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Andrea Rota: Hello everyone and welcome to the IKOS – Religion and Politics podcast. I’m Andrea Rota and today we have the pleasure of hosting Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. He is an associate professor of Global Cultural Studies at the University of Oslo’s Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages. In addition, he is the director of the research project Co-Futures, which aims to explore how works of future fiction respond to pressing global challenges. The project is supported by a five-year ERC grant. He is also the director of the Science Fictionality project, supported by a four-year NFR grant. Bodhisattva, it’s great to have you with us on the podcast.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: Thank you, Andrea. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Andrea Rota: So, let me start by asking you about your field of research in a broad sense. For those of us who are not wearing, as you are today, a Starfleet badge on their jacket, what does it mean to study science fiction as a cultural product in a global perspective?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: I think people around the world have always been imagining futures, you know, so we can always talk about global imaginations of the future. When we talk about science fiction, we are also often thinking in a somewhat limited sense about the genre and about what it can do, where it comes from, where it originates and all of those things. So, I think part of the challenge of talking about global science fiction is first to recognize that what we understand as the history of the genre is somewhat wrong, which means that we need to be looking at many different literary traditions around the world and how these literary traditions have dealt with the future. Now whether you want to call that genre or that literary tradition science fiction or you want to call it something else is up to you. But recognizing that it has a global dimension, I think is the first step. So, I think a lot of what has been happening in the last two decades has been this kind of historiography, which is digging into the archives, looking at the past, looking at the 19th century, 18th century, further back and trying to figure out what the hell do people mean when they say the word future. So that’s the first thing. So, there is a historical dimension to this. There’s also an extrapolative dimension to this. Once you see that, well, okay, people have always been imagining futures, what do you do with that? Do you use that knowledge to construct new ways of thinking about the future? Do you construct new futures? What do you do? That’s the key question, I think, when talking about global science fiction or studying science fiction right now as a cultural product in a global perspective. Now, my own work began with something similar. I started looking at science fiction from India, especially from the colonial period in Bengal. Now, when we talk about genres, and this is why this is important, because the term science fiction itself doesn’t come into usage, proper usage, until the 1930s. Which means if I’m looking at the 19th century, I’m already talking about a different way of doing history, or different way of looking at literature and literary traditions. And what I saw that, you know, it was all over the place. Imaginations of the future are all over the place in 19th century India, 19th century Bengal. So, there is a lot of literature that you can call, well, this is science fiction. You can use the term proto science fiction if you like, or you can just say this is science fiction, or it’s doing something else, or it’s future fiction, which is the term I more commonly use. So, this led me to think about science itself a bit differently. So maybe before we use the term science fiction, we need to have a clearer understanding of what is it that science means. Because based on that, we can also refine our understanding of the genre. Because science changes, what is science fiction in the 19th century is not necessarily science fiction in the 21st. Because science itself has changed. So, I think that is part of where my interest in global science fiction comes from.
Andrea Rota: Thank you. So, when we think about science fiction, we think often of speculative hyper technological words. And in this context, religion doesn’t seem to fit particularly well. And yet in the texts that you analyze, there is a lot of religion coming up. Can you elaborate on the role of religion in these narratives?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: I think religion is all over the place in science fiction, to be honest. And this has to do with the role that religion also plays in terms of how it constructs futures. So, religion also constructs futures, all religions do. What is to come? You know, will you be judged in the afterlife, for instance, this is a future question. This is a question of how you travel, how you transport yourself, right? So, all science fiction in that sense also deals with that component, which is very strong in religion. The other way to think about this is, of course, the role of myth and the way that science itself or whatever we understand as science or as technology builds the myth of the future. Oh, the future is going to be this. The future is going to be shiny. It’s going to be these, you know, spaceships. It’s going to be these jetpacks or these lunar bases or whatever. So, there is this whole other understanding of myth, which is religion turned inside out, but only through the lens of science rather than from religion. Now in 2020, I coined the term religious futurism in the context of a grant application, and it was picked up by Jim Clark, who has now an entire project developing on religious futurisms because he’s been looking at the importance of Catholicism in science fiction, and the importance of Buddhism in science fiction and so on, because a lot of these writers who are writing SF also in the Anglophone tradition are extremely religious people. So, science fiction becomes a way for them to express themselves in new terms, in technological terms, but still deal with the questions of religion. One of my favorite writers, Walter M. Miller, for instance, is a good example of this, and I’ve written on Miller in the context of his human animal ethics. So, a lot of these concerns are coming directly out of religion. Now, when we think of the question of religion, another way to think about this, for instance, is how it unravels a certain form of knowing that you cannot really scientize, that you cannot really encapsulate this way of knowing within a scientific framework. Now a lot of what has been happening in the last, you know, 20 years, especially with a lot of new future fictions or with global science fiction, if you want to use the term, or with futurisms, such as Afrofuturism or indigenous futurism, and so on, is that there is an increasing use of myth, or what you might understand as myth, or of traditional religion or traditional knowledge within the framework of science fiction. So, in a way, it is an attempt to give a certain kind of scientific basis for myth and for religion. So, this is a tendency that we can observe more and more in science fiction now.
Andrea Rota: And to describe this use of myth, you have coined an intriguing term, which is mythologerm. Can you explain us briefly what a mythologerm is?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: For sure. So, in my work, mythologerm is a way of talking about the way myths are scientized within the framework of science fiction, but also within a general cultural context. For instance, you can look at ancient religious texts and you can say, hey, look, this is evidence of an advanced technology. So hey, look, there’s a god with an elephant head, and this must be evidence of a head transplant in the ancient world, right? So, there is a lot of this form of understanding where you look at myth from the lens of the present and then you scientize myth. Now mythologerm is that tendency within science fiction, which really, to me, affects or infects the way we talk about the future.
Andrea Rota: So what do this reference to myth and classical knowledge tell us about the social context in which these stories were written and maybe about their more or less overt political message?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: I think we need to think about the users and abusers of myth. To cultures whose myths are under threat or cultures whose traditions have been systematically destroyed, whether through colonialism or the processes of modernity, whatever one wants to call it, to them, myth plays a significant role in cultural rejuvenation, which means that when these cultures use myth or want to scientize or seek to scientize myth, they definitely have a political goal. It’s cultural rejuvenation, it’s recognition of history. It’s also, you know, filling gaps in that history with stories. This is definitely a political move. That said, this has both potentially positive and potentially negative aspects. Some cultures, for instance, which tend to do this are not cultures under threat. Others are. So, the same use or the same tendency to scientize myth might, in one context, lead to majoritarian politics to wipe out other histories, whereas in other, they support or fuel minority activism. So, the same form can have different effects depending on different cultures.
Andrea Rota: With your new CoFutures project, you are now extending your inquiries on even larger scale. Can you paint us a picture of this project and explain how your previous research has led to new research questions?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: So, going from that understanding of science and how we need to talk about history and historical versions of futures to what is going on in the present, which is just the last 20 years, which is the framework for CoFutures, we are still looking at some of the same questions. That is because the way genres such as science fiction, and this is true not just of literature, this is true of film, this is true of video games, this is true of all other media. So, CoFutures is a transmedial project. And the reason to look at all of this is that they are taking on some of the same questions, some of the same issues that you also find in early SF. After all, people’s concerns with the future have changed, but they have also remained the same. For instance, the responses to climate change. This is something that one finds in pretty much all traditions of science fiction, all traditions of future fiction at present, in all languages. Now the reason for that is because climate change is a global phenomenon. The responses to these phenomena can be extremely local, because the effects are also local. But the phenomenon is global. So, one also can think of a certain comparative structure or comparative framework where we can place these different futures and these different future fictions together and say, How are these local variations affecting our global perspective? Or what can these local variations tell us about the global? So, this is how the scope of the project [went] from being very focused on colonial India and Bengal to looking at the contemporary period across so many different continents and cultures and language communities. We’re identifying some of the same issues. We are working with some of the same issues. So, we are looking at local inflections of very large global problems.
Andrea Rota: As I understand it, your research on science fiction appears aimed not only at analyzing texts and artistic productions and film, but also at unlocking untapped potential for social change. Would you say that your work has an activist or political dimension in it?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: I would not say my work as such has an activist dimension, but a lot of the work that we do study in our project has an activist dimension. And for that reason, I think by extension, our work also has something to do with activism. I think when we talk about co-futures, at least the way we talk about it in the project, co-futures are a mix of three things. They are a mixture of aesthetic practices, which you find in different futurisms. They’re also about social organization. How do you use genres or symbolism of futures to create social communities and groups? And finally, it also is about political action. That is, once you have formed a social organization and you have these aesthetic practices, what are your goals? What are your aims? And this is something that you find in all futurisms. And this is also something that you might find, for instance, in places like queer futurisms, where LGBT questions are extremely prominent in the framing of futures or design of futures. So, you use literature, you use art, you use aesthetics to form communities and to have political effects. Now, a lot of the work that we have done has also been in policy. So, that has taken us quite clearly out of the realm of analysis of any kind of cultural artifacts to designing futures and building futures. For instance, we have worked with UNHCR and UN innovations teams to talk about refugee crisis and how you can use speculative fiction to think about migrant futures or refugee futures. So, we have done all of this. So yes, it has, but that wasn’t so the political or the activist dimensions are not the focus. It just happened that way.
Andrea Rota: I understand. The aim and scope of your project align strongly with the ongoing debate on the potential of previously marginalized alternative epistemologies, sometimes defined as forms of indigenous knowledge. As a scholar working in a Norwegian university, what is your position with respect to these discussions?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: I think it’s really a question of alternative to what? And when we think about alternative epistemologies, then we are already thinking of there being some sort of a standard epistemology to which everything else is an alternative. I think one of the things that historiography or historical knowledge does is that it reveals to us very quickly the limits and boundaries of any kind of singular perspective, including on knowledge. And for those looking at history, it is also about what sort of knowledges has, if there is a dominant epistemology, what sort of knowledges has that dominant epistemology buried or what has it co-opted or what has it absorbed? So, the question of alternative epistemologies then becomes a question of working with quite simply put plural epistemologies and working with history to recognize the frictions and the fissures that you find between different epistemological models or looking at, you know, for us epistemological models related to futures or related to science. Now a lot of this does enter into our analysis of future fiction as well, simply because the way science fiction as a genre has operated. Science fiction has a certain understanding of science and with traditional historiography of science fiction, which is what a lot of the new historiography is challenging, is that science fiction is a predominantly Western genre or it’s a predominantly Anglophone, Francophone genre created in the 19th century or early 20th century. And then it just, you know, spreads to the rest of the world. Now, when we look at historical sources and archival sources, this is clearly wrong. This is clearly wrong, not because the story can’t be told from this lens of Anglophone SF or Francophone SF, but because these traditions of looking at the future have also absorbed other traditions of the future. This is how all genres, all aesthetic forms work. So, looking now in the 21st century at a lot of these future fictions, they are challenging this historiography of science fiction on the one hand, and by doing so, they are questioning how you understand science to begin with, which means that when we talk about future fiction in opposition to science fiction, for example, we’re talking about alternative epistemologies, if you want to use that term by default. Because we’re looking at a global scope of futures rather than a very Anglophone or Francophone history.
Andrea Rota: Thank you. Thank you very much, Bodhisattva, for your insights into the connections between religion, politics and science fiction.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: Thank you, Andreas. It’s been a pleasure.
Andrea Rota: This concludes today’s episode of the podcast. Our guest was Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Associate Professor of Global Cultural Studies at the University of Oslo and Director of the research project CoFutures. In the podcast description, you will find a link to an article that provides further details on the concept of mythologer. Also be sure to visit the CoFutures website to explore the various aspects of this research and access its many online resources. Thank you for listening and goodbye.