Histories of the Future
eBook - PDF

Histories of the Future

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Histories of the Future

About this book

We live in a world saturated by futures. Our lives are constructed around ideas and images about the future that are as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This book is a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the forms and functions that the future takes. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, prophecy and trauma, it brings together critical meditations on the social, cultural, and intellectual forces that create narratives and practices of the future. The prognosticators, speculators, prophets, and visionaries have their say here, but the emphasis is on small narratives and forgotten conjunctures, on the connections between expectation and experience in everyday life.

In tightly linked studies, the contributors excavate forgotten and emergent futures of art, religion, technology, economics, and politics. They trace hidden histories of science fiction, futurism, and millennialism and break down barriers between far-flung cultural spheres. From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the forests of Java and from the literary salons of Tokyo to the roadside cafƩs of the Nevada desert, the authors stitch together the disparate images and stories of futures past and present. Histories of the Future is further punctuated by three interludes: a thought-provoking game that invites players to fashion future narratives of their own, a metafiction by renowned novelist Jonathan Lethem, and a remarkable graphic research tool: a timeline of timelines.

Contributors. Sasha Archibald, Susan Harding, Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christopher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Tsing

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Yes, you can access Histories of the Future by Susan Harding, Daniel Rosenberg, Susan Harding,Daniel Rosenberg in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Introduction: Histories of the Future
  4. A Notebook on Desert Modernism: From the Nevada Test Site to Liberaceā€™s Two-Hundred-Pound Suit
  5. How to Make Resources in Order to Destroy Them (and Then Save Them?) on the Salvage Frontier
  6. The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines
  7. Interlude 1: Global Futures: The Game
  8. Electronic Memory
  9. All That Is Solid Melts into Sauce: Futurists, Surrealists, and Molded Food
  10. Sing Out Ubik
  11. Intelude 2: Access Fantasy: A Story
  12. Subject, City, Machine
  13. Interlude 3: Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement
  14. The Future of the Old Economy: New Deal Motives in New Economy Investors
  15. Why Rachel Isnā€™t Buried at Her Grave: Ghosts, UFOs, and a Place in the West
  16. Interlude 4: The Trouble with Timelines and A Timeline of Timelines
  17. Living Prophecy at Heavenā€™s Gate
  18. Trauma Time: A Still Life
  19. Bibliography
  20. Notes on Contributors
  21. Index