This site features the work of San Diego State University students of the Humanities course “The Future,” taught by Dr. April Anson. We engage “The Future” through these frames:
“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” –Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
“The story we tell ourselves about environmental crises, the story of humanity’s place on the earth… determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to do.” – Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, Or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” 763-4
“The past is prologue” –Antonio, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1
“Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is who gets to decide the future for a given geography” –adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, 163
If the future is what we make it, we are futurists! We decide what will come into being and what will perish. Yet, in the context of accelerating climate change, current coronavirus questions, and the in-progress sixth extinction, the future can feel fast approaching, looming even, and paralyzing. Still, many who have come before expressed similar fears. Indeed, “the past is prologue.” If the future is what we make it, and we are to make it, we must determine what from the past deserves repeating and what demands revolt. We must decide what worlds we should work to create and which ones we need to end.
“The Future” engages these futurist questions through stories of apocalypse. We think with North American novels, film, poetry, and video games that detail surviving apocalypses, predict current ones, or imagine future ends-of-worlds, both near and far. With each, we recognize that “Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who though economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist” (adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, 197). As futurists, we discuss how apocalyptic stories can represent and contest the deadly legacies of genocide, slavery, colonialism, and capitalism now manifesting in a changing climate and other unequal distributions of promises and threats. We investigate the ways works of art attempt to render these complex and perhaps overwhelming concepts comprehensible so that we may envision and enact just futures.