When Reaction Makes Worlds: Speculative Imagination, Legal Culture, and Political Authorization in Reactionary Worldbuilding

Abstract

This essayistic review examines Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice, edited by Anindita Banerjee, Sherryl Vint, David M. Higgins, and Jordan S. Carroll, from a perspective situated between political history, legal culture, and the critique of authoritarian imagination. Its central argument is that the book’s most significant contribution lies not merely in showing how speculative fiction can be appropriated by reactionary repertoires, but in demonstrating how certain narrative forms come to operate as infrastructures of political plausibility. Within this framework, reaction does not simply defend past values or reject democratic consensus; it fabricates normative worlds in which privilege appears as merit, exclusion as defense, violence as restoration, and exception as necessity. The review emphasizes the architecture of the volume, organized around plots, methods, and forms, and discusses its implications for understanding contemporary authoritarianisms, conspiracy cultures, techno-solutionism, denialism, and fantasies of sovereignty. It ultimately argues that the book offers a particularly fruitful contribution to thinking about legal culture as a field of struggle over public truth, evidentiary legitimacy, the intelligibility of conflict, and the political authorization of exclusionary practices.