Science Fiction and US Empire

The genre of science fiction has been deeply connected to imperialism since its early iterations in the late-nineteenth century. Science fiction plots have dramatized imperial projects, mapping out the colonization and conquest of alien worlds, and they have staged scenes of alien invasion, which foster forms nationalism that license and enable imperial expansion in times of economic crisis. Equally, science fiction’s close relationship with empire makes it fertile ground for anti-imperialist reformulation and reinvention: post- and decolonial fiction and film across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made use of science fiction to interrogate regimes of racialized, gendered and ecocidal extraction, and to imagine alternative worlds.

In this latest (Con)Current Events series, we consider how science fiction mediates, anticipates, services and critiques US imperialism, and in particular its emergence in increasingly bald-faced form in the new millennium. How are science fiction imaginaries being marshalled in support in of imperialist agendas? What links the rise of science fiction in the last decades of the British Empire to the science fiction surge in and around the US today? Lead by Rune Graulund (University of Southern Denmark) and Johan Höglund (Linnaeus University), this (Con)Current Event will address and explore these questions in talks and discussion, and will include a screening of science film.

Johan Höglund is Professor of English at Linnaeus University, a founding member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and co-director of the research cluster Ecology, Culture, and Coloniality at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published extensively on the relationship between popular culture, colonialism, and extractive capitalism with particular attention to Gothic and climate fiction. He is the author of The American Climate Emergency Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: Gothic and the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Nordic Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2020), B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Animal Horror Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Rune Graulund is Associate Professor in American Literature at the Centre for American Studies at University of Southern Denmark. He has published widely in gothic studies, including the books Grotesque (New Critical Idiom, Routledge, 2013), co-authored with Justin D. Edwards, and Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), co-edited with Justin D. Edwards and Johan Höglund. He is currently working on a second edition of Grotesque, which will include new chapters on planetary grotesque and political grotesque

The seminar will be held in English. 

Please register if you want to participate via Zoom. 

Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies