This essay traces the histories of sexual, gender, and racial queerness in works from and about the South, and it insists that anything we might see as uniquely “southern” is still profoundly entangled with the literatures and cultures of the United States and beyond. While there are unequivocally southern works of queer literature, it is crucial to recognize that so many queer southerners are the authors, not the others of the wider queer canon, including works that would seem to have nothing to do with the South at all. But this essay does not stop at simply mapping the complex terrain of queer literature by White, Black, and Native American writers associated with the South. The second half turns to the “dirty south”—a term that is rooted especially in hip hop culture and is always already queer, even when texts do not claim queerness as their center. The dirty south has a long and rich cultural history that unearths complex relations among, bodies, pleasures, and the elements they divulge, making it a new source of aesthetic inspiration for reevaluating the multiracial, multigendered south(s) of the past and building a diverse and insurgent southern culture for the future.

The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

Environmental violence is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society's most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. However, culture could interact with environmental violence beyond the supplementary role it has assigned in the model of environmental violence following Galtung's typology. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and environmental violence, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which our ways of production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. This chapter traces how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with environmental violence by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.

Working from the premise that women’s genealogies take as many forms as the political, historical, and ideological interests of those who wrote, illustrated, or patronized them, this concluding chapter outlines some characteristics of such genealogies and new areas of investigation. Genealogies that construct and convey women’s political and spiritual claims frequently accommodate and even emphasize geographical change, disruptions in succession, and the material nature of textuality. Recognizing the political importance and prevalence of matrilineages in medieval texts in turn offers a broader and more nuanced understanding of medieval concepts of maternity and women’s roles as childbearers.

This chapter identifies a strain of political, affective maladjustment it labels “Hopeless Romanticism,” of which Percy Bysshe Shelley is an exemplary case. It argues that hope plays a fundamental role in the progressivist refusal to abide by the terms of the status quo. Hopeless romantics hold on to visions of a better world in spite of the crushing realities that surround them. This chapter tracks how this affective mechanism manifests in a series of Shelleyan poems where hope leaps past probabilistic boundaries, even as the despair that is hope’s other side repeatedly intrudes. Hope’s structural investment in futurity has made it both a symptom of weakened individual agency and a social portent of political change.

This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.

Chapter four investigates archaic inscriptions and the interplay of song and stone in the poetry of Simonides. The tradition of Simonides gives us both epitaphic inscription and choral epinician, two poetic genres whose means and methods might be seen as so widely divergent as to be unrelated. However, I will explore how the substance of song and the fixity of objects are both in play on both sides of the song and stone divide, through a situatedness that allows Simonides to make claims that memories of the past will endure into the future.

Chapter five demonstrates how the ambition to preserve the past in song and stone leads to the hope of securing a stable sense of the future in the poetry of Pindar and the tragedies of Aeschylus. Here we see how the mere image of writing becomes a vehicle in epinician and tragic poetry not only for imagining systems of memorialization and justice, but also for questioning the systems thus imagined.

Chapter 3 explores survivors’ constructions of identity during and post enslavement. It is argued that the denial of personhood in slavery causes a destruction of identity, but that the giving of narrative plays a vital role in the reconstruction of identity. The chapter surveys the ways in which slavery strips individuals of their cultural, political and/or social identity leading to the formation of multiple identities in survival. Divorced from their past while at the same time defined by it, it reveals the way survivors identify as the child, the parent, the sibling, the survivor, the hero, the victim, and as activist. The chapter moves on to show that the giving of narrative is one means through which survivors can explore and re-sculpt their inner landscape and their external presence, reduce their feelings of shame, isolation and spectralisation, while at the same time acknowledging these multiple identities for themselves and to the audience.

This chapter intervenes in ongoing queer ecocritical debates about reproductive futurity by turning to Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with nurse insects and trees. It demonstrates how Thoreau dislocates biological reproduction in both space and time, urging us to attend to a broader range of participants – and a broader range of contributing actions – in our account of the reproductive process. Arguing that such a complex, multispecies understanding of reproduction distinguishes Thoreau from both contemporary environmentalists, whose rhetoric often relies on normative logics of reproductivity, and queer theorists, who often critique such logics, the chapter theorizes an environmental ethic informed by the extant queerness of reproduction itself. In contrast to the contemporary activist organization “Conceivable Future,” which helps women decide whether to have children in a time of climate catastrophe, such a reading of Thoreau offers possibilities for solidarity and social change that customary definitions of reproduction have rendered inconceivable.

Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, this chapter considers the Child as a conventional figure of futurity – as elucidated by Lee Edelman, Robin Bernstein, Natalia Cecire, Rebecca Evans, and Rebekah Sheldon. What happens to this figure when race becomes explicitly a part of narratives in which children, put into perilous motion by environmental collapse, struggle to find a safe place to grow up? One possible consequence, as Dimaline’s novel illustrates, is the granting to young characters an independent existence from the meanings encoded by the Child. Unlike The Road, which centers the father’s sense of guilt on the son having to find ways to survive in an environmentally destroyed world, The Marrow Thieves centers on young adult characters who struggle to hold together a non-familial community amid an environmental crisis. They think explicitly about how stories can bind them together in the pursuit of common survival even as they can tear individuals apart because of the horrors they recall, and in doing so imagines a future that comes into being in part as a result of the exercise of this agency.

“The Asiatic Modal Imagination” traces the repeated linking of the “Asiatic” with futurity in the Western capitalist imagination. It describes the multiple historical moments where the “Asiatic” is invoked speculatively (from the late nineteenth century to the present) in order to better understand the dual role that Asiatic racialization plays in serving narratives of capital as a driver of universal human history. This racialization occurs via the speculative tropes of a peculiar mixture of genres - world history, political economic tracts, and science fiction. Such discourses and modalities are rampant in the political-economic knowledges produced around the “rise” of China. The chapter unfolds this relationship between Asiatic racialization and future histories of capitalism in the work of Asian American science fiction writers Ted Chiang and Ken Liu. It analyzes these writers for how they interrupt the universalizing narratives of capitalism enabled by speculating on Asia.

This chapter continues to uncover Steinbeck’s interest in Mexico (and the Mexican Revolution) and his relevance as a thinker on the Global South and its social inequalities. Turning to Steinbeck’s collaborative projects in Mexico, the documentary film about water sanitation, The Forgotten Village, and The Pearl--both novel and film made with the Mexican director Emilio Fernandez--we encounter experimental artistic forms that embody a transamerican political vision. If The Forgotten Village fails in its efforts to politicize and improve the living conditions of the indigenous peoples it depicts, then The Pearl represents a more successful attempt to participate in history. Comparing the novel and the film reveals a creative dialogue between Steinbeck and Fernandez, in which the novel’s techniques of sound and vision look forward to its existence as a film. Together with a new understanding of uncertainty and of a human consciousness extending into and capable of changing the world, The Pearl has a curious temporality that imagines society on the verge of revolutionary change.

This essay uses the concept of risk and its various instruments to organize some through-lines in the new modernist studies. The first of its three sections examines risk and futurity through the work of Sarah Cole, Enda Duffy, and Paul Saint-Amour. The second section focuses on economic risk through practices of speculation, ranging from Zora Neale Hurston’s efforts to speculate on folk culture to modernist literature’s imbrication in the welfare state and in speculative markets alike, as studied by Michael Szalay, Laura Meixner, and others. The final section moves to an emergent area in modernist scholarship: studies of speculative fiction – and within that field, futuristic science fiction by minority writers. It looks to George Schuyler’s controversial Black No More as a text that ties together the modes of risk-taking, future-projection, and speculative economics that this essay posits as avenues for continued scholarly engagement.

Radical transfeminism emerges out of the negation of a future based in limited forms of social inclusion and legal rights, which operate as a mode of encapsulation. Developing Marquis Bey’s and Susan Stryker’s conception of trans, the chapter articulates trans as the anti-static, indeterminate, claim to change that refuses stability, opening the possibility of trans action as a platform for futurity. Radical transfeminism is a materialist ethics rooted in poor and precarious transfeminine bodies, going beyond the limits of trans liberalism and homonormativity and the ascendency of neo-fascist politics across parts of the globe. The logics of neoliberal capitalist social inclusion, visibility and exploitation demand a clear identity; the anti-static trans becomes a refusal of the promise of exploitative inclusion and of the forms of captivity manifest in the borders, prisons, and workplaces that feed capitalist domination. Radical transfeminist futurity embraces emergent relations which hold the potential for transforming material conditions through supporting different lives.

This chapter puts Nineteen Eighty-Four in conversation with a literary predecessor who energized Orwell at the very root, H. G. Wells. Considering these two figures side by side, ‘Wells, Orwell, and the Dictator’ thinks, first, about how powerfully Wells had influenced Orwell and, equally, how deeply entangled the two writers were in their consideration of issues around freedom, the state, the individual, and the future. Even if they end up on opposite sides of the spectrum – Wells, a utopian who believed that a united world could leave humanity free, peaceful, and prosperous, and Orwell, an anti-utopian who saw in the trends of the twentieth century an image of humans obliterated by the mechanisms of power – the two share a set of preoccupations about power and the future that motivated their fiction and left a mark on the imaginative life of the twentieth century.