Scry, the Beloved Country: Sinofuturist Forecasting and Accelerationist Aesthetics

Abstract

Sinofuturism has emerged within the last 5 years as a compelling label for a wide variety of artistic and literary practices that posit China as “the future” and the future as “Chinese.” Yet this term remains broadly undertheorized outside of accelerationist spheres, where it is often taken as a self-evident truism. In this piece, I explore how—despite its many and varied instantiations—sinofuturist approaches broadly share a preoccupation with temporal surveillance that reinterprets the past as a precondition of an inevitable future, thereby enrolling viewers/readers in the creation of such a future. This practice has a longer history than the term itself presupposes, although the contemporary reimagining of sinofuturist characteristics as part of a globalized, self-defining network is almost entirely a result of engagement with internet technologies. Sinofuturism, despite its short history, carries deterministic paths (and assumptions) in its representations that constrain the potential for plural futures.