This seminar has the dual purpose of exploring the affordances of ‘dystopia’ as a sub-genre of science fiction for writing from the Arab world, and of testing the potency of the term ‘counter-futures’ as a way to identify and explore the political valences of such writing. 

The term ‘counter-futures’ was used by Callum Copley in his short introduction to Reworlding: Ramallah. Short Science Fiction Stories from Palestine (2019) In that introduction, Copley made the case that certain forms of future-thinking enabled by science fiction provide both textual objects, and (perhaps more importantly) writing and reading or imaginative positions geared antithetically to the programs of colonisation and occupation. Copley writes that such fictional texts 

"confront colonisation, occupation and their legacies by using the discourse of science fiction (and in many cases the language of the coloniser) to analyse, critique, and often resist that coloniser’s power. Such texts … are searches for counter-futures (be they desirable ones or not) to the futures presented by western science and science fiction)." (Copley, p. 11) 

Our seminar will take up the ambivalences tangible in Copley’s words above, and point them towards the storied sub-genre of ‘dystopia.’ Long lauded as a form of political textuality capable of great critiques of totalitarianism and inequality, dystopian fiction has enjoyed over a century of critical as well as commercial success in Anglophone culture. Is the concept of dystopia sufficiently mobile to be used to counter and negate the imperial legacies buried deep in the sub-genre’s premises itself? In particular, whereas Anglophone dystopian fictions frequently bracket the past as unspeakable or unthinkable, in favour of a focus on a future which is frighteningly hostile to the supposed comforts of the reader’s present, do Arab writers work with a temporal sequence where the present is in danger from a feared future? 

In a poignantly disappointed 2022 essay, Sarah Marusek reflected on the waning of the revolutionary spirit of ‘the Arab Spring,’ and suggested that "many dreamers in MENA have turned away from realism and the nightmares of the present towards the futuristic lands of science fiction and fantasy, imaginary places where they have the freedom to openly reflect on their disappointing social predicament. Indeed, dystopian literature in Arabic fiction has proliferated in recent years." (Marusek, p. 748).

 This interplay between present, past and future, the weight and the paradoxical possibilities of dystopia as a form of writing counter-futures, will form the focus of our explorations. We are interested in any scholarship on Arab science fiction, in particular on dystopian writing, and in approaches which insist on subjecting the literary-theoretical categories of science fiction and dystopia to historicising critiques.