Terraformings

Authors

  • Vincent Bruyere Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.OI.10.2.2

Keywords:

Terraforming, Historiography, planetary engineering

Abstract

Terraforming, or planetary engineering, is a speculative domain of activity entertaining colonial solutions to extreme disaster and systemic crises in the age of spatial exploration. Since the 1940s, terraforming has provided an extremely fertile playground for science fiction writers, whose terraformed worlds have blown up to planetary dimensions the historical and narrative contours of a novelistic tradition born at the beginning of the eighteenth century on Robinson Crusoe’s island. It is my contention that the speculative existence of terraformed worlds is always already informed by a cultural memory of oikos—the inhabited world. No less experimental in tone and intent than terraforming itself, this paper seeks to transform terraforming into a critical tool in visual culture: a mode of handling texts and images whose temporal parameters exceed that of traditional historiography.

Author Biography

Vincent Bruyere, Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University

Vincent Bruyere is associate professor of French and affiliate faculty in the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of two books: Perishability Fatigue: Forays Into Environmental Loss and Decay, published by Columbia University Press in 2018, and La différence francophone (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012).

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Published

2020-03-30

How to Cite

Bruyere, V. (2020). Terraformings. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 10(2), 39–64. https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.OI.10.2.2

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Section

Articles