World-ecological crisis and the resourceful futures of world-SF

The idea that it seems “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” seems truer than ever. If, as this maxim (typically attributed to Fredric Jameson) suggests, a future of capitalist “business as usual” is incompatible with the long-term prosperity of all life on a damaged planet, how might the imaginative stranglehold that capitalism has upon our ability to imagine the future be broken? To begin answering this question, my thesis examines speculative fiction (SF) through emergent “worlded” and “resourceful” methodologies proposed by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) and developed by others, which read “world-literature” via Jason W. Moore’s (2015a) “world-ecological” re-conception of capitalism, and the uneven materialities of capitalist resource extractivism. In this sense, my thesis establishes and interrogates what I term world-SF: SF that registers and grapples with the uneven futures of the capitalist world-system and what Moore calls its ongoing world-ecological crisis. SF in “science fictional” guises has typically been associated with the privileged and typically “white” imaginaries of world-systemic cores. Recent years, however, have witnessed a growing outpouring of SF from the systemic peripheries long ignored by such imaginaries. It is to these fictions in particular that I turn. Despite emerging in different times and places within the neoliberal “arc”, the SF modes of North American and Caribbean ‘Afrofuturism’ (Dery 1994), South Africa’s ‘postapartheid speculative’ (Duncan 2018a), and what I call Nigerian post-petro-magic futurism all stage a coming to world-ecological consciousness that grasps the durable aftermaths of capital’s uneven, racialised environment-making. These three clusters of interrelated SF texts reclaim the Black futures foreclosed by decades of neoliberalisation. When read as world-SF, however, they also open newly imaginative terrains from which to cultivate worlded and resourceful forms of thinking and being that can negotiate the uneven futures of world-ecological crisis.