What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.
There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In this book, drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.
How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.
"T.J Demos's inspiring vision for decolonial antiracist ecosocialism resoundingly defeats today's fatalistic nihilism. When comradeship exceeds particularity, we can forge the transformative solidarity necessary for an emancipatory egalitarian future."
— Jodi Dean
"Demos's attention to distinct speculative and improvisational artistic practices, movements, and modes of social organization made common in their commitment to "planetary solidarities' across antiracist and anti-capitalist struggles-manages to retain a pessimistic hope for political transformation beyond the foreclosures of the racial Capitalocene."
— Rizvana Bradley
"Going beyond and against liberal identity politics and merely metaphorical forms of decolonization, and opening a conceptual and affective space for solidarity in uncommonality,
Radical Futurisms combines the clarity and urgency of a manifesto with the incisiveness and insightfulness of scholarship."
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Sven LüttickenT. J. Demos writes widely on modern and contemporary art and his essays have appeared in journals such as
Grey Room,
October,
Third Text, and
Nka. He is also a critic, writing for magazines such as
Artforum and
Texte zur Kunst. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions.
