Imaginaries of Planetary Futures: The Expanse and Democracy-to-Come

This article looks at The Expanse (Syfy/Amazon Prime 2015–2022) as an example of Anthropocene television that stages a form of utopianism that is neither naive nor posthumanly nihilistic but aligned with a notion of “democracy-to-come” under the conditions of the Anthropocene. The program text offers parabolic reflections on the underlying capitalistic and colonial logic of Western anthropocentrism in its depictions of the colonization of worlds beyond the Solar System, thus directly challenging the Earth-centric and anthropocentric stances underlying (human) history. The series challenges the binary logic of the (human) “us” vs. the (nonhuman/alien) “them” and gestures towards the inherent heterogeneity of the human itself. Furthermore, the paper comments on the ways The Expanse envisions a future which is always-already deterritorialized and what this means for our lived experiences of crises in relation to concepts of democracy: it comments on what the relation between the pervasiveness of political, economic, and environmental anxieties and the related ethical dilemmas of our present historic time are, and what the nexus between utopianism and democracy reveals about the futures of the human-to-come. (DLP)