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.
The essays and introduction, which Banerjee co-authored, argue that reactionary worldbuilding is a large-scale, widespread and long-lasting phenomenon and deserves to be studied across time and place.
Essays in the book’s first section “Plots,” focus on how fictional texts have influenced politics, such as the author Ayn Rand’s invention of the neoliberal hero embraced by libertarians or Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear” laying groundwork for later climate change denial.
The second section, “Methods,” considers how politicians have implemented science fictional aspirations in real-world policies and projects. Among these is Born’s “Reverse Engineering: Speculative Megaprojects, Reactionary Modernisms, and Early German Science Fiction,” which examines literal reactionary worldbuilding in early 20th century Germany. Speculative infrastructural megaprojects sought to restore a societal status quo through technology, he argues.
“Like other modernizing nations, Germany gave rise to a synthesis of cultural pessimism and technological optimism,” Born writes. “With its apex in the 1920s and 30s, reactionary modernism can be understood as an attempt to reject Enlightenment values of freedom and equality while promoting Fordism and technological progress.”
In the same section, Banerjee (with April Anson) considers the confluence of extremism and environmentalism, writing in their essay “Green Walls: Everyday Ecofascism and the Politics of Proximity” about racially motivated attacks committed in Texas and New Zealand.
Chapters in the collection’s final section, “Forms,” consider what it means to turn the tools developed to study speculative fiction toward analyzing ideologies influencing today’s world.
“Identifying which ideological groups or individual actors engage in reactionary worldbuilding is not the aim of the volume,” Banerjee said. “Rather, our ultimate objective is to inspire readers to ask a much harder question and engage in a much more complex task of self-reflection – and, in the process, to start interrogating some of the default modes in which we ourselves talk about the feedback loops between culture, society and politics.”
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