Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times by Aimee Bahng

2020; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jaas.2020.0014

1097-2129

Keva X. Bui,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Reviewed by: Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times by Aimee Bahng Keva X. Bui (bio) Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, by Aimee Bahng. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018. 248 pp. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8223-7301-8. Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures offers a bold intervention into the future: both in the sense that it charts new ground for speculative thinking about the landscape of futurity as well as its stunning capacity to reshape the future of Asian American and ethnic studies. While Asian American studies has deeply theorized the proliferation of cultural imaginaries associating Asia and Asians with discourses of modernity and technology—what Kevin Robins and David Morley termed techno-Orientalism in their book Spaces of Identity: Global Media, [End Page 306] Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (1995)—Bahng reveals how colonial and capitalist investments in futurity have shaped the entwined cultural formations of speculative fiction and financial speculation. As financial capital industries, scientific institutions, and settler colonial infrastructures move to securitize the future against potential risk and, in turn, maximize potential profit margins, Bahng asserts, “If it is to remain a space of possibility, the future must always also be a multiply occupied space” (13). In doing so, Bahng turns her attention to speculative fictions “from below,” as “alternate engagements with futurity emerging from the colonized, displaced, and disavowed” (7), in order to open a vantage point into the critical work of decolonizing futurity. Bahng’s introduction establishes her theoretical framework: placing speculative finance and speculative fiction in dialogue as “two forms of extrapolative figuration that participate in the cultural production of futurity” (2). While financial capital putatively attempts to project and foreclose the future to secure capitalist development and profits, Bahng unsettles this paradigm by foregrounding speculation that “calls for a disruption in the teleological ordering of the past, present, and future and foregrounds the processes of narrating the past (history) and the future (science)” (8). Conceptualizing speculative futurity thus, this framework informs Bahng’s larger intervention into feminist science studies, a field invested in decoupling the practice of scientific knowledge from the presumed masculinist statutes of pure objectivity, rationality, and empiricism. As science becomes increasingly folded into state capitalist projects of securing optimal profit margins and desecrating Indigenous geographies, Bahng excavates alternative avenues of scientific knowledge production that recognize imaginative and subaltern migrant labor obscured by dominant liberal humanist notions of science—exploring narratives of futurity that escape normative, hegemonic logics of intimacy, kinship, and ecological relations. Each chapter in Migrant Futures pairs a historical case of imperial and/or capitalist speculation with works of migrant speculative fiction. Chapter 1 reads Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) as a counternarrative to Henry Ford’s neocolonial enterprise of Fordlândia, a Ford rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest established to maximize profits from the excavation and industrialization of rubber. Bahng demonstrates how the emergence of the mysterious Matacão in Through the Arc posits the “rainforest [as] a speculative space in which all sorts of discarded, forgotten, and disavowed histories bubble to the surface” (33), exposing the haunting histories of aligned projects of imperial expansion and land excavation within histories of capitalist development. Chapter 2 traces the Department of Home-land Security’s mobilization of science fictive imaginaries to securitize futurity at the U.S.-Mexico border through surveillance and military technologies, while [End Page 307] also turning to Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) as a speculative revision of border futurity that unsettles discrete notions of homeland and nation. Chapter 3 turns attention to the racialization of reproductive futurity, examining cultural discourses surrounding Nadya Suleman, or the “Octomom” who birthed octuplets, and the speculative fictions of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) to argue that “reproductive futurity not only orients subjects toward a reproductive imperative, but it also extrapolates from eugenicist rhetoric to ascribe a generically selective future” (90). Bahng exposes reproductive technologies as a form of speculative finance that profits off of the biopolitical regulation of reproduction by people of color. The final two chapters make the turn toward the geographies of...