Restless Subjects in Rigid Systems : : Risk and Speculation in Millennial Fictions of the North American Pacific Rim / / Susanne Wegener.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter transcript Backlist eBook Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Wegener, Susanne,
• Place / Publishing House: Bielefeld : : transcript Verlag, , [2014]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: 1. Aufl.
• Language: English
• Series: American Culture Studies ; 7
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.)

The anticipatory logic of speculation and preemptive politics of risk are increasingly gaining significance in a globalizing neoliberal world. This study traces risk and speculation as aesthetic and political-economic strategies in factual and fictional discourses emerging at the North American Pacific Rim within a decade around 2000. Its exemplary close readings in particular focus on three fictional texts (Kathryn Bigelow's Hollywood film »Strange Days«, 1995, Karen T. Yamashita's novel »Tropic of Orange«, 1997, and Larissa Lai's novel »Salt Fish Girl«, 2002) whose intricate aesthetics pass perceptive critique on concurrent political-economic discourses and their subtle reconfiguration of race, class, and gender. The speculative near-future scenarios projected by these artifacts expose the rise of risk as a new rationality of governance. At the same time they illustrate neoliberal speculation as a new paradigm of subject formation at a hyper-capitalist, millennial Pacific Rim.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENT -- 1. INTRODUCTION: DEALING IN FUTURES -- 2. ARE YOU PARANOID ENOUGH? KATHRYN BIGELOW’S STRANGE DAYS AND THE POLITICS OF RISK AND SPECULATION -- 3. LIVE ON THE EDGE I SAY: EDGEWORK, RISK, AND LITERARY FORM IN KAREN TEI YAMASHITA’S TROPIC OF ORANGE -- 4. MONSTROUS POLITICS: EPISTEMOLOGICAL EMPOWERMENT, NATURAL SCIENCE, AND NEW TERRITORIES OF EMPIRE IN LARISSA LAI’S SALT FISH GIRL -- 5. TOWARDS A POETICS OF RISK AND SPECULATION -- 6. WORKS CITED