Spectral Futures

Fabulations of Worlds to Come

Bernd Herzogenrath

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350421134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

What colour is the future – or rather, what colors are the futures? Broad and enlightening in its coverage, this collection explores the notion that there is not just one visualization of the future, but many, stretching across and beyond shades of utopian brightness and dystopian darks. Visiting futures that belong to the realm of ghosts, it calls for a hauntology that deals not only with spectres of the past but also the of future, offering a fascinating engagement with both colonial history and hyper-accelerated societies.

Guided by a diversity of colours, contributors speculate on non-anthropogenic futurities, theorising on the richness of an essentially complex and disordered material universe. The volume's critical approaches range from speculative realism, oceanic biology, and philosophy and politics, to posthumanism and queer theory. What all these offerings have in common is a strong focus on materiality, the in|human, and the innovative possibilities that are brought into light by this 'fabulated spectrum'. They combine the potentialities of philosophy, art, and science, in that they all forge a relation to chaos, or, an undeterminable 'new.' Powerful and thought-provoking, this book illuminates different possibilities of gazing upon futures in nuanced and novel ways.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Spectral Futures: An Introduction
• Chapter 1: Wavelength: 0.001 nm | Color: Gamma Rays: The Spectral Affectivity of Glaciers
• Chapter 2: Wavelength: 100–400 nm | Color: Ultraviolet: Wild Light: Radiant Skin and the Domestication of Ultraviolet Futures
• Chapter 3: Wavelength: 380–750 nm | Color: Rainbow: Somewhere over the Rainbow
• Chapter 4: Wavelength: 400–700 nm+ | Color: White: White • Rot
• Chapter 5: Wavelength: 420–700 nm | Color: Sodium-Silver | Blank Screens and Spectral Skies: Hong Kong as a Postcolonial Locus of Transnational Asian Futures
• Chapter 6: Wavelength: 450 nm Low Latency (You Know, for High-Speed Trading) | Color: CME Blue (i.e., the Blue that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Uses): A Brief and Speculative History of Making the Weather an Option
• Chapter 7: Wavelength: 450–490 nm | Color: Cobalt Blue: Afterimage
• Chapter 8: Wavelength: 490 nm | Color: Supra-blue Minor: Meshes of Light and Death, by Oceanic Bacteria
• Chapter 9: Wavelength: 492 nm | Color: Infragreen: An Infragreen and Bipolar Tale of the Future
• Chapter 10: Wavelength: 530 nm | Color: Pure Gold: Hyper-Vanguard: The Future of a Thousand Sects
• Chapter 11: Wavelength: 555 nm | Color: Chartreuse Green: Pale Green Dots
• Chapter 12: Wavelength: 580 nm | Color: Yellow: Specters of Solar Futurity: Yellow–Black–Yellow
• Chapter 13: Wavelength: 590 nm | Color: Amber: Memory of a Stone
• Chapter 14: Wavelength: 605.34 nm | Color: Vermillion: Vermillion Times: Memoranda from the Future
• Chapter 15: Wavelength: 680 nm | Color: Flesh Red: Excoriating Red: A Note on Russian Futurity
• Chapter 16: Wavelength: None, Multiple | Color: Gray: Dead or Alive? Gray Futures
• Chapter 17: Wavelength: 0 nm – 400 nm – ≥ 700 nm | Color: Blackless: Blackless: The Present-Absence of Blackness in an African Tomorrow
• Chapter 18: Wavelength: 595 nm | Color: Black Hole Black: Black Hole Black (Disco Ball Lightning)
• Chapter 19: Wavelength: 6000∘A nm | Color: Transparent: The Color of Breath, the Color of Air
• Chapter 20: Wavelength: n/a | Color: Luminous Darkness: Exploring the Metaphysics of Afrofuturism through Howard Thurman’s Luminous Darkness
• Chapter 21: Wavelength: n/a | Color: Iridescence: The Future Iridesces
• Chapter 22: Wavelength (Khaki): 575.4nm∞Wavelength (Dark Gray)-nil: Soliloquies of a Lone Diner and the Specters of Thomas Sankara
• Contributors
• Further Reading on the Topic of “Color”
• Notes
• Bibliography