Spectral Futures
Fabulations of Worlds to Come

Edited by Professor Bernd Herzogenrath

ISBN13: 9781350421127

Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Hardback

Published: 22/01/2026

Availability: Not yet available

Description
What colour is the future – or rather, what colors are the futures? Broad and enlightening in its coverage, this collection explores the notion that there is not just one visualization of the future, but many, stretching across and beyond shades of utopian brightness and dystopian darks. Visiting futures that belong to the realm of ghosts, it calls for a hauntology that deals not only with spectres of the past but also the of future, offering a fascinating engagement with both colonial history and hyper-accelerated societies. Guided by a diversity of colours, contributors speculate on non-anthropogenic futurities, theorising on the richness of an essentially complex and disordered material universe. The volume’s critical approaches range from speculative realism, oceanic biology, and philosophy and politics, to posthumanism and queer theory. What all these offerings have in common is a strong focus on materiality, the in|human, and the innovative possibilities that are brought into light by this ‘fabulated spectrum’. They combine the potentialities of philosophy, art, and science, in that they all forge a relation to chaos, or, an undeterminable ‘new.’ Powerful and thought-provoking, this book illuminates different possibilities of gazing upon futures in nuanced and novel ways.
01. Introduction: Spectral Futures, Bernd Herzogenrath 02. wavelength: 0.001 nm | color: gamma rays | The Spectral Affectivity of Glaciers, Julita Skotarska 03. wavelength: 100-400 nm | color: Ultraviolet | Wild Light: Radiant Skin and the Domestication of Ultraviolet Futures, Lisa Yin Han 04. wavelength: 380-750 nm | color: Rainbow | Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Claire Colebrook 05. wavelength: 400 nm-700 nm+ | color: White | White ? Rot, Amanda Boetzkes 06. wavelength: 420-700 nm | color: sodium-silver | Blank Screens and Spectral Skies: Hong Kong as a Postcolonial Locus of Transnational Asian Futures, Dawn Chan 07. wavelength: 450 nm low latency (you know, for high speed trading) | color: CME Blue (i.e. the blue that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange uses) | A Brief and Speculative History of Making the Weather an Option, Orit Halpern 08. wavelength: 451-488 nm | color: cobalt blue | Afterimage, Mitchell Akiyama 09. wavelength: 490 nm | color: supra-blue minor | Meshes of Light and Death, by Oceanic Bacteria, Jeremie Brugidou 10. wavelength: 492 nm | color: Infragreen | An Infragreen & Bipolar Tale of the Future, Thierry Bardini 11. wavelength: 530 nm | color: Pure Gold | Hyper-Vanguard: The Future of a Thousand Sects, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh 12. wavelength: 555 nm | color: chartreuse green | Pale Green Dot, Abelardo Gil-Fournier 13. wavelength: 580 mn | color: Yellow| Specters of Solar Futurity: Yellow–Black–Yellow, Asia Bazdyrieva, Adrian Ivakhiv, & Svitlana Matviyenko 14. wavelength: 590 nm | color: Amber | Memory of a Stone, Fabien Clouette 15. wavelength: 605.34 nm | color: vermillion | Vermillion Times: Memoranda from the Future, Christine Reeh-Peters & Isabel Machado 16. wavelength: 680 nm | color: Flesh red | Excoriating Red: A Note on Russian Futurity, Andrey Logutov 17. wavelength: none, multiple | color: gray | Dead or Alive? Gray Futures, Franziska Strack 18. wavelength: 0 nm – 400 nm – = 700 nm | color: Blackless | Blackless: The Present-absence of Blackness in an African Tomorrow, Babson Ajibade 19. wavelength: 595 nm | color: Black Hole Black | Black Hole Black (Disco Ball Lightning), Alison Sperling 20. wavelength: 6000°A nm | color: transparent | The Color of Breath, the Color of Air, Bernd Herzogenrath 21. wavelength: n/a | color: Luminous Darkness | Exploring the metaphysics of Afrofuturism through Howard Thurman's Luminous Darkness, Reynaldo Anderson’s & Christina Hudson 22. wavelength: n/a | color: Iridescence | The future Iridesces, Bronislaw Szerszynski 23. wavelength (Khaki) – 575.4 nm 8 wavelength (Dark Gray) – nil | Soliloquies of a Lone Diner and the Specters of Thomas Sankara, Kuti Ezebiro
  • Social & political philosophy
  • Social forecasting, future studies
  • Professional & Vocational
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List Price: £85.00