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Post-apocalyptic mobilities in Station Eleven

Proposal to explore mobility as a trope in the post-apocalyptic dystopian visual narrative Station Eleven (2021)

Full paper in PDF at the bottom of article. 

Image: HBO MAX

"...it could be argued that within conventional post-apocalyptic narrative, Station Eleven proposes a speculative view of the world “as both a human world and a non-human world” (Eugene Thacker) – a world past the end of “civilization.” That the world ends when “modernity” ends is, of course, a script of Western hegemonic origins. The series employs new mobility practices to activate humanity past its point of demise; in effect, it creates sites of exceptional (white, Western) mobility, while erasing other mobile experiences. Meanings attached to (non)mobility can be traced to a desire of opposing Utopia to Dystopia, with a faulty value system used to differentiate between the two.

“How do we give meaning to the world, in the aftermath of a disaster?” asks E. Thacker. We can challenge the question by acknowledging that some worlds have already ended, but “the end of their worlds did not make these populations vanish so much as it pushed them to invent new methods of ecological and cultural reproduction,” and, we may add, new modes of being mobile (Hsu&Yazell 2019:352).

If a post-apocalyptic (rather than Utopian) thinking were to guide us in an approach of mobility today, we’d “think beyond revelation…engage with the past in a necessarily flawed and incomplete way to imagine different kinds of presents and futures that have no jurisdiction over humanity as a whole and remain incomplete as visions, treatises, critiques, (dis)organizations, and what-if” (Doyle 2015:111). This approach can aid a decolonizing of the single-story of modernity, where the end of capitalism is the end of the world.

If nomadic subjects “require and produce nonunitary, complex politics,” it is an actual, not only a speculative, engagement with this type of subjectivity that can lead to a heightened awareness of a plurality of contemporary journeys. Teresa Heffernan asks: “What does a world that has abandoned a sense of ending looks like? Is it about ruins and ghosts? Is it about possibility and plurality?” Possibility and plurality are takeaways from Station Eleven–either inspired by the execution of the story, or by its shortcomings. Regardless, the use of mobility as a trope is telling."

Paper as PDF

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