Apocalypse: Introduction

Jessica Hurley, Dan Sinykin

ASAP/Journal, Volume 3, Number 3, September 2018, pp. 451-466 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: [Link]

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 Jessica Hurley & Dan Sinykin

APOCALYPSE:
INTRODUCTION

T
he present is apocalyptic. Cataclysms are imminent. Some are already
happening or have been underway for decades, even centuries. Yet
apocalypse is less an event than a form and a practice, maybe the
definitive form and characteristic practice of the present. Visions of the end shape
experience, historical consciousness. Apocalypse, moreover, has a history of its
own, and is embedded with a wide, often contradictory politics. What is at stake
in imagining our world as ending, or as having ended? Why do we turn to this
ancient form so urgently today?

This special issue of ASAP/ Journal posits that our moment is not singular; there
is no universal “we” whose apocalypse is shared. Rather, apocalypse mediates
the unevenly distributed risks of the contemporary social, political, and geo-
physical world. Race, gender, sexuality, disability, indigeneity, citizenship, and
class determine our vulnerability to cataclysmic violence, whether fast or slow.
Contemporary artists take up apocalypse as a form for resisting or abetting such
violence. The arts today stake claims to fore-

“
stalling or accelerating apocalypse, which
seems so far beyond their sphere of influence.
Apocalypse [. . .] is never a Apocalypse, we propose, is never a locatable
event but rather an imaginative practice that
locatable event but rather an
forms and deforms history for specific pur-
imaginative practice that forms poses: an aesthetic that does as much as it
and deforms history for specific represents. Apocalyptic art may represent an
purposes: an aesthetic that does as imagined future, but it acts in and upon the
present. Survivalist narratives like The Walking
much as it represents.
Dead generate a sensibility of imperiled mascu-

” line sovereignty, while Afrofuturist films like

ASAP/Journal, Vol. 3.3 (2018): 451-466

© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sun Ra’s Space is the Place create the experience of future liberation in the present.
Ashmina Ranjit’s performance art enacts the threat of climate change through
the construction of a dress of pins, and Naziha Mestaoui’s virtual forests suggest
possibilities for a reborn world embedded within cataclysm. At a moment when
the use of apocalypse to structure the contemporary has only intensified, this
special issue argues for the exigency of recognizing the plural temporalities and
geographies of apocalypse in the post-1960 visual, media, literary, cinematic,
and performing arts.

By disrupting the commonly held usage of apocalypse as indicating little more

than bad teleology, we seek to destabilize apocalypse as a referent, to break it
from its reified meaning in the academic mind, so that we might, as critics and
artists, develop accounts that are adequate to our objects of study. Too often
the diagnosis of an artwork as “apocalyptic” is taken as the endpoint of critical
inquiry, with “apocalyptic” indexing nothing more than the exhaustion of hope
and the failure of an artist’s political project. A lack of conceptual equipment
has made it difficult to see, for example, how James Baldwin, in his later works,
broke from his earlier nationalism and adopted a critique of American excep-
tionalism articulated precisely in and through the apocalypticism for which his
later work has been scorned. It has likewise made it difficult to appreciate the
radical significance of Indra Sinha’s positioning of the survivors of a fiction-
alized industrial disaster in Bhopal, India as “the people of the Apokalis” in
Animal’s People.1

Despite the ubiquity of apocalypse, canonical Anglo-American cultural theory

tells us that concern about apocalypse is passé. For Frank Kermode, writing in
1968, apocalypse is no longer imminent but immanent: the anticipation of the
real, worldly end has been supplanted by a more nebulous sense of an ending
within the individual psyche.2 Fredric Jameson echoes Kermode in positing the
end of a sense of apocalyptic urgency as the defining feature of postmodernity.3
Scholarly assessments of apocalypse in subsequent decades have persisted in
seeing it as anachronistic, or as overcome.4 In the twenty-first century, apoc-
alypse is commonly framed as good criticism’s Bad Other, with contemporary
environmental and social theorists expressing their scholarly commitment
to “think[ing] in times of urgencies” through an opposition to what Donna
Haraway has called “the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse.” 5
This long-standing scholarly consensus functions to contain and dismiss

ASAP/Journal 452 /
apocalypse as a form that has little to offer the urgencies of the contemporary;
meanwhile, many artists have elevated apocalypse as a form and a practice that
we need now. The arts of the present demand a revaluation of apocalypse in its
many aspects: as an aesthetic, a form, a mode, a genre, a practice, a structure of
feeling, and an orientation.

***

A first proposition: apocalypse is not singular and universal, but rather plural and
particular. This might sound counterintuitive. After all, as it is typically under-
stood, to predict or imagine the end of the world is to make a universal claim.
Questions about the apocalypse tend to be framed in terms of a linear, singular
timeline: when will the apocalypse happen, and what will be its (sole) cause?

Such a framing has costly repercussions. Staggering amounts of resources are

pooled, for example, into addressing the threat of the apocalypse in powerful and
prestigious locations such as the U.S. Department of Defense and the lavishly
funded Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.6 Contrarily, the
work collected in this issue insists, as an aesthetic, ethical, and political impera-
tive, that we treat apocalypse as neither singular nor universal. We must rethink
whether apocalypse bears a familiar narrative structure. In what sociologist
Ulrich Beck has called the “risk society,” epistemologies of probability and risk
have come to replace a more readily comprehensible model of cause and effect,
and this has changed the predictability and character of apocalyptic form.7 Our
vulnerability to cataclysm can now be understood as determined by decisions
made far away and in secret, as well as by differential distribution of risk across
racial, sexual, gendered, and other normative axes; whether one faces a 10%
chance of disaster (or 50% or 90%) or lives in the very midst of it can depend
as much on a privileged access to resources as on geographical location. The
uncanny temporalities of climate change, for example, unmoor us from famil-
iar temporal anchor-points such as before and after. We may have long since
breached the cataclysmic tipping point, even if we may not experience the full
effects of that reality for decades.

If apocalypse is plural and particular, then we must ask not only when, but—
because it is, among other times, now—where is it happening, and to whom,
and by whom? We must ask, with regard to apocalypse, questions posed by slow

Hurley & Sinykin 453 /

violence, structural violence, environmental violence, and colonial violence.
The Indigenous people of Tuvalu are already living the climate change apoca-
lypse. Marshall Islanders, Iraqis, Belarussians, and downwinders across the globe
are already living the nuclear apocalypse. Native nations in North America are
already living the zombie apocalypse; science-fiction writer Rebecca Roanhorse
(Ohkay Owingeh/Black), taking up the long history of white bounty hunters
murdering Natives in order to sell their scalps, addresses settler readers with a
powerful temporal reframing: “What if I told you that there had been a zom-
bie apocalypse? What if I told you that you were the zombies?” 8 Alisha B.
Wormsley’s multimedia work, There Are Black People in the Future, positions
the African diaspora as a post-apocalyptic community, moving through the
aftermath of the Middle Passage as a world-destroying event.9 Yet even criti-
cism that situates itself within these apocalypses—Christina Sharpe’s profound
work of mourning In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), for example, or
Gerald Vizenor’s philosophy of active Indigenous survival in Manifest Manners:
Narratives on Postindian Survivance (1999)—rarely uses apocalypse as a heuristic
for interpreting the apocalyptic situations that it describes.10 Given the real-
ities in which people live, the resurgence of apocalypticism as a consciously
deployed form for understanding and depicting the present across the past few
decades, from above and below, from the genocidal to the liberatory, is in need
of a reckoning.

A second proposition: apocalypse, as a form, has accumulated multiple and con-

tradictory sets of affordances throughout its long history. How is it that apocalypse
can equally serve subaltern thinkers and artists seeking to imagine liberation and
the white evangelical Christians in the U.S. who use Biblical eschatology to jus-
tify ongoing, violent colonialism? The answer lies in the history of the form, a
history that shapes our experience, whether we know it or not. The traditional
definition of apocalyptic aesthetics as a form structured by a future event involv-
ing both ending and revelation is a good example of how apocalypse shapes both
lived experience and the work of art. As the contributions to this special issue
demonstrate, however, this singular definition of apocalyptic form is limited;
apocalyptic form in the present is the result of a long and syncretic process of his-
torical development that includes multiple versions of apocalypse across and even
within specific cultures and communities. Thus can apocalypse express a desire
at once for violence and peace, for the overthrow of empire and its persistence,
for individual agency and its loss in the tides of fatalism.

ASAP/Journal 454 /
Apocalypse gathers eschatologies derived from many traditions. African
Americans, after the Middle Passage, under slavery, developed apocalypticisms
at the intersection of Christian and African belief systems. Centuries later,
under the tutelage of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X popularized the hybrid
eschatology of the Nation of Islam. Diverse visions of the end existed among
Indigenous peoples of the Americas before and after Columbus, most famously
the repeated apocalypses of the Maya. Near the turn of the twentieth century, at
the nadir of Indian populations in the United States, Wovoka, a Paiute prophet,
delivered a syncretic millennial vision that paired Indigenous religion with the
Book of Revelation and spread across tribes in Western states as the Ghost Dance
movement. Hinduism also imagines a cyclical rather than a linear temporality
of apocalypse, in which the cycle of ages that endlessly repeats concludes with
Kali Yuga, a time of discord and degeneration before the eventual regeneration
of the world. For communities all over the world and for thousands of years, his-
torical expectations, political commitments, social organizations, and affective
relationships to the present and future have been shaped by an innumerable and
constantly shifting set of apocalyptic visions.

Apocalypse also signifies in multiple ways within each of these traditions. Native
North American nations, for example, were colonized under the sign of early
modern eschatology from Europe which framed the New World as the New
Heaven and Earth waiting to be seized by the righteous, as Nasia Anam’s essay
in this volume demonstrates; yet apocalypse has also served a liberatory function
for the colonized, both as a way of imagining the inevitable end of the colonial
order and as a way of creating decolonial social organizations in the present, as
in the Ghost Dance movement. And even the hegemonic, imperial Christian
apocalypse that has insisted on its own singularity over the past two millen-
nia contains its own fissures and contradictions. The Book of Revelation is an
anti-imperial document, written late in the first century C.E., which promised
that the present world, in which Christians were being hunted and killed by an
imperial Rome, would soon be overturned. As James Ford details in his essay,
during subsequent centuries, as Christianity itself became imperial, Christians
reinterpreted Revelation on behalf of empire, eventually leading Christian
Europe to pursue the millennium through genocidal colonialism. Yet Ford’s
study of apocalyptic hip hop shows that the liberatory aspects of eschatology
remained latent in the form, ready to be taken up across the colonized world as
an inspiration, a rationale, and a blueprint for anticolonial revolution.

Hurley & Sinykin 455 /

 “
When the arts of the present call
When the arts of the present call upon apoca-
lypse to address present urgencies, then, they
deploy a form riven with internal contradic-
upon apocalypse to address present tions and incommensurate commitments.
And as the contributions to this special issue
urgencies [. . .] they deploy a form
make evident, criticism that seeks to analyze
riven with internal contradictions contemporary apocalyptic art must reckon
and incommensurate commitments. with deep histories and the profoundly polit-

”
icized eschatological forms that they have
produced. For the arts of the present that are
the inheritors of this braided, global, and mul-
tiplicitous history, apocalypse can be a hegemonic discourse of oppression just as
it can be deployed as a liberating vision of the end of hegemony. And its history
means that its multiple sets of affordances are thoroughly entangled with each
other; apocalypse as a tool for shaping experience functions like a Swiss Army
knife, carrying within itself the antinomies of hegemony and revolution and
liable to bring each of them into any situation, no matter how large the blade
that is folded out, or how small the file that is folded away.

***

Apocalypse today is a privileged form for engaging the central aesthetic-­political

problems of our time: crises that feel like they exceed human scale, human
agency, human understanding. Consider Indicators: Artists on Climate Change,
an exhibition on display at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York
from May 19–November 11, 2018. It includes “Permanent Field Observations,

“
. . . apocalypse as a tool for shaping experience functions like
a Swiss Army knife, carrying within itself the antinomies of
hegemony and revolution and liable to bring each of them
into any situation, no matter how large the blade that is
folded out, or how small the file that is folded away.

”
ASAP/Journal 456 /
2018,” in which David Brooks cast in bronze thirty ephemeral objects from the
Storm King site—like branches, logs, and rope—and placed them where he
found them, where they will persist indefinitely. Scattered across Storm King,
the ephemera invite visitors to perceive and contemplate human effects in nature
that exist on timescales well beyond the human. Indicators also includes “Along
the Lines of Displacement: A Tropical Food Forest” by Mary Mattingly, a con-
tributor to this special issue, in which Mattingly transplanted tropical fruit trees
from Florida to Storm King to graft an apocalyptic future onto the present land-
scape, creating an uncanny and viscerally upsetting ecology. Standing among
Mattingly’s work, one could see, across the site, a procession of flags by the arts
collective Dear Climate, contributors, as well, to Apocalypse. The pithy flags,
coupling text and image, command the viewer through puns (FIND A MOLE
MODEL, SEE THE SEA LEVELS, REMEMBER THE ALBEDO), to reori-
ent her perception to a scale beyond the human.

Drawing apocalyptic scales of space and time into confrontation with the lived
experience of the present, the Indicators exhibition offers answers to questions
influentially posed by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty in 2009 about reality and
representation, or history and form, with regard to the existential threat of cli-
mate change: if geological scale is incommensurable with human scale, then
how can we describe the Anthropocene such that we accurately see it? How
can we perform adequate political actions unless we see the world clearly?11
Apocalypse demands an encounter between the local experience of cataclysm
and its global—even cosmic—provenance, an encounter that artists are daring
to occasion across a variety of contemporary media. Articulating the histories,
politics, practices, and stakes of these encounters is the project of each of the
contributors to Apocalypse.

Our editors’ forum brings into conversation

a range of artists and scholars from across the
globe whose work is at the forefront of theo- “
Apocalypse demands an encounter
rizing the encounter between the intimacies
of lived experience and the inhuman scale of between the local experience of
apocalypse as mediated through art. The artists cataclysm and its global—even
and scholars gathered in the forum—Heather cosmic—provenance.
Davis, Janine Randerson, Zaria Forman,
Heather Houser, Pinar Yoldas, smudge studio,
”
Hurley & Sinykin 457 /
Una Chaudhuri, Marina Zurkow, and Mary Mattingly—each address the topic
of “Climate Change, Apocalypse, and the Arts of the Present.” In response
to our prompt, which asked how visual, cinematic, and performing arts have
tackled the emergent apocalypse of climate change, contributors give examples
of artworks that expand our sensoria, including Māori performance art, instal-
lations in collaboration with scientists, films by an Inuit collective, and hot yoga
practiced as socially engaged art in a curated space that compels participants to
feel the incremental rise of global temperatures.

Taken together, the contributors to the forum raise questions about theory
and praxis in apocalyptic times: how can artists critically engage their mate-
rials toward a just practice? Take for example, cobalt, used in the manufacture
of both military weapons and blue pigment, and mined, destructively, in
Congo. How can art visualize data to harness its exigence? Posters created by
the Dear Climate project, contributed by Una Chaudhuri and Marina Zurkow,
punctuate the forum with timely invitations to the reader. The Dear Climate
project offers a methodology for art in the midst of apocalypse that we find
profoundly useful: a research/art collaboration that moves along multiple fronts
at once, creating widely distributable posters as well as guided meditations and
workshops that engage the body, and an ongoing invitation for the public to
participate by writing letters to the climate. Climate change, we posit, requires
multiple, simultaneous forms of approach—a flexibility of methodology that
this forum, moving between and among theory, praxis, and individual art-
works, seeks to entrain.

The contributions to this special issue share key motivating questions: how does
the history of apocalyptic form shape our world even in ways we might fail
to recognize; and how do experiments with that form allow us to apprehend
our failures, to escape the shape of history, so that we might experience, and
intervene in, our moment? History and form: in our interview with speculative
fiction writer and three-time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin, she considers
how her trilogy The Broken Earth uses an apocalyptic narrative form to capture
the feeling of living in the present as a Black woman in the United States, as
well as to represent histories of oppression that produce, for some people, real-
ity as “the apocalypse again and again and again.” The essays in this special
issue of ASAP/ Journal expand on this dialectical relationship between history
and form: the first four drill down on making form adequate to the present; the

ASAP/Journal 458 /
last three explain how the long history of apocalypse shapes its form—and the
world—today.

What of human agency in apocalyptic times? Apocalypse creates a paradox:

apocalyptic texts tend to be activist, urging some change in behavior. Yet if so,
why do so many people act as if the end of the world is imminent and beyond
human control? Environmentalists, in particular, have derided apocalypticism
for its historical foreclosure, its agential futility, and its enervation of political
will. But the alternative, as Rebecca Evans notes in her contribution to this
special issue, is too often techno-optimism, a rationalized acquiescence to the
status quo that refuses to acknowledge where we are and why. In “The Best
of Times, the Worst of Times, the End of Times?: The Uses and Abuses of
Environmental Apocalypse,” Evans insists that apocalypse “is not only the sci-
entifically plausible interpretation of the Anthropocene, but also an ideologically
honest reckoning of how deeply the logics and material practices that produce
climate change are rooted in Western modernity.” What we need, she argues, is
to redeploy apocalypse, rather than to dismiss it. We need an “open apocalypse,”
politically unflinching but not historically resolved, that can challenge the foun-
dations of the contemporary world while leaving space for agency and historical
contingency. In works of hybrid genre that deploy apocalypse strategically
alongside utopia and dystopia by writers including Margaret Atwood, David
Mitchell, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, and Kim Stanley Robinson,
she finds an incipient tradition of apocalyptic narrative adequate to the present.

If apocalypse presents a challenge for agential motivation—why act if the end is

imminent and inevitable?—then it also presents a scalar challenge: how can art
reckon with an apocalyptic reality incommensurable with human scale? The
novel may seem particularly ill-suited to the task—as Amitav Ghosh, drawing
from Dipesh Chakrabarty, has argued—given its proclivities toward the scale
and perspective of the liberal human subject. By turning to work by Black and
Indigenous women who critique the very premise of the liberal human sub-
ject, Leif Sorensen argues in “The Apocalypse is a Non-Human Story” that
we already have vernacular theorists of nonhuman scale in novelists Octavia
Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Leslie Marmon Silko. While Ghosh claims that
the humanist history of the novel makes it incompatible with the apocalyp-
tic scale of contemporary reality, Butler, Okorafor, and Silko show us that the
novel form can incorporate deep time and planetary scale, becoming capacious

Hurley & Sinykin 459 /

enough to imagine, and thus make possible, a politics that escapes the bounds
of liberal, or neoliberal, humanism. Sorensen suggests that the apocalyptic novel
for these writers is precisely the space where new modes of being and action
emerge: at the intersection of individual scale with the massive and inhuman
scales of climate, deep time, and language itself.

As Evans and Sorensen demonstrate, apocalypse, now, compels us to rethink

the human experience of time itself. How do we experience the incremental
warming of the climate? How do we imagine a flexible range of futures if we are
shackled to narratives in which history combusts in a singular cataclysm? How
can art break us from the habit of imagining the world moving collectively along
a single timeline? Taking up the shibboleth, familiar on the academic left, that
it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Charles
Tung writes in “The Angel of Alternate History and Apocalyptic Hope” that
“it is easier to imagine the end of history than to imagine the end of a partic-
ular kind of critical monotemporal historicism.” Through the formal logic of
the crosscut, exemplified in the television series The Man in the High Castle and
the film Interstellar, Tung invites us to radically reconceive the nature of time
in an apocalyptic age, expanding from monotemporality to a densely striated
braid of nonsynchronous timelines that, were we to perceive them, would allow
us to “[assess] and [speculate] on possibilities that could be ignited if friction
and resistance were placed elsewhere, or distributed differently across other
lines of history.” Sarah Chihaya, too, calls our attention in “What is Missing:
Cataloguing the End” to the heterochronicities available within apocalyptic
form, analyzing a digital memorial to extinction by Maya Lin and a rewriting
of Ignatius Donnelly’s cosmic disaster story Ragnarok by A. S. Byatt to advocate
the list, or the “list-fraught world,” as a form that captures the temporal expe-
rience of living in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. The list, as she argues
throughout her essay, “imaginatively positions itself simultaneously in the midst
of ongoing planetary crisis and at, or even after its end.” To experience at once
the plenitude and loss inscribed in a list of what is—and was and will not be and
already is not—is, maybe, to feel the Anthropocene.

As Tung and Chihaya posit, apocalypse is heterochronic, inhabited by some

and not (yet) by others. African Americans have long been at the front lines in
the U. S. The Civil Rights era offered a brief respite during which the dom-
inant mode was not apocalypse but jeremiad, as in canonical texts like James

ASAP/Journal 460 /
Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.”
The jeremiad asks a sinful nation to return, for the first time, to its foundations,
“to achieve our country” or to cash in the constitution’s defaulted “promis-
sory note.”12 But as early as the late 1960s, Baldwin and others, betrayed by the
limits of civil rights without economic justice, and anticipating the renewed
imposition of institutionalized segregation through mass incarceration, took up
Malcolm X’s torch and turned from jeremiad to apocalypse. This apocalyptic
turn entailed a shift—as James Ford argues in “When Disaster Strikes: On the
Apocalyptic Tone of 1990s Hip Hop”—from a national to an imperial frame.
The next decade or so witnessed, in response to Black life in America, apoc-
alyptic art from, to name just a few of the most influential artists, Toni Cade
Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Sun Ra, and Ishmael Reed. In the 1980s, the center
of gravity moved, as Ford shows in his essay, to hip hop. Public Enemy, Mobb
Deep, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, Lauryn Hill, Pastor Troy, and, above
all, Busta Rhymes became apocalyptic visionaries who mounted the challenge
of representing Black life at the end of the twentieth century, but whose voices,
in 2018, remain utterly contemporary. In his “Final World Front” tetralogy,
Busta Rhymes inhabits the apocalypse imposed on Blackness in the U.S., while
using the affective, hermeneutic, and physical affordances of hip hop to imag-
ine modes of being “outside the hopelessness cultivated by [neoliberalism’s]
apocalypse on an installment plan.” From within a neoliberal hegemony that
increasingly purveys harmonic resolution at the expense of Black lives, Ford
amplifies the dissonance of apocalyptic hip hop as a counter-apocalyptic strategy
of resistance and refusal.

These scholars—Evans, Sorensen, Tung, Chihaya, and Ford—emphasize the lib-

erating potential of inhabiting apocalypse. But as Ford suggests in his distinction
between “major” and “minor” forms of apocalypse—in which major apoca-
lypses support hegemony and minor ones signify rebellion—the form nonetheless
retains its power to serve empire. In a practice that supports the violent exclusion
or destruction of the less powerful, apocalypse frequently entails assigning respon-
sibility for the end to an evil other among us or outside us. Heather Hicks calls
this the “logic of apocalyptic affiliation,” in which women are depicted as both
aligned with and representative of “the destructive social forces and values that
have precipitated massive environmental destruction and societal collapse. In her
essay “ ‘Smoke Follows Beauty’: The Femme Fatale and the Logic of Apocalyptic
Affiliation in Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus,” she details the history of

Hurley & Sinykin 461 /

misogynistic apocalyptic affiliation bound up in apocalypse. Locating this logic
first in Revelation’s Whore of Babylon, Hicks traces the surprising continuities
between the glamorous, nonreproductive figure of the Whore and the Hollywood
archetype of the femme fatale. She finds this misogynistic figuration engaged and
subverted in Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel Gold Fame Citrus (2015), powerfully
demonstrating how the logic of apocalyptic affiliation functions to increase the
vulnerability of women in the present by making them scapegoats for society’s
anxieties about the degraded future.

Like Hicks, Nasia Anam also draws on the long history of apocalyptic form in
order to account for its contemporary manifestations. In the twenty-first century,
with the War on Terror and the global migration crisis, Islam has become the
recipient of a cruel apocalyptic affiliation in imperialist or post-imperialist coun-
tries such as England, France, and the U. S. Anam explains the short and long
history of Islamophobic apocalypticism in the West, from the eschatological fan-
tasies of Christopher Columbus to the ravages of capitalism and climate change
that undergird the migrant crisis. The current resurgence of fear of the demise of
Western civilization at Islamic hands is, she shows, “the return of the historically
repressed” in which the colonizing world imagines itself as the recipient of the
exterminist colonial practices that it has itself deployed. Historicizing apocalypse
within the Crusades and the deep history of colonialism, she sees apocalypse as a
foundational myth that “formed the very concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West,’ ”
identifying contemporary manifestations of this myth in novels by Michel
Houellebecq and Boualem Sansal. Theorizing against this manifestation of apoc-
alypse, in which colonial nations see themselves as existentially threatened by their
victims, Anam draws on Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West to propose a new apocalyptic
figure of the migrant as one who is able to survive and even flourish within the
end of civilizations brought about by contemporary war, capital extraction, and
climate change. She argues that if we could, today, refuse the colonial-paranoid
apocalypse, eschew its shaping power, “then the language of civilizational clash,
conquest, and colonization would effectively be rendered toothless.”

To close the issue, we present a work of fiction by Joanna Demers in which the
apocalypse to which scholars and practitioners of the arts and humanities must also
attend is an apocalypse for the humanities. Told from a future in which the disci-
pline of history has disappeared and been replaced by the omniscient inscriptions
of the Cloud, the story looks back on our present, circa 2018, through the concerns

ASAP/Journal 462 /
of the ostensibly Marxist Eddans Collective. One of its members, and the story’s
protagonist, Annika Trent, is a historian of late antiquity and a practitioner of astral
projection who comes to believe that, when seen from a cosmic perspective, apoc-
alypses are cyclical, belonging within the slogan stasis is form. Against her scientistic
nemesis, who believes capitalism is a metabolistic outgrowth of the natural world,
Trent advocates the establishment of a contem-
porary Augustinian City of God that “could
offer a harbor to those fleeing the oncoming
storm of automatization.” We close this special
issue in the speculative mode to invite readers
“
what will our apocalyptic present
to engage imaginatively and affectively as well have been, and how can we act,
as intellectually with the question of Apocalypse: think, argue, and organize, here,
what will our apocalyptic present have been, and
at the end of time?
how can we act, think, argue, and organize, here,
at the end of time?
”
***

Apocalypse is everywhere. To the extent that its ubiquity is coercive, we live

in an apocalyptic world. But despite its pretense of inexorability, apocalypse
is not inevitable. The apocalyptic world is forged through unevenly weighted
human decisions, and artists choose whether and how to use an apocalyptic art
to respond to it: the cataclysmic world beckons toward but does not require
apocalyptic form. Too often, debates about its merits are reductive, concerned
with whether it is good or bad. Moving beyond this framing, the forum, story,
interview, and essays collected in this volume theorize, collectively, a politics of
form. Apocalyptic form in the present has reckoned with the world—in Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s famous words, everything that is the case—and shaped it, both,
at times, cracking open new powers of apprehension, and abetting and extend-
ing old oppressions.

If there is a single strength shared by every contributor to this volume, it is an

approach to apocalypse premised upon the idea that naming “apocalypse” is the
starting point, not the conclusion, of rigorous inquiry. Referring to something
as “apocalyptic,” for these artists and writers, requires both a historical and a
formal analysis: what is the long history that has shaped the form in this con-
temporary manifestation, and how does that historically produced form work

Hurley & Sinykin 463 /

 to shape our contemporary experience? As a result, apocalypse comes alive in
this issue, revealing itself to be flexible and active, capable of activating an almost
endless array of affects, orientations, narrative logics, political affiliations, and
modes of ecological inhabitation.

To edit a special issue is to make a certain kind of claim upon the present. It
stakes a claim to the time of others, extending an invitation to write with us,
read with us, respond to us, upon a single topic. It stakes a claim to the labor of
others, to the writers and artists and reviewers and editors and copy editors and
typesetters and printers who we ask to orient their work toward the problem
that we seek to interrogate. And it stakes a claim to stakes themselves, arguing
that its topic is urgent, that it has be addressed right now, by us, right here. Perhaps,
then, apocalypse is both the content and the form of this particular special issue.
The multiplicity of perspective, theory, and practice that this issue contains is
all a part of what it means to be apocalyptic; the profound engagement with the
present is what it means to be apocalyptic; the collaboration and cooperation
with each other that this volume has required is, as N. K. Jemisin reminds us
in her interview, what it means to be apocalyptic. If we stake a claim upon the
present right now, right here, it is this: that apocalypse can be a way to live, a way to
think, a way to work together, a way to flourish in a world that might not have
a future but that demands our action nonetheless.

“
If we stake a claim upon the present right now, right here, it is this:
that apocalypse can be a way to live, a way to think, a way to
work together, a way to flourish in a world that might not
have a future but that demands our action nonetheless.

ASAP/Journal 464 /
 Notes

1
Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (2007; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 366.
2
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction: With a New
Epilogue (1967; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).
3
Jameson’s famous essay opens with the claim that “[t]he last few years have been
marked by an inverted millennarianism [sic], in which premonitions of the future,
catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that.” Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary
Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 1.
4
James Berger describes the late twentieth century as haunted by “another sense,
that the conclusive catastrophe has already occurred, the crisis is over (perhaps we were
not aware of exactly when it transpired), and the ceaseless activity of our time—the
news with its procession of almost indistinguishable disasters—is only a complex form of
stasis”; while Teresa Heffernan analyzes the same period in terms of “the implications and
repercussions of living in a world that does not or cannot rely on revelation as an organizing
principle.” Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), xiii; Teresa Heffernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism,
Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2008), 7.
5
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2016), 35. See also Timothy Morton’s claim that “the strongly
held belief that the world is about to end ‘unless we act now’ is paradoxically one of the
most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here
on Earth.” Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 6–7.
6
For a striking account of how a focus on “existential risks” in the tech-philanthropy
community has diverted resources away from more mundane crises such as global poverty,
see Dylan Matthews, “I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came
away . . . worried,” Vox, August 10, 2015, [Link]
effective-altruism-global-ai.
7
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 2010).
8
Rebecca Roanhorse, “Postcards from the Apocalypse,” Uncanny Magazine, 2018,
[Link] Roanhorse builds
here on Cutcha Risling Baldy’s (Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk) analysis of the California Gold
Rush as a zombie apocalypse for California Indians. See Cutcha Risling Baldy, “Why I
Teach The Walking Dead in My Native Studies Classes,” The Nerds of Color, April 24, 2014,
[Link]
-studies-classes/.

Hurley & Sinykin 465 /

 9
Alisha B. Wormsley, “There Are Black People in the Future,” [Link]
[Link]/there-are-black-people-in-the-future/.
10
A notable exception here is Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s foundational The
Apocalypse in African-American Fiction (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996).
11
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry
35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
12
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; New York: Vintage International, 1993),
105; Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have A Dream . . . ,” 1963, [Link]
press/exhibits/[Link].

JESSICA HURLEY ​is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the DAN SINYKINis a postdoctoral fellow in Digital
Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and English at the University of Notre Dame
Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is currently and editor of Contemporaries at Post45. His book, The
completing a book manuscript titled Infrastructures of Conglomerate Era: A History of Literature in the Age
Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex of the Agent, is under contract with Columbia University
and working on a second, Nuclear Decolonizations. Press. He is completing a second book manuscript, Neoliberal
Her research focuses on the liberatory strategies, forms, and Apocalypse: American Literature and the Long
imaginaries—including apocalypse—that minoritized writers Downturn, 1965–2016. He has written about microfinance,
have developed to resist the logics and practices of the American Karl Ove Knausgaard’s masculinity, the war in Yemen, and
nuclear-military-industrial complex both within the United the experience of undergoing an endoscopy, among other topics.
States and across the Global South.

ASAP/Journal 466 /