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Undetermined Promising Futures

Type: Virtual

Description

That a promising future awaits us not too far has been rearticulated ad nauseum. Abstract, vacuous, and frequently unrealized, a promising future indefinitely extends precarity. To imagine a promising future, as human and environmental conditions in the present deteriorate, invokes a fatiguing despair.

However, an undetermined future also invites many forms of resistance. Rather than stand still and wait for a future that may never arrive, what happens when people’s acts of resistance and refusal forge alternative futures? Through which forms and means do aggrieved communities around the world contest, negate, and refuse promising futures?

This seminar invites papers that explore textual, visual, and discursive representations of a “promising future.” Literature, film, and art engage with the complexity of promising futures to interrogate the forces that perpetuate disaster and how aggrieved communities navigate those challenges.

In literature, novels such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple presents a narrative of love, reunification, and liberation as a painfully slow process. In films such as Patricia Riggen’s Under the Same Moon (2007), the draconian immigration policies that tear families apart place dreams and aspirations in long periods of stasis.

Discursively, the long overdue reparations to Black people in the U.S. is an unrealized political project. The settler-colonial state of Israel’s genocide campaign in Palestine has left Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank quite literally in the twilight of a promising future for peace and a ceasefire.

The idea of a promising future is not always welcomed. And yet, it provides the framework to dwell in the contemporary space and ameliorate conditions before the future arrives: whether good or bad.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Representations of the future.
Incomplete narratives, literature, works of art.
Liminality between life and death.
Alternative spatiotemporal timelines.
The speeds of historical trauma.
Indigenous, Black, and racialized futurisms.
Pessimism and fatalism.
Acceleration of anthropocentric climate disaster.
Processes and methods of survival.  
Rejecting neoliberal and fascist futures.
Anxious futures with artificial intelligence.

For questions, please contact Michael Anthony Turcios at [email protected]

Schedule

Friday, May 30, 2025
2:30 PM CDT - 4:15 PM CDT
Room: 2025 Annual Meeting > Conference Rooms

Papers

Anti-Progressive Futurities in Contemporary Palestinian Literature
Samuel Aftel
Dreaming of Promising Futures in a Promised Land
Shruti Shukla
Indigenous Poetic Time, Palestine on Hold
Michael Turcios
Remembering Our Decolonial Futures
Maia Rodriguez
Saturday, May 31, 2025
2:30 PM CDT - 4:15 PM CDT
Room: 2025 Annual Meeting > Conference Rooms

Papers

Narratives of Resistance: Gender, Political Identity, and Performative Futures
Stefanie Sevcik
The Poetics of Catastrophic Endings: (Un)determining Possibility From (Un)inhabitable Worlds
Alice Turski
[Re]Imagining Muslim Futures: Khayāl and Sci-Fi Sufism as Astro-Activism
Mélika Hashemi
(Un)Promised Futures: Disavowals of Fate and the Power of the Sovereign in "A Threnody for Sohrab"
Sareh Afshar