In the End: Apocalyptic Literature, Minoritarian Identity, and Hopeless Futurity
“In the End: Apocalyptic Literature, Minoritarian Identity, and Hopeless Futurity,” argues that apocalyptic narratives uniquely allow for interrogating the paradoxes and potential for social criticism and change in the face of various social issues, including racial inequalities and climate change. I primarily examine North American apocalyptic literature written or published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, with a particular focus on ethnic or minoritarian depictions, to consider the unexpected ways that apocalyptic literature attempts to imagine and execute radically new futures. Relying on a longer history of the genre—including ancient Hebrew apocalyptic stories—coupled with twenty-first century cultural studies about apocalyptic conceptions, I argue that apocalypse is often misread in two different but equally limiting ways. In the first, apocalypse is positioned as nihilism or defeatism, overlooking the strange hopefulness and engagement with futurity inherent in most apocalyptic narratives. In the second, which is most closely aligned to early apocalyptic stories such as the Book of Revelations, apocalypse is falsely viewed as a transformative reset, wherein change inherently comes to pass through the destructive event—a formulation that runs the risk of fostering passivity and inaction.
Seeking positivist examples of proactive futurity, I argue for the primacy of minoritarian perspectives for creating counterstrategies, demonstrating how the heightened awareness that comes from histories of marginalization fosters an efficacious means of imagining and effectuating progressively altered futures. I first explore how some apocalyptic narratives, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, evade meaningful change by embracing a normative, detached futurity that merely replicates the oppressions, inequalities, and destructive human behaviors of the present and past. In later chapters, critical race theory, third-world feminism, queer theory, afrofuturism, and afropessimism inform my claim that explorations of futurity from the perspectives of minoritarian identities provide a viable blueprint for achieving productively different futures. Engaging with the works of Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead, among others, I demonstrate how reading minoritarian futurity in apocalyptic stories reveals the limitations of optimistic narratives in favor of generative hopelessness—acknowledging the failure of what we have tried thus far and radically expanding notions of what we can do differently.
In some ways, my project functions as a genre study: I articulate and differentiate the genre of apocalyptic narratives to demonstrate how these stories function at times within and outside of other genres, such as dystopian or science fiction. My project intervenes in literary studies by establishing these critical distinctions and providing a narrative trajectory (erasure—revelation—futurity and/or further erasure)that helps define apocalyptic literature and provides an analytical framework for reading the political stakes of minoritarian futurity. I demonstrate the benefits of approaching these texts through this genre-based lens—particularly in apocalyptic texts that advance minoritarian futurity—to explore how we can (and must) consider conceptions of futurity as a challenge to majoritarian concepts, the status quo, and perceived limitations on our capability to enact radical change.
The introduction develops a narratological and historicized roadmap for reading and interpreting apocalyptic literature. I briefly explore the long history of apocalyptic narratives, contextualizing my argument for the value of understanding the history and practice of apocalyptic stories. Commencing with The Epic of Gilgamesh and early Hebrew writings, I demonstrate how this history helps us better understand how apocalyptic narratives function today and how they are understood in literature and society.
Chapter One illuminates the dangers of the “false futurity” conveyed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and P.D. James’s The Children of Men, which explore humanity’s penchant for further erasure/denial by striving for a future that is merely a replication of the past and does not challenge the established status quo. As a contrast, I also analyze Mexican director Alfonso Cuaròn’s film adaptation of Children of Men to introduce how a focus on minoritarian issues—particularly issues of race and immigration—effectively criticizes the false futurity presented by James and McCarthy.
Chapter Two advances the concept of minoritarian futurity as not just a criticism of, but as a corrective to retrograde visions of the future. I turn to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents as models of apocalyptic narratives that explore minoritarian futurity, or attempts to imagine and enact radical change using minoritarian perspectives and experiences. Relying largely on theories of third world feminism and Latinx activist writings, I argue for an engagement with minoritarian futurity that challenges the status quo by focusing on the failed lessons of past and present systems of oppression. I thus reveal how histories and lived experiences of oppression and inequality lead to an increased awareness of how to effectively resist, not just criticize, the status quo and imagine alternative futures.
This argument is continued in the third chapter, where I read Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One to explore how minoritarian futurity also reveals the benefits of productive pessimism. Using the lenses of afrofuturism and afropessimism, I demonstrate how both Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead’s apocalyptic texts criticize an uncomplicated notion of hopefulness—highlighting the limitations of an uncritical optimism that engenders passivity and stasis. This chapter ultimately argues for the benefits of a productive and active hopelessness, similar to Derrick Bell’s concept of racial realism, generated by minoritarian perspective that furthers radical change.
In the fourth chapter I name and explore the genre of realist apocalyptic literature, which effectively reveals humanity’s penchant for denial and erasure. Specifically in the context of global inequalities and climate change, I argue that humanity looks to apocalypse only as large-scale event and thus misses the more quotidian signs of destruction. I juxtapose majoritarian perspectives and responses in the face of apocalyptic crisis (Ian McEwan’s Solar) with minoritarian perspectives based on race, nationality, class, and gender (Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being) to demonstrate another way that minoritarian identity asks us to rethink limiting notions of apocalypse.
My conclusion turns to Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God to further demonstrate how, particularly through the use of ambiguous, unresolved endings, apocalyptic novels are uniquely positioned to challenge readers to imagine a radically altered future—and to do so in a way that, following tenets of critical race theory and indigenous studies, disrupts and counters both the status quo and teleological progress.
I ultimately argue that minoritarian identity has the potential to generate a productive hopelessness—the awareness that what we have been trying does not work—that can then lead to alternative futures. Apocalyptic narratives function as a valuable genre to read and understand these processes and histories of erasure and the potential for revelation that might lead to meaningful change. I explore the tendency of some apocalyptic narratives that engage in a false futurity that is merely a replication of the present and will surely cause future oppressions, erasures, and apocalyptic events. However, I also provide a close reading of the form, content, and literary-historical context of other apocalyptic narratives that explore minoritarian futurity—and thus provide a praxis for expanding notions of what is possible in order to imagine and enact meaningful, necessary change through a paradoxical but productive sense of hopelessness.
Dwight Tanner 