Description
Book SynopsisAn anthropologically based interdisciplinary collection on sites and projections of imagined futures from conspiracy theorists to technological dystopias.
Trade Review“An eclectic, provocative mix of ideas and approaches united by their common intelligence and lucidity, the essays in Daniel Rosenberg’s and Susan Harding’s
Histories of the Future tease out unexpected adjacencies between a welter of social, political, and cultural scenarios that touch on questions of the
yet-to-come. This is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the relationship of the future to the past—and of the present to both.”—Jeffrey Kastner, senior editor of
Cabinet magazine
“Telling of timelines to the end of time and boom times for imagining the future, this fine book is a boon for all of us who tune in for such timely discourses. Astute essays—and a chancy global futures card game—take the reader from salvage frontiers in South Kalimantan; to desert folk futurologies in Rachel, Nevada, and lived surreal cityscapes in Irvine, California; to fraught future makings through art, technology, and social movements in the Philippines and Japan; to that end-of-the millennium portal, Heaven’s Gate.
Histories of the Future experiments with topic, genre, and mode. Its own narratives of the metastasizing metanarratives of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century future making are at home in trauma time, everyday time, Big Time, prophecy time, local nonstandard time, and global time. Asking how to examine grand stories with local acts, this valuable collection makes palpable the rich collaborative thinking that bound the authors as they studied the shapes of futures already lost and futures still imaginable. We never get Big Stories out of place; rather,
Histories of the Future gives us robust places, artifacts, practices, texts, and performances in which narrative control of possible futures is at stake.”—Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
1. Introduction: Histories of the Future / Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding 1
2. A Notebook on Desert Modernism: From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace's Two-Hundred-Pound Suit / Joseph Masco 19
3. How to Make Resources in Order to Destroy Them (and Then Save Them?) on the Salvage Frontier / Anna Tsing 51
4. The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines / Vicente L. Rafael 75
Interlude I. Global Futures: The Game / Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Pollman 105
5. Electronic Memory / Daniel Rosenberg 123
6. All That Is Solid Melts into Sauce: Futurists, Surrealists, and Molded Food / Jamar Hunt 153
7. Sing Out Ubik / Pamela Jackson 171
Interlude II. Access Fantasy: A Story / Jonathan Lethem 185
8. Subject, City, Machine / Miryam Sas 202
Interlude III. Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement / Hirato Renkichi (Translated by Miryam Sas) 225
9. The Future of the Old Economy: New Deal Motives in New Economy Investors / Christopher Newfield 231
10. Why Rachel Isn't Buried at Her Grave: Ghosts, UFOs, and a Place in the West / Susan Lepselter 255
Interlude IV. The Trouble with Timelines and a Timeline of Timelines / Daniel Rosenberg and Sasha Archibald 281
11. Living Prophecy at Heaven's Gate / Susan Harding 297
12. Trauma Time: A Still Life / Kathleen Stewart 321
Bibliography 341
Notes on Contributors 355
Index 357
