Life After Earth: Speculations in World-Building from California to the Red Planet

 

Allison Carruth, associate professor of English at the University of California-Los Angeles and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in the Princeton American Studies Program, presents “Life After Earth: Speculations in World-Building from California to the Red Planet.”

Decades before the American national imaginary fixated on the “new frontier” of space colonization, Los Angeles civil engineer William Mulholland suggested that world-building here on Earth was California’s manifest destiny. His bravado about a growing city’s land-and-water grab from the Paiute Shoshone and agricultural communities of the Owens Valley offered a prescient touchstone for the dreams about moon landings and Martian colonies that have emanated from California’s ever-expanding tech industries. Meanwhile, contemporary writers and artists probe the ecological and ethical hazards — as well as the quasi-magical promises — of these various world-building fantasies and the real-world simulations and speculations they fuel. This talk puts the futurism of engineers and sci-fi writers in conversation with other cultural fields and imaginative forms, from astrobiology to lyric poetry to performance art.

Carruth delivers the Fall 2019 Anschutz Lecture presented by the Princeton Program in American Studies and co-sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Department of English.

Life After Earth: Speculations in World-Building from California to the Red Planet

Publish Date

October 17, 2019

Presenter(s)

Allison Carruth

Link to Video

https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/Fall+2019+Anschutz+LectureA+Allison+Carruth/1_31ok9hqc

Video Length

1:13:28

 

Allison Carruth, associate professor of English at the University of California-Los Angeles and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in the Princeton American Studies Program, presents “Life After Earth: Speculations in World-Building from California to the Red Planet.”

Decades before the American national imaginary fixated on the “new frontier” of space colonization, Los Angeles civil engineer William Mulholland suggested that world-building here on Earth was California’s manifest destiny. His bravado about a growing city’s land-and-water grab from the Paiute Shoshone and agricultural communities of the Owens Valley offered a prescient touchstone for the dreams about moon landings and Martian colonies that have emanated from California’s ever-expanding tech industries. Meanwhile, contemporary writers and artists probe the ecological and ethical hazards — as well as the quasi-magical promises — of these various world-building fantasies and the real-world simulations and speculations they fuel. This talk puts the futurism of engineers and sci-fi writers in conversation with other cultural fields and imaginative forms, from astrobiology to lyric poetry to performance art.

Carruth delivers the Fall 2019 Anschutz Lecture presented by the Princeton Program in American Studies and co-sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Department of English.