A new collection co-edited by Cornell University literature scholar Anindita Banerjee examines how ideas and techniques associated with speculative fiction can move into real-world political movements and violence.
“Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice,” published by MIT Press and available through open access, brings together scholars who study the relationship between imagined worlds and political action.
Banerjee, an associate professor of comparative literature in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, said the gallows erected outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, echoed the climax of “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian novel associated with white supremacist extremism.
She also pointed to political invocations of “The Great Replacement,” a 2001 work of speculative fiction from France. Banerjee said the idea later appeared in the 2017 Charlottesville rally and in mass violence targeting immigrants and minority groups.
Those parallels led Banerjee, who has written extensively about science fiction, to ask colleagues to explore what happens when worldbuilding is adopted in a charged political environment. Worldbuilding is a literary technique in which an author constructs a setting and social order different from the reader's reality.
The collection focuses on what Cornell described as the darker side of that process. Its contributors examine how speculative narratives can supply symbols, plots and imagined social structures that political actors attempt to put into practice.
Erik Born, an associate professor of German studies in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, is among the scholars whose work appears in the volume. The source material released by Cornell did not provide a complete list of contributors or chapter topics.
Banerjee said the book does not treat speculative art only as a source of reactionary ideas. Its contributors also consider how those forms can help people understand themselves and the world and can support alternatives to violent or exclusionary politics.
The project grew from Banerjee's call for scholars to study how fictional frameworks can be co-opted outside literature. The resulting collection places those questions across the boundary between literary criticism and contemporary political analysis.
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