On the Future

VOL 3 ISSUE 3

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

8 August 2019

The editorial board is pleased to share with new and returning readers issue 3.3 of Process, On the Future. We received an especially broad range of submissions for this issue, and it we were impressed by the richness of undergraduate thinking on the future. Submissions considered literary and historical imaginings of the future; scientific and political engagements with the future; and social and cultural visions of alternative futures.

Kasia Majewski’s essay, “Communizing Memory: Controlling the Past, Present, and Future in the ČSSR,” demonstrates how state communism sought to manipulate cultural memory and how the Czech public resisted these official manipulations of history. Analyzing competing forces in public memory-making, Majewski points to a generative gap between state narratives and public memory. Studying how power operates in the construction of memory gives us a sense, Majewski claims, of who will make decisions about the future. Zoe Bracken’s “In Defense of Utopia” also thinks about how power operates in public narratives. Who gets to imagine the future, and what are the stakes of this? Arguing that utopic thinking is not only wise, but necessary, Bracken engages queer theory and aesthetic theory to draw out the emancipatory utopianism of Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer. Following, like Bracken, the possibilities for justice in alternative visions of space and movement, Minh Vu considers what an erotic gaze, as opposed to a pornopraphic gaze, might make possible. Vu synthesizes work in feminsm, queer theory, and ethnography to imagine different relations between people and alternative understandings of self.

All three essays make clear that our sense of the future is bound up with our thinking about the past and present. Our uses of history--hegemonic understandings of the past, or possibilities of seeing history in a new way--help determine what the present feels like and what visions of the future are possible. Similarly, practicing seeing the future in a way other than as an extension of the present can shift the present and help us re-see the past.  We hope these pieces inspire further discussion, reflections, and thinking about the future. We also invite readers to read the call for papers for our next issue, On Failure, and we look forward to receiving your submissions!

Sincerely,

Kathleen Reeves & Emily George

Editors-in-Chief