Multiplicative Speculations: What We Can Learn from The Rise and Fall of Hopepunk

• Published in: ASAP journal 2021-05, Vol.6 (2), p.459-483
• Main Author: Mancuso, Cecilia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Afrofuturism; Capitalism; Dystopias; Empathy; Fiction; Genre; Intertextuality; Optimism; Rowland, Alexandra; Speculative fiction; Subjectivity; Utopias
• ISSN: 2381-4705; 2381-4721; 2381-4721
• DOI: 10.1353/asa.2021.0031

Offering itself as a radical but happy medium between the paralyzing resignation and cynicism of nihilist "grimdark" fantasy and the passivity, false sense of security, and "chosen one" underpinning of "noblebright" fantasy, hopepunk became a rallying cry for a wide range of speculative fiction judged to be weaponizing hope against an overwhelming wave of hopelessness in contemporary media and life.2 groundswell of support that only grew in the following year after journalistic explainers revived the term, earning praise for its self-organization around affects like hope and its proposed mechanisms for surviving and resisting the logics of capitalism. [...]by proposing itself as a relatively loose collection of texts united by a fluid set of affects and ideologies, hopepunk strives to model one possibility of what categorical intertextual relationships might look like in a postgenre world that is moving away from traditional spatial and mutually exclusive models of genre and toward defining textual identity and relationships in terms of what texts do or enable for their readers. [...]I compare some of the structural hallmarks of predictive and multiplicative speculation through an examination of several exemplary texts that tackle in definitively opposite ways a common motif of contemporary speculation: intergenerational conflict. "5 By emphasizing the embrace of and derivation of hope from future uncertainty, hopepunk can offer readers an escape route from the core logics of contemporary capitalism—in particular, seemingly inescapable cycles of aspirational subjectivity. Since its debut in 2011, Lauren Berlant's affect theory lodestone, Cruel Optimism, has defined discussions of hope within the academy.