Author Archives: Professor Arielle Saiber

Tai Shani’s Feminist Science Fiction Novel Draws on Spoken Word Performance

“Since 2014, artist Tai Shani, a nominee for the 2019 Turner Prize, has constructed hallucinatory environments inhabited by feminine characters adapted from myth, history, and science fiction. This multipart project—encompassing sculpture, graphic images, installations, film, and performance—has taken several forms, one of them culminating in her first book, Our Fatal Magic. Each of the volume’s twelve chapters is an elliptical, phantasmagoric monologue delivered by one of Shani’s figures: a medieval mystic, a cube of flesh embodying the fairy-tale Bluebeard’s multiple murdered wives, even an AI program named after Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. Several of Shani’s projects have been presented under the rubric “Dark Continent” (or “DC”), a reference to Freud’s infamous description of female sexual psychology—a characterization shaped by the colonial geographic imagination. The setting of Our Fatal Magic is the land of Semiramis, named for the legendary Assyrian queen. Though she does not make an appearance in any of the chapters of Shani’s book, Semiramis is the cornerstone in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, a fifteenth-century allegory about the contributions of women to human society, which treats its heroines as the structural elements of a new city. The opening Note of Our Fatal Magic refers to the compilation’s source project, “DC: Semiramis,” as an “expanded adaptation” of de Pizan’s book.”  –-Artnews

Osiris, Volume 34 PRESENTING FUTURES PAST: SCIENCE FICTION AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

“The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. This volume of Osiris focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of storytelling—science fiction (SF), told through a variety of media—and the history of science.

The protagonists of these two enterprises have a lot in common. Both SF and the history of science are oriented towards the (re)construction of unfamiliar worlds; both are fascinated by the ways in which natural and social systems interact; both are critically aware of the different ways in which the social (class, gender, race, sex, species) has inflected the experience of the scientific. Taking a global approach, Presenting Futures Past examines the ways in which SF can be used to investigate the cultural status and authority afforded to science at different times and in different places. The essays consider the role played by SF in the history of specific scientific disciplines, topics, or cultures, as well as the ways in which it has helped to move scientific concepts, methodologies, and practices between wider cultural areas. Ultimately, Presenting Futures Past explores what SF can tell us about the histories of the future, how different communities have envisaged their futures, and how SF conveys the socioscientific claims of past presents.”   University of Chicago Press