Date of Award

Spring 6-6-2025

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Miya Xie

Second Advisor

Jodi Kim

Abstract

This thesis offers a comparative analysis of Toni Morrison’s Paradise and K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, exploring the relationship between the utopic impulse in art and the field of speculative fiction. I coin and propose the usage of the term “speculative gesture” as a conceptual tool to identify tactics, motifs, and impulses running throughout these two texts that gesture towards the potentialities for constructing alternative futurities. In Chapters 1 and 2, I identify speculative gestures in Paradise and Bestiary, respectively. In Chapter 3, I delve into a comparative analysis of six speculative gestures from these two novels. Building on the scholarship of Giorgio Agamben and José Esteban Muñoz, I argue that identifying speculative gestures is imperative to building a gestural politics of incommensurability. I conclude by advocating for a modality of reading speculative fiction through the lens of identifying speculative gestures in art and the quotidian. Such a modality of reading is central for building alternative futurities for minoritarian subjects, women of color, and diasporic people.

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