Maureen McHugh's 2011 collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse , is a devastating window onto the conditions of bare life--the reduction of self to homo sacer, humans evacuated of any rights until only their bare corporeality remains to be regulated by the State (Agamben 1998). Each of the stories takes up the question of the apocalyptic, but not from the Hollywood perspective--there are no bombs, tsunami, alien invasions. Instead, McHugh explores everyday life in the wake of disaster. And, little by little, we're led from this novum to the realization that we are, in fact, living after the apocalypse: in the wake of successive catastrophes of capitalism, greed and environmental degradation. This is certainly the case with the second story in the collection, "Special Economics". In a post-bird flu pandemic China, workers are in short supply, and Jieling makes her way from the provinces to Shenzhen to find her fortune in a factory. ...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.