Literary Topic: The Future is Not What You Think: Radical Imagination and the Matter of Time in Global South Speculative Fiction

This MA-level seminar examines the emergence of science fiction as a dominant non-mimetic literary form in the Global South, particularly in regions where magical realism rooted itself as a privileged vehicle for the translatability of cultural difference (Homi Bhabha). By tracing the underpinnings of the transformation of aesthetic and political concerns of magical realism into speculative futurities, the 'south' emerges as a conceptual site of critical innovation where genres are historically reworked. Drawing on a wide range of Global South authors as diverse as Amitav Ghosh, Siddharta Debb, Rita Indiana, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Namwali Serpell, we will explore the relationship between historicity and form by foregrounding the matter of time in the science fictional futures of former colonised literary cultures. By working through multiple iterations of the colonial past—time travel to the seventeenth century, multidimensional dislocations, pre-colonial cosmologies—, the chosen authors articulate futurities that expose the ongoing legacies of a world forged by the modern-colonial imagination (Walter Mignolo). More meaningfully, they strategically mobilize  the narrative form in order to carve an opening in the world-literary system (Pheng Cheah). 

This seminar aims to trouble the umbrella term 'speculative fiction' by reviewing the marxist critical strand in science fictional studies. Theorized as a quintessential Anglo-European phenomenon born in the industrial world centers, science fiction has been critically praised for its structural affinity to dialectical thought by Darko Suvin, Carl Freedman, and Fredric Jameson. This ‘literature of cognitive estrangement’, operates similarly to marxist methodologies: it renders dominant ideologies unfamiliar by exposing their underlying material conditions. Human or automated labor, utopian survival or dystopian collapse, self or other; History moves between these oppositions in a negative dialectical movement. But what happens when those who 'were not meant to survive' reclaim their right to imagine the future? Why do these authors from the Global South aesthetically articulate colonial histories—which work in loops that break, and in recursive fractures—into their futures? How do these southern spins of science fiction de-stabilize the narratives of those at the forefront of world history?

Students are invited to examine the powerful revisions postcolonial perspectives have brought to comparative literary studies. Particularly, to consider its challenges in a multipolar world, beyond the colonizer/colonized dichotomy.

Thinking with bell hooks (theory as liberatory practice), Saidiya Hartman (critical fabulation), José Esteban Muñoz (queer futurities), and Lorna Burns (a world literature yet-to-come), we will explore how radical imaginative interventions can reinvent the ethical horizon of postcolonial and decolonial thought.