Re-Membering the Rupture: Asian American Science Fictional Literature as a Challenge to Capitalist Realism in Ling Ma's Severance

Whitney, Charlie Middelmann

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Re-Membering the Rupture: Asian American Science Fictional Literature as a Challenge to Capitalist Realism in Ling Ma's Severance Öffentlichkeit Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/3197xn52d

Abstract

This thesis aims to situate Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance against a contemporary landscape of capitalist realist science fiction (SF). Guided by Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts, on Asian American counterhegemonic subjectivity, I argue that Severance departs from both mainstream and critical incursions into the capitalist realist apocalypse by foregrounding present and past colonial or imperialist exploitation. Works of science fiction and related genres are crucial for inspiring and sustaining activism, which is also science fictional in that it imagines alternate futures. Severance’s imaginative power thus lies in Ma’s depiction of an individual break from the status quo in the form of her protagonist’s escape from nationally bound subjectivity to the extent that a transnational future can become visible. I employ Christopher Fan’s term “science fictionality” to distinguish Severance from works of science fiction that emerge from within the national culture. I join Mark Fisher in arguing that this culture is dominated by capitalist realism, yet I turn away from postmodernism to examine how to challenge such a culture. Lisa Lowe’s conception of “re-memberance” and the “outsider-within” perspective that emerges in Asian American literature informs my reading of Severance as an Asian American science fictional novel that can critique both the status quo and hegemonic representations of it. Unlike the world-changing ruptures in the status quo that dominate most SF, Severance’s rupture occurs on the level of its protagonist’s personal identity, yet it is just as liberatory. In tracing this rupture, I engage Giuseppe Cocco’s approach to deterritorialization under neoliberal capitalism to explore Severance’s geographically untethered spaces of labor. In contrast to these spaces, I explore the affective ruptures produced by the protagonist’s immigrant upbringing to argue that transnational strategies of re-membering can offer a challenge to alienating forms of nationally bound subjectivity.

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