Terraforming Beyond Master Narratives: Storying Lands and Bodies in Speculative Fabulations
EHL seminar with Mateusz Borowski & Małgorzata Sugiera
Welcome to an EHL seminar talk with guests Mateusz Borowski & Małgorzata Sugiera, Jagiellonian University, Poland, on " Terraforming Beyond Master Narratives:Storying Lands and Bodies in Speculative Fabulations"
The talk in a critical fashion approaches the trope of terraforming through the lens of the contemporary green humanities and decolonial studies, focusing on older and more recent speculative fabulations taking up this topic. It is safe to say that in the 2020s we live in an era of renewed interest in terraforming, which again holds sway over our imagination with visions of colonizing other planets or moons as well as Earth’s orbit. However, there are also those who suggest that in the decades to come we will need to terraform Earth to make it hospitable to life again, to alleviate the consequences of the disruption of planetary ecosystems and climate change. To put it bluntly, terraforming seems to offer a (false) hope of re-establishing the holocenic equilibrium. At the same time, however, more and more communities worldwide struggle to survive, living in the shadow of the great terraforming projects of modernity, such as monocrop plantations, huge infrastructural and industrial projects and modern cities as the main dwelling places of late modernity.
To envisage the stakes in these processes, we refer to the most recent case of the Swedish Kiruna Municipality, whose historical centre is planned to be relocated in its entirety so that the existing iron ore mines can be extended. In view of such projects it seems that today it is crucial to critically reassess the dominant concept of terraforming as a colonial practice and a form of governance of bodies and land. However, in our talk we approach terraforming not only as a set of specific techno-scientific procedures, but predominantly as one of the master narratives of late Western modernity – a story which in its many guises and variants has sanctioned unrelenting conquest of the worlds of human and non-human others.
In our talk we will return to two early speculative fabulations which problematize the colonial and racial underpinnings of the master narrative of terraforming: H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) and Jules Verne’s Invasion of the Sea (1905). Those early terraforming narratives provide a necessary reference point for their more recent versions. No wonder that while in 2020s terraforming seems to make its comeback into technoscientific projects, speculative narratives and critical thought, it undergoes profound modifications in times of ongoing multi-pronged ecologic crises and climate change which bring about ever more dire effects for communities world-wide. We will therefore discuss the recent 21st-century narratives of terraforming, which address the notion in a critical way at the same time proposing alternative ways of establishing livable connections between bodies and land. To demonstrate this, we focus on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s cycle composed of three novels: Children of Time (2015), Children of Ruin (2019), and Children of Memory (2022). By discussing how we read older and more recent terraforming narratives we can point towards possible ways out of the anthropocentric imaginary and narratives which have been structuring our life-worlds in the modern period.
Mateusz Borowski is a Professor at the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He holds a PhD from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and the Jagiellonian University. Recently, as recipient of Fulbright Slavic Award he spent months at University of Illinois in Chicago. Currently his main areas of interest are green humanities, counterfactual discourses and speculative fabulations in the context of climate change. He published, among others, Strategie zapominania. Pamięć i kultura cyfrowa (2015, Strategies of Forgetting: Memory andCyberculture) and, with Małgorzata Sugiera, Sztuczne Natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki (2016, Artificial Natures. Performances of Technoscience and Arts). He is currently Principal Investigator in the OPUS 22 research project After Climate Crisis. Non-Scalable Survival Strategies in Speculative Fabulations of the Last Two Decades (2022-2026) funded by the Polish National Science Center.
Małgorzata Sugiera is a Full Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, and Head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, Institut für die Wissenschaften von Menschen in Vienna, the American Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the IRC “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 2024 she participated in a six-months Senior Fellowship at the College for Social Science and Humanities of the University Alliance Ruhr in Essen, carrying out a research project “Performing Waste: To Re-Member Pasts and Speculate Futures”. Her research concentrates on performativity theories, environmental and decolonial studies, particularly in the context of the history of science. She published twelve single-authored books, and, together with Mateusz Borowski, Sztuczne natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki (2016, Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Arts). She co-edited several books in English and German, most recently Crisis and Communitas: Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics (Routledge 2022). She translates scholarly books and theatre plays from English, German and French. She carries out a four-year international research project Epidemics and Communities in Critical Theories, Artistic Practices and Speculative Fabulations of the Last Decades funded by the Polish National Science Center (NCN).
