Thinking from the End: On Apocalyptic Realism, Futurity, and Speculative Fabulation

Historically, the end of the world occurred again and again for various subjects in the frame of colonization, mass extinction and continued dispossession of populations. Such a conception of the recurrent end dislodges a linear idea of time and a modernist narrative of progress which surfaces in various discourses concerned with the Anthropocene. Here, the end of the world equals the end of humanity while staging the universal human subject as a collective agent of preventing such an apocalyptic scenario. This article draws on critical work on the end of worlds, queer speculative futurity and critical fabulation to carve out narrative techniques for resisting the uniform temporality of what we term apocalyptic realism. Proposing the idea of speculative fabulation, we foreground the power of speculative engagements with futurity against their subsumption under an all-too-human casting of the future as the dominant narrative mode of Anthropocene’s present.