Criticism was equally an extension of Maureen’s generosity. She not only made space for the text, listening and responding to its own otherness, but she also made space for her readers. Each review was an invitation, a gift to inquire further, to think more deeply and more sensitively about what it is we do when we read.
Reverse extractivism is a colonial fever-dream, one that the reveals the colonist’s ultimate desires through its uncanny logics If extractivism is empire’s removal of resources from the periphery without industrial development or fair compensation, reverse extractivism is the imbrication of the colonizer into the very being of the colonized, such that resources don’t need to be removed to be exploited for the benefit of empire.
Lion City is Ng’s attempt at situating Singapore’s postcolonial hybrid identity through his work forces readers to pause and reconsider Singapore’s place in the world before further progress is made.
In the vast traditions that inspire SF worldbuilding, what will be reclaimed and reinvented, and what will be discarded? How do narratives on the periphery speak to and interact with each other in their local contexts, rather than in opposition to the dominant structures of white Western hegemonic culture? What dynamics and possibilities are revealed in the repositioning of these narratives?
In conclusion, I argue that SF fanzines in China mostly played a transitional role. That is, when no professional platforms were available to publish articles and stories, fanzines stepped in. Though most of those fanzines did not last very long, they played the important role of compiling and delivering information. The key reason why I identify those magazines as fanzines is because all the contributors joined out of their interest in SF and worked for free.
Those who write about music or incorporate musicality in their words often have an innate sense of that, whether or not they’re able to describe it in academic terms. And with this sense, writers often, possibly unknowingly, incorporate a few techniques from composition and songwriting into their prose.
So we’re talking about a violence that supplants the histories of people and things, scrubbing them clean so that they can fuel the oppressive and unequal status quo it sustains.
Waste is profoundly shaping and changing our society and our way of living. Our daily mundane world always treats waste as a hidden structure, together with its whole ecosystem, and places it beyond our sight, to maintain the glories of contemporary life. But unfortunately, some are advantaged by this, while others suffer.