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1 CONTENT 5 1. INTRODUCTION: DEALING IN FUTURES 7 2. ARE YOU PARANOID ENOUGH? KATHRYN BIGELOW'S STRANGE DAYS AND THE POLITICS OF RISK AND SPECULATION 69 3. LIVE ON THE EDGE I SAY: EDGEWORK, RISK, AND LITERARY FORM IN KAREN TEI YAMASHITA'S TROPIC OF ORANGE 133 4. MONSTROUS POLITICS: EPISTEMOLOGICAL EMPOWERMENT, NATURAL SCIENCE, AND NEW TERRITORIES OF EMPIRE IN LARISSA LAI'S SALT FISH GIRL 203 5. TOWARDS A POETICS OF RISK AND SPECULATION 277 6. WORKS CITED 295
The anticipatory logic of speculation and preemptive politics of risk are increasingly gaining significance in a globalizing neoliberal world. This study traces risk and speculation as aesthetic and political-economic strategies in factual and fictional discourses emerging at the North American Pacific Rim within a decade around 2000. Its exemplary close readings in particular focus on three fictional texts (Kathryn Bigelow's Hollywood film »Strange Days«, 1995, Karen T. Yamashita's novel »Tropic of Orange«, 1997, and Larissa Lai's novel »Salt Fish Girl«, 2002) whose intricate aesthetics pass perceptive critique on concurrent political-economic discourses and their subtle reconfiguration of race, class, and gender. The speculative near-future scenarios projected by these artifacts expose the rise of risk as a new rationality of governance. At the same time they illustrate neoliberal speculation as a new paradigm of subject formation at a hyper-capitalist, millennial Pacific Rim.
Susanne Wegener (Dr. phil.) works on a postdoc project on genre and theory construction in literary criticism. Her research interests are American Studies, Narrative Theory, Critical Theory, Political Philosophy, Theory of Science, and History of Ideas.