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The present is apocalyptic. Cataclysms are imminent. Some are already happening or have been underway for decades, even centuries. Yet apocalypse is less an event than a form and a practice, maybe the definitive form and characteristic practice of the present. Visions of the end shape experience, historical consciousness. Apocalypse, moreover, has a history of its own, and is embedded with a wide, often contradictory politics. What is at stake in imagining our world as ending, or as having ended? Why do we turn to this ancient form so urgently today?
This special issue of ASAP/Journal posits that our moment is not singular; there is no universal "we" whose apocalypse is shared. Rather, apocalypse mediates the unevenly distributed risks of the contemporary social, political, and geophysical world. Race, gender, sexuality, disability, indigeneity, citizenship, and class determine our vulnerability to cataclysmic violence, whether fast or slow. Contemporary artists take up apocalypse as a form for resisting or abetting such violence. The arts today stake claims to forestalling or accelerating apocalypse, which seems so far beyond their sphere of influence. Apocalypse, we propose, is never a locatable event but rather an imaginative practice that forms and deforms history for specific purposes: an aesthetic that does as much as it represents. Apocalyptic art may represent an imagined future, but it acts in and upon the present. Survivalist narratives like The Walking Dead generate a sensibility of imperiled masculine sovereignty, while Afrofuturist films like Sun Ra's Space is the Place create the experience of future liberation in the present. Ashmina Ranjit's performance art enacts the threat of climate change through the construction of a dress of pins, and Naziha Mestaoui's virtual forests suggest possibilities for a reborn world embedded within cataclysm. At a moment when the use of apocalypse to structure the contemporary has only intensified, this special issue argues for the exigency of recognizing the plural temporalities and geographies of apocalypse in the post-1960 visual, media, literary, cinematic, and performing arts.
By disrupting the commonly held usage of apocalypse as indicating little more than bad teleology, we seek to destabilize apocalypse as a referent, to break it from its reified meaning in the academic mind, so that we might, as critics and artists, develop accounts that are...