Peter Paik, Comparative Literature, UW-Milwaukee

Peter Paik will be talking about the ideas, texts, and questions that stand at the heart of his book, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe. The book is a study of imaginary upheavals overtaking fictitious societies, looking at the superhero comics of British writer Alan Moore, the South Korean science fiction film Save the Green Planet, Hayao Miyazaki’s manga Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and the Matrix trilogy. He chose to study these speculative scenarios because they enable us to imagine a sequence of historical change being played out: the decay and destruction of the old order, the introduction of what Machiavelli called new modes and orders, and the figures of resistance that arise in the new world. In it he explores such themes as revolutionary change as an unwilled event, the attempt by neoliberal capitalism to create the utopia it condemned communism for seeking to establish, and political agency as a form of tragic decisionism.

Peter Paik is Associate Professor in the Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature. His book, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, was published By the University of Minnesota Press in 2010. His current research interests include theology, science fiction, anime, and the graphic novel, political philosophy, and world cinema. His current project examines a series of related themes – climate change, imperial expansionism, scarcity – from the standpoint of world-making.