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: 

1. Why has the Global South turned toward speculative fiction after decades of developing literary traditions grounded in realism, neorealism, social realism and magic realism?
2. How do speculative genres offer new ways of representing reality and envisioning the future?
3. In what ways do critical issues like nationalism, feminism, ecology, the Anthropocene, and corporeality manifest in speculative literature from the Global South?
4. What intellectual and aesthetic alternatives do these works propose to the epistemological deadlocks of Western theory?
5. How do speculative genres and modes fuse with traditional postcolonial forms like the "national novel" in the current moment?
6. 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.