FIGURES OF FREEDOM:
Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis
Edited by Randy Laist & Brian A. Dixon
The United States of America—its politics, its culture, and its identity—is often framed as an evolving conversation about the nature of freedom. The word “freedom” is ubiquitous in political rhetoric, patriotic songs, advertising, and activism. Conflicts in American life typically revolve around questions of what it means to be free, who gets to be free, the limitations of freedom, and the problems and paradoxes associated with freedom.
In the twenty-first century, in a time of social media, digital surveillance, climate change, pandemic management, autocratic politicians, and evolving attitudes about race, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity, the old question of what freedom truly entails calls for new answers, new ways of thinking, and even new ways of being free. In this time of crisis, it is imperative that democratic populations engage in earnest and open-ended discourse about what freedom means, how it is defined, and what it looks like.
Figures of Freedom answers the call. This provocative and thought-provoking collection of essays by an international team of scholars invites readers to witness how recent literary, filmic, and televisual narratives have represented and reimagined themes of personal and political agency in the context of twenty-first-century aspirations and anxieties. In various ways, films as diverse as Bird Box, Toy Story, and Pacific Rim, television series such as Mad Men and Mr. Robot, and novels such as DeLillo’s Zero K, Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, and Millet’s A Children’s Bible all present characters who grapple with classical questions of freedom against a recognizably contemporary backdrop of terror, tyranny, technology, and apocalypse. Together, they reveal what twenty-first-century narratives can teach us about how the idea of freedom has been expanded, distorted, and reimagined in contemporary fiction.
What Does it
Mean to be free?
FEATURING
“‘Becoming a WASP’: Mad Men and the Failure of the American Dream” by Nicole Chrenek
“At Apocalypse’s Edge: The Paradox of Freedom in Contemporary Popular Science Fiction Films” by Jasmine Tan Hui Jun
'“The Freedom of ‘the Endland of the Convergence’ or ‘the Long Soft Life’ in DeLillo’s Zero K” by Stephen Hock
“Allegorical Tensions between ‘Freedom to’ and ‘Freedom from’ in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom” by Peter Krause
“‘The Time for Expeditions was Over’: Infectious Collaborations, Multispecies Justice, and Troubled Freedoms in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy” by Ashasmiti Das
“‘You Gave Up the World’: Freedom and Responsibility in Jenny Offill’s Weather and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible” by Claire P. Curtis
“‘Sometimes That’s All It Takes to Save a World, You See’: Reading Freedom and the Anthropocene in N. K. Jemisin’s Writings” by Katrina Newsom
“The Shadow of the Pit: Freedom, Family, and Neoliberalism in Meghan Lamb’s Failure to Thrive” by Jay Fraser
“Can You Be Free If You’re Not Real?: Emily St. John Mandel on Freedom and the Simulation Hypothesis” by John C. Merfeld, Tom Richards, and Noah Stengl
“Caught in the Web: The Illusion of Freedom and the Techno-Dystopia in Mr. Robot” by Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh
“Sonmi-451’s Revolutionary Fight for Freedom in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas” by Martha Zornow
“Seeing Environmental Crisis: Reproduction, Disability, and Climate Change in Bird Box” by Tatiana Konrad
“Freedom in Toy Story: Reading Woody’s Journey as a Post-Human Slave Narrative” by Sutirtho Roy
“‘Those Who Deny Freedom to Others Deserve It Not for Themselves’: Redefining the Content of Freedom in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad” by Beatrice Melodia Festa
“The Struggle at the End of the World: Black Freedom in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me” by Sharmila Mukherjee
“Every story is about freedom in one way or another, and every representation of freedom inevitably negotiates the dynamic questions involved in what it means to be free, who gets to be free, what one should do with one’s freedom, the risks of freedom, and how one can even know how free they are, or how unfree. Indeed, such questions might only be answerable through the language of storytelling, since they are intimately connected to the lived experience of time, context, and consciousness. It may well be that one of the cognitive functions that narrative fulfills for human societies is its ability to help us think through the imponderable questions of human freedom. ”