MLA 2027 Special Session Proposal–Tales of the Late Human: Extinction, Disposability, and the End-Times Subject
The following is a Special Session Proposal for the 2027 Modern Language Convention to be held January 7-10 in Los Angeles, California.
What does it mean to survive under late capitalism—and for whom does survival remain possible? This panel takes extinction not as a future horizon but as a present condition: a slow, stratified process already embedded in economic structures, urban environments, and narrative form. Bringing together and bridging work from literary and cultural studies, earth system science, and science and technology studies, the three presentations gathered here examine how capitalism operates simultaneously as an economic system and an extinction-producing apparatus—one that reorganizes ecological life, human subjectivity, and the boundaries of the human itself.
The panel opens with Amit Ray’s analysis of what he terms the extinction economy: the self-accelerating circuit by which platform capitalism hastens ecological breakdown while simultaneously monetizing the crises it generates. Ray’s concept of autocolonialism—the internalized reproduction of extractive structures—provides a diagnostic for understanding why populations consent to technological “fixes” that deepen the conditions requiring rescue. Drawing on Disaster Capitalism and the Capitalocene, Ray argues that ecological collapse does not interrupt late-stage economic logic but intensifies it. As Michel Nieva’s Technology and Barbarism illuminates, this is barbarism wearing the face of innovation—techno-solutionism functioning as a civilizational alibi for annihilation, in which populations consent to extractive fixes that reproduce the very crises they claim to resolve. Silicon Valley’s Mars colonization fantasies represent the logical endpoint—capital exporting terrestrial collapse rather than confronting it. Crucially, Ray insists this is also a biopolitical failure: the racialized and classed distribution of survivability ensures that the costs of ecological collapse are borne by those least responsible for generating it.
Sean T. Hammond extends and complicates this framework by introducing the nonhuman as both case study and mirror. Where Ray locates the extractive logic in venture capital and techno-solutionism, Hammond finds it embedded in the built environment itself. His analysis of synanthropic domestication—traced through urban raccoon populations exhibiting measurable morphological shifts consistent with early domestication—argues that cities function as selection machines, structurally breeding compliance across generations. The raccoon’s self-selection into the “trash economy” illuminates what capitalism’s logic demands of any species that seeks proximity to it. Hammond’s reach back to the Epic of Gilgamesh as the earliest literary recognition of civilization’s domesticating violence places Ray’s extinction economy in deep historical context: the one-way transformation that begins with eating the bread and ends with a population adapted to conditions their ancestors would have found unlivable.
Christene d’Anca’s paper draws the literary and theoretical threads of the panel into its sharpest focus. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower through Lauren Berlant’s concept of “slow death,” Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, and Marx’s metabolic rift, d’Anca argues that contemporary fiction registers extinction as an aesthetics of abandonment—a narrative form in which the exhaustion of humanist assumptions about agency and progress becomes visible. Where Ray identifies the structural drivers of biopolitical abandonment and Hammond traces their embodied and evolutionary effects, d’Anca asks how that abandonment is lived and narrated: not as apocalyptic rupture but as the ongoing normalization of attrition. Butler’s speculative vision foregrounds adaptive subjectivities that emerge within systemic collapse, while McCarthy’s ashen landscape registers its absolute foreclosure of futurity—together staging the full range of end-times subjectivity the panel sets out to examine.
Alongside one another, these three presentations construct a layered account of extinction subjectivity under late capitalism. Ray diagnoses the economic logic; Hammond maps its embodied and evolutionary effects on bodies—human and nonhuman alike; d’Anca examines how that logic shapes narrative consciousness and the literature of survival. Across all three, a shared question emerges: if capitalism has rendered extinction profitable, compliance adaptive, and abandonment livable, what forms of critique, imagination, or refusal remain available? This panel does not offer easy answers but insists that confronting them requires exactly the kind of interdisciplinary exchange—between ecology, political economy, and literary form—that these presentations, in dialogue, make possible.
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