Alterity and Capitalism in Speculative Fiction: Estranging Contemporary History

Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction: Anamorphic Estrangement
	Gothic Marxism: Historical Materialism and the Fantastic
	The Critique of Suvin’s SF Theory
	Mark Bould’s Paranoid Theory of Fantasy: Ontology as Hermeneutics
	Anamorphic Estrangement
	Estrangement and Historicity: What Can We Do with It?
	Overview of the Book
	Bibliography
Chapter 2: Marxism as Narrative World-Building Method: New Weird Fiction and Capitalist Crisis in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag Trilogy
	Weird Metaphors: A Fantastic Interrogation of History
	Marxism as Narrative World-Building Method
	Bas-Lag and Marx’s Theory of Crisis: The Possibility of the Impossible
	Bas-Lag’s Abcanny Universe: Benjamin’s Allegory
	Bas-Lag’s Industrial Capitalism: A Fantastic Documentation of Capitalist Crises
	Remaking: Radical Social Labour Exploitation
	The Plague of Nightmares: Weird Approximations to Capital
	Crisis as Ontology: The Possibility of the Impossible
	The Weaver: A Revolutionary Conception of Crisis
	Renovating the Fantasy of Revolution
	Conclusion
	Bibliography
Chapter 3: The Afterlives of Slavery: Spectres of the Antebellum in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland
	The Underground Railroad: A Collage of Institutional Racism
	The Political Economy of Racism
	Scenes from Darkest Africa
	Spaghetti Western
	Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland
	Sorrowland: Black Liberation?
	Sorrowland: The Hauntings of Black History
	Sorrowland: Sympoiesis and Black Liberation
	Conclusion
	Bibliography
Chapter 4: Challenging Cultural Studies Through Dystopia: Catatonic Cultural Dominant in Noon’s Falling Out of Cars and McCormack’s Notes from a Coma
	Catatonia and/or Schizophrenia: A Dynamic Cultural Dominant
	Dystopia as a Metaphor for the Present
	Falling Out of Cars: Catatonic Stasis
	Falling Out of Cars: Catatonic Écriture and Losing the Traces of the World
	Falling Out of Cars: Catatonic Capitalism
	Notes from a Coma: Comatose Future and Catatonic Zeitgeist
	Notes from a Coma: Coma and Exhaustion
	The Coma Zeitgeist: Towards a Catatonic Future
	Notes from a Coma: Post-Apocalyptic Mode of Production
	Conclusion
	Bibliography
Chapter 5: Extrapolation and Social Reproduction: Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time and Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps
	Plausibility as Rhetorical Effect: Towards a Diachronic View of Extrapolation
	Speculative Fiction and Socialist Feminism: Social Reproduction
	Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time
	Dreams Before the Start of Time: Beyond the Nuclear Family
	Dreams Before the Start of Time: Capitalist Eugenics and Class Difference
	Before the Start of Time: Integrating Gender and Class Struggles
	Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps
	Before She Sleeps: Integrative World-Building
	Before She Sleeps: Local and Universal Extrapolation
	Before She Sleeps: The Underground Resistance
	Before She Sleeps: The Trajectory of Feminist Movements
	Bibliography
Chapter 6: Conclusion: New Horizons for a Marxist Theory of Speculative Fiction
	Future Research
	Bibliography
Index