Fictions of the Future in Palestine and SWANA: A Critical Reconsideration
Description
What role do fictions of the future play in the politics of Southwest Asia and North Africa? While recent scholarship tends to celebrate speculative fiction as an inherently subversive and liberatory genre, works of literary and artistic speculation—like discursive deployments of “futurity” more broadly—are often complicit in legitimating and advancing warfare, colonization, destruction, or authoritarianism.
This complicity is perhaps most obvious in the Gaza Strip, whose recent demolition and annihilation are rhetorically laced with speculative “plans” for its future rebuilding as “the Riviera of the Middle East.” More than a simple side-effect of warfare and genocide, the “day after” discourse has been instrumental to facilitating the onslaught on Gaza. Speculative aesthetics, as Donatella Della Ratta recently argued, can normalize unthinkable futures. The “fictions of the future” in this seminar’s title thus refer not only to speculative narratives but also to discursive invocations of futurity—fictional by dint of their still prospective nature—that are paddled by politicians, techno-capitalists, and the media as a mode of politics-making.
We invite critical, theoretical, and historical explorations of futurity, its tropes and its narratives, as expressed in various genres and modes of cultural production, as well as in political speech, philosophical writing, and the media. In light of current events, we are especially interested in papers that center Palestine but given the topic's broader relevance we welcome papers that engage with other geographies across SWANA or with regional future visions.
Possible topics include:
- SWANA futurescapes in literature and culture: characteristics, histories, uses, "speculative infrastructures” (Reeves-Evison)
- The capacities and limitations of various speculative genres: fantasy, science fiction, utopia, dystopia, magical realism, horror, grotesque/abject, philosophy, etc.
- Vernacular forms of SWANA futurism, especially in comparison to other futurisms, or lack thereof (e.g., Afrofuturism and Afropessimism)
- Futures past: SWANA histories of future-making and future-taking; futurism as a return to/of the past
- Future-oriented affects: politics of hope, despair, cruel optimism
- Constitutive political fictions that hinge on futurity; future-claiming as governmentality; futurism in the national imaginary
- The “primitive accumulation” of futurism: development rhetoric; speculation as extraction; the future as a colonial wasteland; environmental exhaustion.
- Financial speculation; land speculation; oil speculation
- Techno-futurism: AI, automation, biohacking; a future without a subject
- Militaristic futures; predictive and preemptive technologies and legal mechanisms
- Theological futurities—redemptive, eschatological, cyclical
- Desert futures: technological, aesthetic, or architectural experiments; future climates
This seminar is organized by the West Asia Forum, formerly of the MLA.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nour Zerelli is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Sorbonne University, an interdisciplinary diploma from Smith College, and a diploma in French from the University of Tunis. Her research explores postcolonial studies, science fiction, and Islamic thought, with a particular focus on literature from the MENA region.
Speaker Bio
Ikram Masmoudi is an associate professor of Arabic at the University of Delaware. Her research interests are in modern and contemporary Arabic literature; fiction of war, Arab women authors, gothic and apocalyptic trends in Arabic.
Speaker Bio
Jala Alarja is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at UCD. Her research examines the relation between sentimental storytelling and nation-building, primarily through a romanticized description of the land and its people. Her dissertation studies the Palestinian narrative through an eco-critical lens. Her work hones in on the discursive argument and its ability to establish a national narrative in lieu of the nation itself, primarily through its focus on the narration of the landscape.
Speaker Bio
Liron Mor is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her book, Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel, was published by Fordham University Press in 2024.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Maurice Ebileeni is a faculty member in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. He is the author of Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense (2015) and Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World (2022).
Speaker Bio
Sabreen Rashmawi is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University. She holds a B.A. in English and Middle East & North African Studies from Scripps College. Sabreen’s research interests include Palestinian and Arab speculative fiction as well as Arab anglophone literature, post-colonial studies, and historical narrativity.
Speaker Bio
Marina Johnson is a PhD candidate at Stanford TAPS. Prior to Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College. In Palestine she has directed at Al Harah and El Hakawati Theatres and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Johnson’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice, TDR, Theatre Topics, Arab Stages, Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities, Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I.
Speaker Bio
Melissa Melpignano is a dance scholar and practitioner, working as Assistant Professor of Dance at The University of Texas at El Paso. She is working on the monograph Choreographic Impolitical: Dance and Livability in Palestine-Israel. Her research appears in The Drama Review and Dance Research Journal, among others. Her article "A Necropower Carnival: Israeli Soldiers Dancing in the Palestinian Occupied Territories" received the 2024 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Shir Alon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Static Forms: Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East (Columbia UP, 2025).
Speaker Bio
danah alfailakawi received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Her research explores petroleum, apocalypse, ecology, and futurity on the Arabian Peninsula, and harbors a fixation on love and haunting. She aspires always to embody her calling as teacher and storyteller. Born at noon in August in Kuwait, she writes of home.