After the End of the World

This talk looks at two fairly recent scifi films, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and Semil Kaplanoglu’s Grain (2017), to consider how materiality, star power and ideology impact postapocalyptic storytelling. Interstellar has quickly become a scifi classic, while Grain, a Turkish German coproduction with a much smaller budget, hardly drew attention in the media. In this paper, I read Grain as an example of Gulf futurism. While Nolan’s blockbuster centers American values and institutions as the saving grace for humanity, Kaplanoglu uses the genre of scifi to critique Islamophobic politics in the West and the repercussions of Western Imperialism for the Middle East and humanity at large.

Host or Publisher Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures