In the spotlight Adam Stock

What does the apocalypse and/or post-apocalypse mean for you?

I’ve found the apocalyptic a generative concept in several ways. Firstly, as a literary scholar, the apocalyptic is important to my work as a generic narrative form. Like all genres, the apocalyptic has its own history and story of development, and as a cultural historian it has been interesting for me to find out more about the connections of the apocalyptic to material history too—especially the history of colonialism, which has often been experienced as an apocalyptic upheaval by Indigenous communities. As I’m working on a project about deserts, I am also concerned with the spatiality of apocalypse in the sense of the types of landscape which are often culturally figured as apocalyptic and/or postapocalyptic. In thinking about arid lands, the apocalyptic has an important and underappreciated role in the environmental humanities. Finally, since I’ve been at CAPAS I have been working on what it means to adopt an apocalyptic perspective: to term something apocalyptic is to make both an aesthetic and political judgement, since it is a way of seeing or reading the chaotic, contingent events of history within the confines of a narrative form. 

What is/was your fellowship trying to achieve?

I’ve been working on a book project, tentatively entitled Deserts in Speculative Fictions: Arid Lands in the Environmental Humanities. I use methods including literary close reading techniques; political, media, and discourse analysis; and historical and archival study to interrogate political and environmental issues in cultural representations of deserts. My focus is on modern and contemporary desert settings in apocalyptic, utopian, dystopian, and science fictions. One question I’m exploring is why deserts are so often associated with the apocalyptic. This has had material and practical implications as well as cultural and intellectual consequences: deserts have long been treated as wildernesses and wastelands. They are often (wrongly) assumed to be empty, but they are healthy, vibrant and diverse ecologies. This has led to some irreparable harm, including vast mining operations and the detonation of nuclear devices. Such practices feed into the association of deserts with apocalyptic wastelands, in a circular logic. Given these stakes, it’s no surprise deserts have also been sites associated with the violence of both colonial aggression and decolonial/anticolonial resistance. In sum, I want my work to help overturn some common assumptions about deserts, desert life, and desertification.

How does the fellowship project build on or connect to your previous career or biography? 

My interests in arid lands and the apocalyptic largely derive from two experiences. Firstly, during an AHRC funded postdoctoral project on ruins (2014-15), my research group commissioned an artist film about Guadalajara, California, where the sets of Cecil DeMille’s 1923 film The Ten Commandments were buried after production ended, and only rediscovered in the late 1980s. This made me think about how deserts might hide traces of past stories and lives, and how such stories might be uncomfortable and even suppressed (Guadalajara, for example, was also the site of a Japanese American internment camp in WWII). Secondly, in 2021 I lived in Muscat, Oman for six months over summer. The temperature was often well over 40°C and thanks to air pollution and humidity the ‘feels like’ temperature sometimes exceeded 50°C. Gulf states are leading architectural symbols of late capitalism, reliant on oil wealth, and highly exposed to the effects of climate breakdown. When the first typhoon to make landfall in the Gulf arrived in October 2021, it caused great damage. I began to pay greater attention to descriptions of deserts in literature, the sort of atmosphere associated with deserts, and the values attached to aridity and desertification. 

From here, it was easy to connect the dots with my past research, which has all been motivated in some way by an interest in the relationship between history, politics, and cultural narratives. I am especially interested in the political in relation to temporality and the production of space in novels, films and other media as representational modes. In other words, I’m interested in the intersection of (a) the how of narrative (how a story is told) and (b) that space is itself experienced as and through story telling as a fundamental human activity. I have generally focused on these areas in dystopian and utopian fiction.

What do you take with you from the project and its results?

Being at CAPAS has been a transformative experience for me. In career terms, it has provided me with unmatchable research opportunities and support. When I look back on the fellowship in years to come, I will also remember Heidelberg as a place where I could enjoy a balanced work and home life, and a time when I felt my work as a researcher had real value. As such, it’s helped me to re-think my career goals and priorities over the long-term. I’m very grateful for that.

I’m now more confident in the value of my own research outputs to the scholarly field, and aware of some of the ways that apocalyptic thinking—including my own work—could be helpful to a broader public and debates in culture, politics and history.

What was particularly valuable for you in terms of the input from other disciplines, other perspectives, and the exchange with the fellows and people at CAPAS?

One of the nicest things about researching at CAPAS is that everyone’s work is genuinely curiosity driven (rather than by, say, institutional or government priorities). What really helps here is the phenomenal wraparound support fellows have access to, so we can maintain our independent research work. At a practical level, this includes the science communications, publications and events teams. At an intellectual level, this includes the well-designed and directed programme of workshops, reading groups, and so on, which help generate collaboration. My cohorts have been diverse and conversations and debates—even those which bring together diverging viewpoints—feel respectful and helpful.

CAPAS’s ability to support new ideas and early-stage research has meant I can make headway with my current project, and in addition work with other fellows, members of the centre and existing collaborators to develop exciting new research plans. I’m pleased to be organizing a workshop in November on postapocalyptic ecological imaginaries. In terms of public engagement and outreach, meanwhile, the opportunities I’ve had at CAPAS in unusual settings such as a wine refugium and an outdoor cinema have felt organic rather than forced, and I’ve really enjoyed these interactions and had lovely feedback. 

To get some practical advice: What would be the three things you would definitely need in a post-apocalyptic world? 

This depends on whose apocalypse: there are many communities around the world who have experienced colonialism and genocide as apocalyptic upheavals. What they need is reparative justice, solidarity and recognition. This means doing everything we can to ensure no one else suffers such crimes, and that’s something the political establishments of the Global North are failing badly at right now.

At a lighter, pop cultural level, there’s a rich strain in science fiction of characters (mostly men of course) surviving the apocalypse by following their own rules, knowing martial arts and generally being prepared to commit violence: the lone warrior figure like Mad Max, for example. During the pandemic though, being able to race cars and wield knives was much less helpful than domestic knowledge, so if I could offer three skills for a postapocalyptic world, it would be growing vegetables, mending clothes and repairing domestic appliances. 

What are some of your favourite pop culture references to the/an (post)apocalypse?

There are so many! I’ll start with novels: The Swan Book by Alexis Wright (2013) and Terra Nullius (2017) by Claire G Coleman give an Indigenous take on apocalyptic SF experiences in Australia. They are both richly imaginative and require real work on the part of the non-Indigenous reader to grasp the complexities of the story worlds and Indigenous culture. In terms of historical novels, I’d recommend the work of Katharine Burdekin from the 1930s, which straddles dystopia and apocalypse, and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, Ursula Le Guin’s magisterial Always Coming Home and He, She and It by Marge Piercy. I recently enjoyed Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre too.

While I’m writing, I often listen to post-rock to help me focus. Godspeed You! Black Emperor have an early EP called F#A# ∞, which opens with an apocalyptic track called Dead Flag Blues. I’d also recommend Janelle Monáe, whose Afrofuturist imaginaries are fun, daring, articulate and very catchy. Their most obviously relevant track is called “Dance Apocalyptic”. 

Adam Stock is senior lecturer in English Literature at York St John University. His research seeks to better understand the intersection between political thought and representations of temporality and space in modern and contemporary culture, especially speculative fictions. His fellowship at CAPAS runs from March to December 2024.