Imperialist Nostalgia and Untranslatable Affect in Ling Ma's Severance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11061580 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Claire Gullander-Drolet (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 94-108 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Fiction Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-7729 • E-ISSN: 2327-6207 |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sfs.2021.0024 |
| OpenAlex | W4205759090 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
This article argues that Ling Ma's 2018 novel Severance positions American consumerism and its ties to East Asian economies and mass production as the origin point for an apocalyptic future. Severance's nostalgic attachments to both the 1980s and to China serve as a roadmap for understanding currently unfolding global crises, rendering visible the west's complicated and longstanding imbrication with East Asian economies and labor practices that are frequently downplayed, if remarked upon at all, in western mass-media framings. Beginning by offering “imperialist nostalgia” as a framework through which to approach the double-bind of nostalgic attachment and affect in Ma's text, I argue that it is the protagonist's positionality as a transpacific subject—i.e, as a diasporic Chinese American with economic and personal ties to both her country of origin and her country of residence—that enables the reader to make sense of nostalgia's capacity to injure and conceal harm. I then move to consider the text's nostalgic inheritances from the 1980s, both in the form of film genres that inform its speculative structure and in the specters of economic excess that haunt the novel. Here, I position Severance within a long line of American sf that takes capitalist excess and/or a fear of East Asian economic ascendence as its animating principle, while also underscoring the novel's unique intervention in this genre through its engagement with forms of imperialist nostalgia
Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics) · Art · China · Harm · Political economy · Political science · Severance · Sociology · History · Law · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Travel Writing and Literature
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,8 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |