to specific environments express anxieties about difference that have their roots in “the human” as a category of racialization. Both Claire Denis’ High Life (2018) and Ali Abbasi’s Border (2018) use sf techniques to interrogate the anxieties about migration intersection with discourses of dehumanization. In distinct ways, both films raise questions about familiar reproduction and its intersections with the larger question of the reproduction (or not) of the human species itself.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science Program. An editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies, and a founding editor of the journal Science Fiction Film and Television, she has published widely on science fiction. Professor Vint is author of Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (2014), Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (2010), and Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (2007). She is editor of Science Fiction and Cultural Theory: A Reader (2016) and The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011).
This talk is the keynote lecture for the 2020 conference, “Environmentalism, Fantasy and Intersectionality: A Comparison Between the US and the EU.” This conference is organized by Priscilla Layne, Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at UNC. The conference events, including this keynote, are co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.
The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
