This article proposes the concepts of “brutal” and “gentle” affects as a critical framework to analyze affective economies of freedom in paradoxical times. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on affect, Sruti Bala’s on participation, and Franco Berardi’s on freedom, it argues that freedom emerges not solely as a historical achievement of an inalienable right, but as an embodied experience enhanced by theatrical dispositifs. I consider forms of celebrating, performing, and capturing freedom in paradoxical times, including the staging of the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution; the production 25th of April 1974 by Portuguese company Mala Voadora; and The Seagull by Argentinian director Guillermo Cacace. I begin with a discussion of the relationship between populism and notions of freedom, describing the nuanced usage and political capture of the latter to examine its paradoxes in the present. I then examine how these productions critically engage with the paradoxes of freedom and reset the conditions of experience of its affective-sensorium.
Keyword: fiction
Review of Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones by Marc DiPaolo (State University of New York Press)
Marc DiPaolo’s Fire and Snow engages with the burgeoning ‘cli-fi’ genre which speculates on climate change themes and corollary effects. Through close examination of such diverse works as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, and “low-culture” films Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road, DiPaolo both argues in favor of non-partisan collective action against climate change and explores broader public engagement with environmental themes. Primarily a survey text, Fire and Snow nevertheless provides considered analysis of the relationship between authors, producers, and consumers in the dissemination of cli-fi messaging in popular culture.
The Necropolitics of Liberty: Sovereignty, Fantasy, and United States Gun Culture
This article approaches the speculative fiction of the survivalist right as an archive that can illuminate the continuities between the fantasies of necropolitical power that animate the radical right and undergird the sovereignty of the United States. Focusing on Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupier LaVoy Finicum’s 2015 novel Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom, this essay argues that such survivalist fiction, in imagining a future civil conflict that enables the reinstatement of Lockean property rights, should be understood as settler colonial rather than anti-statist. In representing the dystopian future in which “public lands” are reopened as a frontier, survivalist novels like Finicum’s reaffirm, rather than challenge, the fantasy that produces the constituted power of the United States.