Ariel Kroon

In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake , the apocalypse is brought about by the character Crake, who devises and unleashes a virus to wipe out human life. Far from a typical mad-scientist villain who abandons reason and turns against his own society, however, Crake exists in a social milieu that encourages the “mad” prizing of knowledge at the expense of feeling and the routine degradation and oppression of other humans. Drawing on the affect theory of Jonathan Flatley, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, I analyze Crake as an exemplary denizen of the “happiness dystopia” that is his society. I argue that Crake’s disanthropic attitude is not recognized by other characters because the scientific and socioeconomic systems are perpetuated by a disaffected response to suffering. Crake does not appear mad, as even his genocidal endgame conforms to the affective logic of his society, effectively camouflaging his methods and motives from detection.

This is a text written to accompany Dr Justin Quaid Grubb's art exhibit titled SURVIVING THE WILDS OF THE PANHANDLE, commissioned by The Art Gallery at The University of West Florida (Sept. 29-Nov. 18, 2022).

Excerpt: “The future,” asserts queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, “is queerness’s domain. [It] is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (1). SURVIVING THE WILDS OF THE PANHANDLE is a demonstration of queer utopic desire that comes at a time when the sociopolitical state is intolerant of non-dominant identities: the work is unapologetic in its difference and, further, in taking up space and refusing to blend in, gesturing towards a collective queer futurity that does not ask permission to exist. Justin Quaid Grubb’s work demonstrates in the contemporary moment a hope for queer futurity in action despite the “wilds” of the present sociopolitical order.

In response to the extraordinary crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, reigning Canadian Liberal party has mirrored President Biden’s campaign slogan and vowed to “build back better”, a promise matched by official opposition the Canadian Conservative Party to “build back stronger”. The similarity of these two promises is striking: both future-oriented yet deeply invested in an iteration of the future as built on the past as signified by “back”. Canadians have only to parse the valences of what constitutes “better” and “stronger”, yet these pledges are fundamentally the same in resting on an affective promise that is cruelly optimistic. Lauren Berlant succinctly defines the desire for the “good life” despite the fact that the world as we know it is actively falling apart as cruel optimism: “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (24). In promising a return to “normal”, politicians tacitly endorse a status quo that is colonialist, white supremacist, structurally racist, misogynist, heteronormative, and not at all bothered about the climate crisis. Utopia is often figured as a vision of the future based in ideals of the conservative past: a prescriptive, unchanging society that benefits those in power. The Utopian state is not actually future-oriented but instead looks backwards in time and, I argue, any politics seeking to move towards utopia are likely to be actively regressive in realizing utopic desire. In this short paper, I will argue that José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of queer utopia, an open-ended and never-finished process of becoming, is a crucial intervention necessary to challenge fascist, past-glorifying political formations that seek a static status quo. Instead, a queer utopia is a much more useful critical tool to use in order to meaningfully create a future beyond the impasse of the climate and COVID-19 crises.

The Anthropocene has emerged as the dominant conception of the contemporary moment, centering the human individual as both responsible for and bearing the responsibility to counteract its numerous interrelated socioeconomic, political, and environmental issues including the staggering loss of biodiversity across the globe and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This constitutes a significant psychological impasse that disempowers and disenfranchises humans living in this epoch, discouraging any substantive individual effort. Drawing on the posthuman feminist philosophy of theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Stacy Alaimo together with a reflection of the power of science fiction as a literature of cognitive estrangement highlighting social issues, this paper reads “The Boston Hearth Project” by T.X. Watson as a short story demonstrative of an ethos of community and hope that resists the negative affects and oppressive social structures of the Anthropocene. I argue in the course of this paper that theorists and activists alike must turn to alternative narratives, such as those modelled in the emergent science fiction genre of solarpunk, in order to reject essentializing and individualizing forces and think multiply in order to realize meaningful resistance in a time of increasing fragmentation in society and destruction of the more-than-human world.

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/2

In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, the apocalypse is brought about by the character Crake, who devises and unleashes a virus to wipe out human life. Far from a typical mad-scientist villain who abandons reason and turns against his own society, however, Crake exists in a social milieu that encourages the “mad” prizing of knowledge at the expense of feeling and the routine degradation and oppression of other humans. Drawing on the affect theory of Jonathan Flatley, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, I analyze Crake as an exemplary denizen of the “happiness dystopia” that is his society. I argue that Crake’s disanthropic attitude is not recognized by other characters because the scientific and socioeconomic systems are perpetuated by a disaffected response to suffering. Crake does not appear mad, as even his genocidal endgame conforms to the affective logic of his society, effectively camouflaging his methods and motives from detection.

NB: This article “Reasonably Insane: Affect and Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” originally appeared in Emerging Scholars. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 226 (Autumn 2015): 18-33, and is not available except through institutional access or purchase of the issue from Canadian Literature's website (as linked above).

Review of:

Measures of Astonishment: Poets on Poetry. By the League of Canadian Poets. University of Regina Press.

and

Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics. By Bart Vautour (Editor), Erin Wunker (Editor), Travis V. Mason (Editor) and Christl Verduyn (Editor). Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Presented at the Paradise on Fire: 2019 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment conference, on 26 Jun 2019, at the University of California - Davis, Davis, CA, USA.

nb: this was presented as part of a panel, and had a powerpoint to go with it, slides available on request.

Presented at ReSurfacing: women writing across Canada in the 1970s / Réfaire Surface: écrivaines canadiennes des années 1970 conference, hosted by Mount Allison University & Université de Moncton, 28 Apr. 2018, in Sackville NB, and Moncton NB.

This thesis examines settler-Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction (SF) by English-language and Francophone Québécois authors published between 1948 and 1989, in order to investigate how historical settler imaginations of disaster are articulated. This study is in service of several ends: first, to disrupt and interrogate the Canadian literary canon through the study of SF as a legitimate genre with important insights; second, to take a good, hard look at the development of what theorists have called a neoconservative and regressive genre in settler Canada and Québec; and third, to look to the past for strategies to live in an imagined future where worldwide disaster (“apocalypse”) has already transpired. I argue that the visions of the post-apocalyptic future that were prevalent in SF produced in Canada during the latter half of the twentieth century correspond to a singular narrative in SF that is based on and around tropes established by earlier SF and literary writing published in the US. In the course of my research, I found that while most of the forty-four texts in this genre adhere to a specifically Canadian settler-colonial and ultimately instrumentalist worldview, there are several texts that demonstrate divergent attitudes and sociopolitical alternatives to dominant cultural imaginings of the methods of survival in the post-apocalypse. I focus my study on these few texts that I argue depart in significant ways from a dominant post-apocalyptic narrative, subverting the genre and taking it to new places. While doing so, I reference and make note of other texts and use them to illustrate my arguments, comparing and contrasting them with the main texts and tropes under discussion. In chapter order, the main theoretical lenses I employed are: 1. Canadian SF theory and environmental criticism, 2. ecofeminism and feminist posthumanism, 3. post-colonial and decolonial thought specifically focusing on Quebec and Indigenous issues, and 4. affect and queer theory. This dissertation contributes to excavating and highlighting the colonial survival mindset that colours the stories we tell ourselves, and shines a light on the philosophies underpinning our actions as we move forward into the Anthropocene. It is a project that seeks to build imaginative capacity for writers, critics, theorists, and readers of SF. I argue that these scripts both cleave to and depart from reality, and that dominant settler assumptions based on individualism and garrison mentality as a way to survive crises ignore the crucial role of care and healthy community in encouraging human flourishing in its diverse forms. My research shows that, in the post-apocalypse, which more often than not is marked by ongoing crises, people who are able to move beyond disaster survival narratives are the ones that in the end are able to create a life for themselves and others worth living—in non-hierarchical community, in relations of care, and in an acknowledgement of their posthuman entanglement with the non-human world and their environment. My findings from this study are that the imaginary of the post-apocalypse necessarily must incorporate community, connection, and post-anthropocentrism as key facets in order to truly move beyond the fear-driven regressive, exclusionary, and violent impulses of survival. Unsubscribing from the single version of the post-apocalyptic narrative that anticipates the garrison mentality as a necessary corollary of worldwide devastation can allow for a critical appraisal of the present in order to consciously move beyond survival and into the future.