Histories of the Future [Hardcover]

Daniel Rosenberg (Editor), Susan Harding (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 30, 2005

We live in a world saturated by futures. Our lives are constructed around ideas and images about the future that are as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This book is a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the forms and functions that the future takes. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, prophecy and trauma, it brings together critical meditations on the social, cultural, and intellectual forces that create narratives and practices of the future. The prognosticators, speculators, prophets, and visionaries have their say here, but the emphasis is on small narratives and forgotten conjunctures, on the connections between expectation and experience in everyday life.

In tightly linked studies, the contributors excavate forgotten and emergent futures of art, religion, technology, economics, and politics. They trace hidden histories of science fiction, futurism, and millennialism and break down barriers between far-flung cultural spheres. From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the forests of Java and from the literary salons of Tokyo to the roadside cafés of the Nevada desert, the authors stitch together the disparate images and stories of futures past and present. Histories of the Future is further punctuated by three interludes: a thought-provoking game that invites players to fashion future narratives of their own, a metafiction by renowned novelist Jonathan Lethem, and a remarkable graphic research tool: a timeline of timelines.

Contributors. Sasha Archibald, Susan Harding, Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christopher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Tsing

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An eclectic, provocative mix of ideas and approaches united by their common intelligence and lucidity, the essays in Daniel Rosenberg’s and Susan Harding’s Histories of the Future tease out unexpected adjacencies between a welter of social, political, and cultural scenarios that touch on questions of the yet-to-come. This is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the relationship of the future to the past—and of the present to both.”—Jeffrey Kastner, senior editor of Cabinet magazine

“Telling of timelines to the end of time and boom times for imagining the future, this fine book is a boon for all of us who tune in for such timely discourses. Astute essays—and a chancy global futures card game—take the reader from salvage frontiers in South Kalimantan; to desert folk futurologies in Rachel, Nevada, and lived surreal cityscapes in Irvine, California; to fraught future makings through art, technology, and social movements in the Philippines and Japan; to that end-of-the millennium portal, Heaven’s Gate. Histories of the Future experiments with topic, genre, and mode. Its own narratives of the metastasizing metanarratives of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century future making are at home in trauma time, everyday time, Big Time, prophecy time, local nonstandard time, and global time. Asking how to examine grand stories with local acts, this valuable collection makes palpable the rich collaborative thinking that bound the authors as they studied the shapes of futures already lost and futures still imaginable. We never get Big Stories out of place; rather, Histories of the Future gives us robust places, artifacts, practices, texts, and performances in which narrative control of possible futures is at stake.”—Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

About the Author

Daniel Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of History in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the French Enlightenment.

Susan Harding is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent book is The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822334852
• ISBN-13: 978-0822334859
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,380,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is hard to explain..., January 6, 2008

By 

Michael Valdivielso (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Histories of the Future (Paperback)

The book is a collection of essays and ideas about the future. But what is the future? It can be a frontier, promising wealth and a high standard of living. It can be a vision of a city of the future, shiny and smelling of gas. The collection includes one story and even a future game and also a time about...well, timelines. From cell phones in the Philippines to Heaven's Gate, explain mankind's many futures for yourself. Like it or not, this book really forces one's mind to expand. A must for any sci-fi fan or person interested in the many facets of history.