reviewed by Taguhi Torosyan
edited by Knar Khudoyan

In Radical Futurisms, T. J. Demos confronts the mounting signs of civilizational collapse—a convergence of ecological devastation, democratic backsliding, systemic inequality, and the erosion of planetary life support systems in the Holocene. He frames this polycrisis not as a series of isolated catastrophes but as interwoven consequences of centuries-long racial and colonial exploitation.

Demos surveys the landscape of contemporary global crises—climate change, pandemics, racial injustice, economic instability, species extinction, and the resurgence of authoritarianism—not as sudden ruptures, but as enduring conditions that have long threatened the lives of marginalized communities. These conditions persist into the present, maintaining their structural violence under new guises.

The heart of Demos’s inquiry is speculative: what visions of the future are possible amid systemic breakdown, and which communities will shape or survive them? Rather than simply charting collapse, he advocates for imaginative strategies that move beyond entrenched systems of power. What might a future liberated from the confines of capitalism, colonialism, and linear progress look like? And what steps are required to transition from critique to creation?

How does Demos’s invocation of Angela Davis’s definition of “radical”—“grasping things at the root”—reframe the notion of futurism as not merely speculative, but as fundamentally rooted in historical, structural, and systemic transformation?

To answer these questions, Demos argues that we must reconfigure our very relationship with time. Drawing on radical futurist perspectives—rooted in the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, queer, multispecies, and anti-capitalist communities—he explores alternative chronopolitics that resist the fatalism of collapse and instead foreground justice-to-come.

Artistic and activist practices become crucial in this context. Demos points to experimental art, digital media, and grassroots movements as fertile grounds for envisioning and enacting radical futures. These practices reject the Western teleology of progress and instead draw from Black radical traditions, Indigenous cosmologies, and anti-capitalist imaginaries. For instance, Indigenous temporalities prioritize cyclical time—where past, present, and future converge through ancestral knowledge, ecological rhythms, and embodied ritual. Such chronologies offer an embodied, place-based temporality essential for cultural resilience and ecological care.

Through his analysis of temporality, Demos reveals how artists deploy speculative strategies to reconfigure the future as a space of healing, resistance, and radical transformation. T.J. Cuthand’s Reclamation (2018), part of the NDN Survival Trilogy alongside Extractions and Less Lethal Fetishes, envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape that carries reparative potential. Together, these works intertwine ecological violence, colonial afterlives, and queer futurity to challenge dominant timelines and systems of power.

In these artistic imaginaries, the future is not merely a destination but a contested terrain where retrocausality, chronopolitical agency, and prefigurative elements are mobilized to disrupt what Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism calls the master(’s) clock[work universe]—a temporal regime that unequally distributes mobility, agency, and access to futurity.

This resistance to linear, imperial time resonates with political anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla’s concept of hopeful pessimism and art critic John Berger’s notion of undefeated despair, both of which describe enduring affects that persist within the ruins of modernity’s broken promises. Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger powerfully embodies this temporal persistence in their public artwork We Survive You (2021), part of the Future Ancestral Technologies (2021) series, which asserts Indigenous futurity as a living presence embedded in the now—not merely a deferred ideal.

Similarly, Krista Kim’s Mars House (2021), the first NFT house and Alisha B. Wormsley’s There Are Black People in the Future (2017) present speculative landscapes shaped by technocapitalism and digital extraction, yet reframe futurity as a site of care, presence, and resistance rather than an extension of capitalist accumulation.

Expanding on what Demos terms abolitionist aesthetics, The Otolith Group’s speculative video essays—especially INFINITY minus Infinity (2019)—employ choreopoetic techniques that evoke embodied indeterminacy. Their work rejects Enlightenment chronologies, racialized rationality, and necrospeculative capitalism, where historical violence is financialized to fuel ongoing oppression.

Demos contends, that these aesthetic interventions align closely with Walter Benjamin’s eighth thesis in On the Concept of History, where he evokes the tradition of the oppressed as a force capable of rupturing homogeneous, historicist time and opening revolutionary possibilities through temporal disjuncture and political imagination.

Demos highlights a range of collectives and initiatives—from Afrofuturist interventions like Black Quantum Futurism and the Otolith Group to activist-art hybrids such as Super Futures Haunt Qollective (SFHQ), Forensic Architecture, and Extinction Rebellion. These projects expose and challenge dominant narratives of identity, time, and power. Groups like The Red Nation and the Indigenous Environmental Network center sovereignty and solidarity in their environmental justice frameworks, aligning with global alliances such as the Climate Justice Alliance.

In his analysis of protest art, Demos references Decolonize This Place and the 2021 Strike MoMA campaign, illustrating how artistic intervention and coalition-building converge into powerful critiques of institutional complicity. These movements bring together diverse groups—anti-gentrification activists, war resisters, queer collectives, and more—to demand structural change.

Demos also engages with projects such as Jeanne van Heeswijk’s Trainings for the Not-Yet (2019-20) and Jonas Staal and Florian Malzacher's Training for the Future (2019), which explore methods for cultivating collective imagination and resistance. Legal-political interventions like Staal’s Collectivize Facebook campaign with Jan Fermon and transnational movements like Progressive International’s Make Amazon Pay initiative exemplify efforts to rethink common digital spaces and confront corporate extraction.

At the conceptual level, Demos introduces chronopolitics—the political structuring of time—as a way to counter capitalist realism, a term borrowed from philosopher Mark Fisher. He warns against green capitalism and algorithmic governance, which offer false promises of sustainability while reinforcing existing hierarchies. Instead, he advocates for ruptural futures that open up radical possibilities through alternative temporal practices.

 T. J. Demos presents La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción as an active artivist practice which transforms protest into new transformative possibilities for Puerto Rico. Through their creative approach to the debt crisis the collective demonstrates that Puerto Rican people cannot be reduced to debtors. The collective maintains that Puerto Rican citizens are creditors not the debtors and that they deserve justice because of the colonial and capitalist exploitation they have endured for centuries. Through this  transformative perspective the collective fights against neoliberal systems while recovering historical power dynamics.

Through murals and protests and community work La  Colectiva unites people to form a collective political voice and solidarity that resists oppressive systems. Their work  aligns with the Combahee River Collective's demand to dismantle all systems of oppression for liberation. According to the collective member Charisse  Burden-Stelly, identity is found in politics, and not politics in identity, thus political identity develops through coordinated collective action.

Solidarity, in Demos’s framework, emerges not from identity but from shared political commitment. Distinguishing between solidarity in embodiment, solidarity in affect, solidarity in aesthetics, and drawing on philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò’s critique of epistemic deference and political theorist Jodi Dean’s notion of the generic comrade, Demos argues that solidarity should be practiced across differences, resisting the liberal impulse to reduce politics to personal identity. Black Live Matters' writer and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s call to open onto difference supports this view, grounding it in the politics of insurgent universality—an expansive, collective form of organizing that refuses the closures of identity-based liberalism.

Demos contends that solidarity must be temporal as well as political: an evolving practice forged in the ongoing struggle to build post-collapse societies rooted in care, reciprocity, and systemic transformation. Collapse, in this view, is not an end, but a generative threshold—a site of insurgent creativity and decolonial reorientation.

Yet, the book leaves a critical gap. Despite its compelling vision, Radical Futurisms sidesteps the historical contradictions embedded in the term futurism. Demos’s project would benefit from confronting the reactionary dimensions of early 20th-century Futurism—particularly its Italian iteration, with its celebration of fascism, violence, and techno-utopianism. Ignoring this legacy risks presenting radical futurism as a concept without a past, undermining its potential to fully disavow its imperial and destructive genealogies.

More significantly, the text could be enriched by reclaiming alternative futurist traditions—especially those emerging from Russia and Eastern Europe. Thinkers like Alexander Bogdanov and Velimir Khlebnikov envisioned cosmic collectivism, systemic reorganization, and poetic universalism. Bogdanov’s Tektology, a precursor to systems theory and ecological thinking, and Khlebnikov’s speculative linguistic experiments mirror many of the values Demos champions.

Recognizing this radical counter-history would situate Radical Futurisms within a longer dialectic of political imagination, where the future has always been a contested terrain. By foregrounding these lineages, Demos could deepen his chronopolitical critique and better demonstrate that liberated futures are never invented ex nihilo—they emerge from the tensions and contradictions of history.

Ultimately, with the mentioned reservations, Radical Futurisms makes a vital contribution to contemporary debates around climate justice, decolonization, and the politics of time. Its call to reimagine solidarity as both a temporal and political force opens new pathways for collective transformation beyond the ruins of capitalist realism.