The Alimentary Unconscious: Science Fiction and the World-Food-System in the Capitalocene

Abstract

This thesis explores post-1970 science fiction writing from the Americas as it can be understood with regard to the development and operations of the neoliberal world-food-system. Through my reading of a range of post-1970 sf texts from the Americas, I draw out the ways these texts register the material damage, exploitative practices and ideological conceits of the system; but I also attend to the ways in which they can be seen to reveal radically alternative ways of being and eating. In pursuing this line of analysis, I deploy the critical methodologies of the Energy Humanities, world-ecological literary studies, and the utopian scholarship of Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin. As a result, I argue that science fiction serves as a key cultural form in understanding, critiquing and reimagining the relations of production which form the neoliberal food system.