Brazilian Science Fiction Film

Brazilian Science Fiction Film
Author: Alfredo Suppia
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2024-12-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

This book offers a pioneering critical history of Brazilian science fiction (SF) cinema, from its first appearances in the mid-twentieth century to the present. Though frequently overlooked by scholars, SF cinema from the Global South has reinvigorated the genre in recent decades. In this comprehensive study—the first of its kind in either English or Portuguese—Alfredo Suppia draws out the unique features and universal resonance of SF film in Brazil, a country that has fittingly been called "the land of the future." In Suppia's analysis, Brazilian SF stems from and responds to a long history of inequality in which everyday reality has often resembled a movie-like dystopia. Analyzing both short and feature films in the context of social, political, and economic transformations, Suppia rethinks SF film in general from a southern perspective.

Brazilian Science Fiction

Brazilian Science Fiction
Author: M. Elizabeth Ginway
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838755648

Science fiction, because of its links to science and technology, is the consummate literary vehicle for examining the perception and cultural impact of the modernization process in Brazil. Because of the centrality of the role played by the military dictatorship (1964-85) in imposing industrialization and economic development policies on Brazil, this book examines the genre in the periods before, during, and after the dictatorship, encompassing the years 1960-2000. The analysis shows that a reading of Brazilian science fiction based on its use of paradigms of Anglo-American science fiction and myths of Brazilian nationhood provides a unique look into Brazil's modern metamorphosis as it finds itself on the periphery of the globalized world.

Landscape and the Environment in Hollywood Film

Landscape and the Environment in Hollywood Film
Author: Ellen E. Moore
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-11-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319564110

This book systematically explores how popular Hollywood film portrays environmental issues through various genres. In so doing, it reveals the influence exerted by media consolidation and the drive for profit on Hollywood’s portrayal of the natural landscape, which ultimately shapes how environmental problems and their solutions are presented to audiences. Analysis is framed by a consideration of how cultural studies can make more theoretical and practical room for environmental concern, thereby expanding its capacity for critical examination. The book begins by introducing the theoretical underpinning of the research as it relates to cultural studies, landscape, and genre. In the chapters that follow, each genre is taken in turn, starting with popular animated family films and progressing through spy thrillers, eco-thrillers, science fiction, Westerns, superhero films, and drama. This book is ideal for students and scholars in a variety of disciplines, including film, environmental studies, communication, political economy, and cultural studies.

Uneven Futures

Uneven Futures
Author: Ida Yoshinaga
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2022-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 026254394X

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In this edited collection, more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. The essays, international in scope, demonstrate the diversity of SF through a balance of popular mass-market novels, comics, films, games, TV shows, creepypastas, and more niche works. SF works explored range from Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, 2084: The End of the World by Boualem Sansal, Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman, Watchmen and X-Men comics, and the Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, to the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin, and the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson. In an era in which ecological disaster and global pandemics regularly expose and intensify deep political-economic inequalities, what futures has SF anticipated? What survival strategies has it provided us? Can it help us to deal with, and grow beyond, the inequalities and injustices of our times? Unlike other books of speculative/science fiction criticism, Uneven Futures uses a think piece format to make its critical insights engaging to a wide audience. The essays inspire visions of better possible futures—drawing on feminist, queer, and global speculative engagements with Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro- and African futurisms—while imparting important lessons for political organizing in the present. Contributors: Ben Abraham, Emmet Asher-Perrin, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Gerry Canavan, Andrew Ferguson, Fabio Fernandes, Dexter Gabriel, M. Elizabeth Ginway, Sean Guynes, Ouissal Harize, David M. Higgins, Veronica Hollinger, Allanah Hunt, Nicola Hunte, Nathaniel Isaacson, Ayana Jamieson, Darshana Jayemanne, Gwyneth Jones, Brendan Keogh, Sami Ahmad Khan, Cameron Kunzelman, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Isiah Lavender III, Caryn Lesuma, Karen Lord, Sarah Marrs, Farah Mendlesohn, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Hugh Charles O’Connell, B. Pladek, John Rieder, Lysa Rivera, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steven Shaviro, Rebekah Sheldon, Alison Sperling, Alfredo Suppia, Bogi Takács, Taryne Jade Taylor, Sherryl Vint, Kirin Wachter-Grene, Ida Yoshinaga.

New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction

New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction
Author: Donald M. Hassler
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2008
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781570037368

Surveying the vast expanse of politically-charged science fiction, this book posits that the defining dilemma for these tales rests in whether identity and meaning germinate from progressive linear changes or progress, or from a continuous return to primitive realities of war, death and the competition for survival.

Practicing Science Fiction

Practicing Science Fiction
Author: Karen Hellekson
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 078645783X

Drawn from the Science Fiction Research Association conference held in Lawrence, Kansas, in 2008, the essays in this volume address intersections among the reading, writing, and teaching of science fiction. Part 1 studies the teaching of SF, placing analytical and pedagogical research next to each other to reveal how SF can be both an object of study as well as a teaching tool for other disciplines. Part 2 examines SF as a genre of mediation between the sciences and the humanities, using close readings and analyses of the literary-scientific nexus. Part 3 examines SF in the media, using specific television programs, graphic novels, and films as examples of how SF successfully transcends the medium of transmission. Finally, Part 4 features close readings of SF texts by women, including Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler.

Latin American Science Fiction

Latin American Science Fiction
Author: M. Ginway
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1137312777

Combining work by critics from Latin America, the USA, and Europe, Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice is the first anthology of articles in English to examine science fiction in all of Latin America, from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil and the Southern Cone. Using a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches, the book explores not merely the development of a science fiction tradition in the region, but more importantly, the intricate ways in which this tradition has engaged with the most important cultural and literary debates of recent year.