The functions of the embassy in the world-making experiments of China Miéville

Brown, SD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7841-3225, 2019. The functions of the embassy in the world-making experiments of China Miéville. NatureCulture (5), pp. 95-116.

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Abstract

What happens when social scientific theorising seeks to take instruction from Science Fiction and Fantasy writing rather than using it as a source of convenient examples? This paper discusses the ways in which the figure of the ‘embassy’ and ambassadorial functions operate within the work of China Miéville. Focusing in particular on three key novels – The City and The City, Kraken and Embassytown – the paper reads the secondary worlds constructed by Miéville as offering their own self-contained problematics of relevance to social science. These concerns the mechanisms of territorial distinction, the nature of communication and the organization of spatio-temporal relations. The embassy emerges as an embodied site for the mediation of specialized communicative relations that are fundamentally irreconcilable, but which nevertheless offer the hope of reaching outside of human temporality. The relevance of these considerations for a social science of the Anthropocene and the Chthulucene are outlined.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	NatureCulture
Creators:	Brown, S.D.
Publisher:	NatureCulture
Date:	2019
Number:	5
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	05 Sep 2019 10:40
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2019 10:56
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/37575

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