Images of gallows that went up outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, struck Cornell literature scholar Anindita Banerjee hard, not just for their unforgettable nature, she said, but because she'd seen them before.
"They were a literal enactment of the climax of a dystopian novel called 'The Turner Diaries,' a near-future speculative fiction that was last made famous by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber of 1995, who carried handwritten quotes from the novel on his person," said Banerjee, associate professor of comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). "For me, that moment was déjà vu, as were the increasingly frequent invocations of 'The Great Replacement,' another work of speculative fiction published in France in 2001, in rallies at Charlottesville in 2017 and mass murders of immigrants and minorities throughout the last decade."
Banerjee, who has written extensively about science fiction, called on colleagues to consider, with her, how worldbuilding, a technique in which a science fiction author creates a world different from the reality the reader actually inhabits, has been coopted in today's charged political climates. She is a co-editor of the resulting collection, "Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice," (MIT Press, open access).
In the book, Banerjee and other scholars, including Erik Born, associate professor of German studies (A&S), examine the dark side of worldbuilding, exploring the connection between speculative imagination and political practice. Nevertheless, contributors to the volume hold onto hope that the speculative arts can still serve as crucial foundations for making sense of the self and the world, Banerjee said.
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
