Electric Lit: White Futurism No Longer Holds Center Stage in HBO's "Station Eleven"

The adaptation of the novel disrupts the typical apocalypse story by allowing marginalized characters to survive

A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literaturesIn her book Infrastructures of ApocalypseJessica Hurley notes that at this same time, the federal government pulled funding from cities and spent instead on building more bombs. Cities started to crumble from within. Urban blight led to white flight until major cities such as Philadelphia were majority-Black in a country where Black Americans made up 12% of the population. Who else lived in cities in the 80s? Most Indigenous people, relocated to cities after U.S. “termination” policy ended land trust programs in the 1950s, mentally disabled folks kicked out of institutions the government wanted to close, trans people, immigrants, and queers. Futurelessness was a stark almost-reality: Historian Manning Marable writes that had Russia set off its nuclear bombs in 1984, more than 80% of Black Americans in the whole wide world would have been dead before the sound waves hit the suburbs. So much for luck. So much for being prepared.

Read the full article at Electric Literature