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.