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The Sound & The Surplus.pdf (1016.21 KB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

The Sound & the Surplus: Speculation as a Radical Mode

Doyle, Emma B.B.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1559139514065567

Abstract Details

2019, BA, Oberlin College, Comparative Literature.
Speculation is a futurist practice of looking outwards in which the subject turns to other realities in the face of a crushing here-and-now. It is from this premise, which draws from Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009) and Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003), that I set out to understand how experiential, literary, and artistic speculation acts as a rejection of the capitalist and colonial structures of this world. Through a conversation with the aforementioned theorists, as well as other queer, posthumanist, and radical black thinkers, this project will analyze three different instances of speculation. First, a queer nightclub in New York which enacts a glitch between temporalities; next, a Dominican sci fi novel by Rita Indiana that shows how remixing queers time and narrative structure; and finally, a video art piece where artist Mickalene Thomas subverts the imperial male gaze, cutting into normative power and creating a break from which speculation can arise. Although these artistic forms of speculation by no means exhaust speculative potential, they sound out expressions of radical imagining that effectively draw the contours around this practice. I argue that the act of speculating towards other worlds by subjects historically excluded from the category of the Human is a radical refusal of the established order, and an embrace of the spaces between so as to find happiness and self-determination.
Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón (Advisor)
62 p.
Comparative Literature
Speculation; posthumanism; futurism; sound; anticapitalism; anticolonialism; queer theory; radical black theory; queer time

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Doyle, E. B.B. (2019). The Sound & the Surplus: Speculation as a Radical Mode [Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1559139514065567

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Doyle, Emma. The Sound & the Surplus: Speculation as a Radical Mode. 2019. Oberlin College, Undergraduate thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1559139514065567.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Doyle, Emma. "The Sound & the Surplus: Speculation as a Radical Mode." Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1559139514065567

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

oberlin1559139514065567
591
© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Oberlin College Honors Theses and OhioLINK.