Vortrag über Theresa Hannigs 'Pantopia'

Leverhulme Visiting Professor Dr Lars Schmeink from the Europa-Universität Flensburg will give his official Leverhulme Lecture on the “Progressive Fantastic” at the University of Leeds. The event will be held in person with enough space for social distancing. The event is open for students, staff, and interested public and will take place in the Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre in the Michael Sadler Building (LG.X04). Entrance is free. Abstract German science fiction has traditionally been a conservative genre, its main authors to this day mostly white, cis, hetero males of middle age. Until recently, diversity of genders, non-heteronormative sexuality, race or varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds, or representations of other marginalized groups (age, (dis)ability, etc.) has been sorely missing. But there has been a concerted effort by a younger, more diverse group of writers to change the approach to fantastic literature. Under the umbrella of the “progressive fantastic”, they have called for the inclusion of other identities in speculative fiction, the strengthening of own-voices, and a keen-eyed re-examination of traditions and structures in fantastic texts. In this talk, I want to present the key features of this “progressive fantastic” by looking at exemplary texts of recent German SF production: Judith and Christian Vogt’s ground-breaking work in writing in a non-heteronormative language and presenting intersectionally diverse communities in Wasteland (2019) and Ace in Space (2020); James Sullivan’s investigation of belonging and self-positioning via Afrofuturist estrangement in Die Stadt der Symbionten (2019), Lena Richter’s subtle emphasis on (dis)abled and neurodivergent characters in her short stories “Feuer” (2020) and “3,78 Lifepoints” (2021), and Theresa Hannig’s reinvigoration of the hopeful narrative strategies of utopia as a genre in Pantopia (2022).