Chapter 6 - Identity and Power

Summary

This chapter registers how questions of collectivity and radical change cannot be considered without questions of gender, race, class and power coming to the fore. In William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014), technology seems at first sight to distinguish the near from far future, but the foundational difference is between gendered bodies. In World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler (2008), the jump-starting of history leads to a pre-modern US from which race is excised, and a world that mirrors the role the South has played in the US regional imaginary in such a way that The Peripheral is revealed as a riff on the counterfactual civil war history. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014) sees the collaborative arts become a societal model in which women can assume prominent roles. However, the novel’s emphasis on timeless ‘beauty’ promotes the post-Fordist creative as human universal, while its patriarchal cult relies on a stereotyped figure of the white South, such that the novel’s utopian overlooking of race threatens to efface the history of slavery. Station Eleven ultimately splits between the return of a fatally compromised history, and a utopian break from it.