In Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, Darieck Scott distinguishes between two different kinds of fantasy: “collective fantasies,” those communally held beliefs that have become understood as truth, naturalizing social structures and limiting our vision of what can be; and individual literary and fictional “fantasy acts,” productive speculations that can serve as gestures of resistance to the status quo. In their construction of alternate realities, the speculative fictions that have proliferated in literature and film since the turn of the millennium have offered a space for reflecting on the cultural shifts of the present, as well as for critiquing current cultural, economic, or sociopolitical conditions. Yet science fiction, fantasy, romantasy, and other popular (sub)genres also bring with them their own constraints, not only regarding how narratives can or should be structured but also about what alternative worlds can look like, who can populate them, how – and with whom – relationships can be formed, and who can craft these narratives in the first place.

Taking as inspiration performance studies scholar Iván Ramos’ exploration of the gestures of “unbelonging” produced when Mexican and Latina/o artists engage sonic traditions in which they are viewed as “outsiders” (Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics), this seminar proposes to explore the “dissonance” that emerges in contemporary speculative fictions as a diverse and transnational cadre of creators and consumers engage with the very limits of the generic traditions from which these fictions draw. How have speculative fictions disrupted or exposed collective fantasies of neoliberal progress? How might a commitment to generic limits paradoxically allow for a rejection of other constraints? How do the constraints of speculative genres allow for a freedom from cultural exceptionalism? How do these fictions negotiate, rewrite, or subvert narratives of national, racial, socioeconomic, and gendered identity, whether within the fictions themselves or through the communities they signal to and from?

This seminar invites papers on topics including but not limited to: global and transnational speculative literary traditions; romantasy; cyberpunk; fanfictions; the omegaverse; Afrofuturism, Latinxfuturism, and Indigenous Futurisms; adaptations of speculative narratives for film, TV, games, film, and the theatre.