Post-Millennial Speculative Fiction from the Global South
Description
Speculative fiction—an umbrella term encompassing genres/modes such as science fiction, the weird, futuristic fiction, and fantasy—is increasingly being taken up by contemporary writers from the Global South as a challenge to the limitations of realism and also magic realism in capturing the polyphonic, fractured, and violent realities of contemporary life. This seminar invites scholars to explore post-millennial speculative fiction as a critical response to the legacies of colonialism, the ongoing political, humanitarian and climate crises across the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the growing influence of technologies such as artificial intelligence. These dynamics reveal a persistent global hierarchy in which the control of human and natural resources is often prioritized over human and nonhuman life.
We suggest that speculative fiction emerges from a broader epistemological rupture—a crisis of meaning, representation, and theory to which writers of the Global South are responding. As Zahi Zalloua writes in Being Posthuman (2021), “Speculative realism accuses theory or continental philosophy (under the sway of Derridean deconstruction) of being stuck in its epistemological impasses.” Within this context, speculative fiction can be seen as a mode of resistance, reimagination and regeneration of knowledge. This reimagination and regeneration is evident not only in the surfeit of futurisms–Africanfuturism, Arabfuturisms, Dalitfuturisms etc– but also in the hybridized forms of contemporary “national” novels from the global South, such as Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (Zambia), Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (Dominican Republic) and Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World (India).
This panel asks:
- Why has the Global South turned toward speculative fiction after decades of developing literary traditions grounded in realism, neorealism, social realism and magic realism?
- How do speculative genres offer new ways of representing reality and envisioning the future?
- In what ways do critical issues like nationalism, feminism, ecology, the Anthropocene, and corporeality manifest in speculative literature from the Global South?
- What intellectual and aesthetic alternatives do these works propose to the epistemological deadlocks of Western theory?
- How do speculative genres and modes fuse with traditional postcolonial forms like the "national novel" in the current moment?
- How does post-millennial speculative fiction from the Global South engage with, reinterpret, or challenge the themes and conventions established in speculative fiction from the 19th and early 20th centuries?
We invite literary scholars working on literary traditions from the Global South to submit paper proposals that address—but are not limited to—the questions outlined above.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Jay Rajiva (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Decolonizing, Transnational, and Diasporic Literatures at the University of Saskatchewan. His second book, Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature (Routledge 2020), uses the conceptual framework of animism, the belief in the spiritual qualities of nonhuman matter, to analyze representations of trauma in postcolonial fiction from Nigeria and India.
Speaker Bio
Santesso is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Palgrave, 2013), Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023) which received an honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies at the MLA. She is the co-editor of Islam and Postcolonial Literature (Routledge, 2017), and Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction (Manchester UP, forthcoming).
Speaker Bio
Daniella Prieto is PhD candidate at Cornell University’s department of Romance Studies. Her research project focuses on contemporary Latin American Literature that uses genre fiction as a way to revise and imagine Latin American and Caribbean history and its forms of colonial, dictatorial, femicidal violence. She is also a student of the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies graduate minor at Cornell, and holds a B.A and a M.A in Philosophy.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Víctor Alarcón is an Associate Professor at Catholic University Andrés Bello specializing in the fantastic, grotesque, and humor. He earned a PhD in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature from UAB, holds master’s degrees in Cultural and Literary Studies and Venezuelan Literature, and has taught at universities across Latin America. His work appears in journals such as Akademos, Crisol, and Mitologías Hoy. In 2020, he earned an honorary mention from Caro y Cuervo Institute.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Emad El-Din Aysha is an academic researcher, author, translator, and freelance journalist based in Cairo. He earned his PhD in International Studies from the University of Sheffield (2001) and has taught in Egypt on topics including social entrepreneurship, sustainable development, and Arab history. Since 2016, he has focused on science fiction, joining the Egyptian Writers’ Union and ESSF. His works include Arab and Muslim Science Fiction (2022) and stories in Palestine+100 and Gaia Awakens.
Speaker Bio
Erin Twohig is an associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on post-colonial Maghrebi literature in French and Arabic. She is the author of a number of scholarly articles, as well as the monograph Contesting the Classroom: Reimagining Education in Moroccan and Algerian Literatures, published by Liverpool University Press in 2019.
Speaker Bio
Graham Liddell is a writer, translator, and scholar of modern Arabic literature. A 2023 recipient of a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, he wrote a dissertation on the narration of Arab and Afghan migration in both literature and the asylum process. In 2022, he edited an issue of the translation journal Absinthe entitled Orphaned of Light: Translating Arab and Arabophone Migration. His current position is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hope College.
Speaker Bio
Hanan Jasim Khammas – Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, University of Michigan. PhD in literary theory and comparative literature from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Author of Writing Through the Body: Iraqi Responses to the War on Terror (2024). Her research focuses on contemporary Arabic Literature with particular focus on Iraq’s cultural semiotics of corporeality, gender, and sexuality, as well as the development of the feminist intellectual production.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Manzura Hoque is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the intersections of genre literature, literary production, and readership in the Global South, with a focus on contemporary Arabic, African, and South Asian literature. She examines how colonial legacies shape the social, cultural, and economic contexts of literature, generating new understandings of subjectivity, embodiment, and narrative in contemporary postcolonial fiction.
Speaker Bio
Shazia Sadaf is Associate Professor of Human Rights and Social Justice in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of London, United Kingdom, and a second doctoral degree in Postcolonial Studies from Western University, Canada, with a primary interest in the field of human rights literature.
Speaker Bio
Uttara Rangarajan is a sixth-year PhD candidate at Fordham University. Her research focuses on postcolonial literatures and South Asian speculative fiction.
Speaker Bio
Amit R. Baishya is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma
Papers
Speaker Bio
Suparno Banerjee is a Professor of English and an Honorary Professor of International Studies at Texas State University specializing in science fiction, utopian/dystopian literature and film, Indian literature and culture, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity (2020).