Imagining Segregated Spaces: The Spacial Turn in Two Science Fiction Texts

Abstract

As for the mid-nineties, and gathering momentum at the beginning of the new millennium, according to geographer Edward Soja (2009), we can observe a spatial turn in literary criticism, and other fields of knowledge such as archeology, law studies, religious studies, among others. This spatial turn entails the reading of different phenomena through a critical conception of space that, in agreement with Foucault's stand on spatiality, considers the social in the production of spatiality, which makes it a possible object for political change, in a dialogic way. The notion of mobility here ascribed is framed within this social concpetion of space, and is therefore political (Cresswell 2011, 2012, 2014, Uteng y Cresswell 2009, Söderström et al. 2013). This article analyzes two representative texts of these current tendencies—the spatial turn and critical mobility--: Ursula Le Guin's “Newton's Dream” (1994) and the film Elysium (2013) directed by Neill Blomkamp. In these texts the spatial dimension is thematized and politized and exposes the power struggles over geography and the imaginations around it, which enable forms of both subjection and resistance.