Description

Book description:
What will the end of the world look like? Abandoned Futures: A Journey to the Posthuman World, is a breathtaking global overview of the decay and abandonment that sits in the midsts of humanities constant push towards an uncertain future. It’s a visual epic dedicated to the edge of our power, where human industry fails and decay takes over. These are the landscapes that give the lie to our dreams of immortality.

Professor Tong Lam is a historian, author, and visual artist. His research interests cover modern and contemporary China and East Asia, modernity, technoscience, spectacle and urbanism, social theory, colonialism, and nationalism. As a visual artist, he is particularly interested in using photographic and cinematographic techniques to explore and examine industrial and postindustrial ruins from around the world, as well as China’s hysterical transformation. His photo essays have appeared in the Dissent Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other major literary publications. His solo photo exhibit, Unreal Estate, is currently on view at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is an Associate Professor of History and a core faculty of the Asian Institute, University of Toronto.