Science Fiction, Speculative Feminism, and the Violence of Colonialism: Listening to an Extremely Grainy Photograph

Archaeological narratives are frequently sites of epistemic violence. If we are left with the remnants of violent events wrought by colonialism and heteropatriarchy, how might it be possible to pick them up and piece them together towards speculative feminist ends? In this essay, we propose that science fiction and sonic epistemologies can actively oppose the hegemony of violence embedded within archaeology. The rational is shaped by the visually dominant epistemologies of Eurocentric models of knowledge production (Daston & Galison 2007). Yet “there is always more than one map for a territory, and sound provides a particular path through history” (Sterne 2003: 3). We would like to explore how the sonic can be tasked with opening up the potentials of the extra-rational.

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