Anterograde palimpsests haunting eco-dystopian cinema: the past, present and future as terminable and interminable

Films fictionalizing ecological disaster tend to be positioned in a near-future where the crisis has reached dystopian proportions, but complicate this temporal shift by including palimpsestuous intertextual memories of real-world catastrophes from the past, such as the Holocaust and Atlantic slave trade. This article is concerned with how this complex layering of past, present and future partakes in the kind of dehistoricizing passivity which Fredric Jameson associates with postmodernism. The article argues that these films temporarily imagine how contemporary capitalist-industrial behavior condemns humanity to a nightmarish future, but then disavow this imagination via a repetition of ostensibly resolved quasi-historical memories.

Citation

Geal, R. (in press) Anterograde palimpsests haunting eco-dystopian cinema: the past, present and future as terminable and interminable. Ecokritike.

Type

Journal article

Language

en

Description

© [in press] The Author. Published by H-Net Journals. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: [tbc]

ISSN

3034-9214

Collections

Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences