Young Southern Speculatives: New Decolonialisms in the Capitalocene
Young people coming of age after the millennium are inheriting a world in the midst of violent transformation. Their reality looks increasingly different from earlier generations’, and so demands new forms of political consciousness and new visions of what a just future means. In literary studies, scholars are noting that our ecological and economic emergencies even resist realist narration. Instead, new speculative stories are needed to imagine unfolding global shifts. This project examines the emergence of these new, non-realist forms in work by young authors from across the global south, those postcolonial regions of the world that are most affected by climate and financial crises. It analyses speculative genres as modes of “crisis management”, which help to make sense of planetary emergencies, but also to critique the systems that cause them. In this way, the project explores how speculative texts reflect a generational shift in political outlook, which, in postcolonial contexts, is also a shift away from earlier understandings of oppression and resistance. To examine how this change informs literary imaginaries, the project draws on decolonial theory, which argues that the global inequality of crisis confirms the ongoing reality of colonial power. The project reads speculative texts as confronting this reality, and explores their decolonial potential: the extent to which their non-realist forms imaginatively critique and reconstruct a broken, unequal world.
Final report
This project set out to analyse how a new wave of speculative fiction from across the formerly colonized global south engages with ongoing global-but-uneven socio-ecological crisis. Building on and expanding established research in literary ecocriticism, the project considered both how speculative forms provide an appropriate vocabulary for disruptive social and environmental transformations most intensely felt across the postcolonial world; and how they interrogate the histories of colonialism and capitalism that produce these catastrophes. A central aim of the project was to examine speculative fiction’s critical strategies as situated forms of decolonization, which work by reconfiguring the racialized, gendered and ecocidal logic that underpins capitalist extraction and exploitation.
During its three-year implementation period, the project developed as planned, while also adapting to new insights gained from wide reading, collegial dialogue, feedback from the midway report, and in-depth engagement with the critical literature. While the project was initially formulated to focus exclusively on the work of an emerging generation of writers, it became clear that the speculative strategies in question were shared by a wider cohort of contemporary authors, and also appearing in fiction engaging with racialized and gendered socio-ecological precarity across the North-South divide. Rather than artificially excluding these texts, the scope of the corpus was moderately adjusted to include important established writers of speculative fiction (such as Mariana Enriquez), as well as North American and British writers engaging with, for example, the legacy of enslavement (such as Jesmyn Ward), and issues of forced migration (such as Remi Weekes). This allowed the project to consider speculative responses to crisis as this is distributed unequally across multiple different scales (both inter- and intraregional), thus providing a fuller and more complex picture of the world-literary landscape in our present moment of social and environmental turbulence.
These analyses returned results that upheld key elements of pilot research, while also highlighting previously unforeseen patterns in the corpus, and generating new theoretical interventions. Research for the project affirmed the capacity of speculative forms to critically reimagine colonial socio-ecological relations (often with recourse to Indigenous or local cosmologies), and it also revealed the specific significance of monstrous figures, which circulate widely across conventional generic borders between, for example, science fiction and horror. The project’s analyses further destabilised some significant assumptions underpinning established frameworks for reading global speculative fiction, and in particular questioned the treatment of ‘Western’ speculative genre as essentially distinct from wider cultural responses to socio-ecological upheaval. A key contribution made by the project is the retheorisation of monstrous cultures in the transregional context: Developing the concept of ‘world-gothic’, the project identifies how culturally and historically specific monstrous forms tend to appear in places and times where extraction and exploitation are drastically remaking the worlds in which people live.
This insight helps to connect European genres such as the gothic (which offers a paradigmatic example of Western speculative fiction) to a much wider range of situated narrative responses to capitalist modernity, making it possible to link up disparate experiences of social and environmental violence. Interesting questions relating to the patterning of world-literary history are raised by these analyses. In particular, the insight that speculative forms respond to located periods of socio-ecological upheaval affirms the possibility that genres understood to be Western inventions have earlier correlates in colonised regions, where crisis is experienced first and most intensely. These ideas are addressed in the project’s consideration of monstrous cultures, and are currently being examined in a range of decolonial and world-literary conversations.
Results from the project have been disseminated in published and forthcoming peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes, book chapters and a ‘minigraph’, as well as at international conferences, and national and international public speaking engagements. One of these publications – The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023) – won both the Justin D. Edwards Prize and a Choice ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ Award in 2024. A number of collaborations have been central to the research process, not least those within the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, where the project was based for its duration. Additionally, research for the project brought together a transnational range of contributors to three edited volumes, and formed a springboard for invited international teaching assignments with Manchester Metropolitan University (UK); speaking assignments at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), the University of Hyderabad (India), the University of Flensburg (Germany), and the University of Sheffield (UK); and teaching and research visits at Weber State University (USA) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa).
During its three-year implementation period, the project developed as planned, while also adapting to new insights gained from wide reading, collegial dialogue, feedback from the midway report, and in-depth engagement with the critical literature. While the project was initially formulated to focus exclusively on the work of an emerging generation of writers, it became clear that the speculative strategies in question were shared by a wider cohort of contemporary authors, and also appearing in fiction engaging with racialized and gendered socio-ecological precarity across the North-South divide. Rather than artificially excluding these texts, the scope of the corpus was moderately adjusted to include important established writers of speculative fiction (such as Mariana Enriquez), as well as North American and British writers engaging with, for example, the legacy of enslavement (such as Jesmyn Ward), and issues of forced migration (such as Remi Weekes). This allowed the project to consider speculative responses to crisis as this is distributed unequally across multiple different scales (both inter- and intraregional), thus providing a fuller and more complex picture of the world-literary landscape in our present moment of social and environmental turbulence.
These analyses returned results that upheld key elements of pilot research, while also highlighting previously unforeseen patterns in the corpus, and generating new theoretical interventions. Research for the project affirmed the capacity of speculative forms to critically reimagine colonial socio-ecological relations (often with recourse to Indigenous or local cosmologies), and it also revealed the specific significance of monstrous figures, which circulate widely across conventional generic borders between, for example, science fiction and horror. The project’s analyses further destabilised some significant assumptions underpinning established frameworks for reading global speculative fiction, and in particular questioned the treatment of ‘Western’ speculative genre as essentially distinct from wider cultural responses to socio-ecological upheaval. A key contribution made by the project is the retheorisation of monstrous cultures in the transregional context: Developing the concept of ‘world-gothic’, the project identifies how culturally and historically specific monstrous forms tend to appear in places and times where extraction and exploitation are drastically remaking the worlds in which people live.
This insight helps to connect European genres such as the gothic (which offers a paradigmatic example of Western speculative fiction) to a much wider range of situated narrative responses to capitalist modernity, making it possible to link up disparate experiences of social and environmental violence. Interesting questions relating to the patterning of world-literary history are raised by these analyses. In particular, the insight that speculative forms respond to located periods of socio-ecological upheaval affirms the possibility that genres understood to be Western inventions have earlier correlates in colonised regions, where crisis is experienced first and most intensely. These ideas are addressed in the project’s consideration of monstrous cultures, and are currently being examined in a range of decolonial and world-literary conversations.
Results from the project have been disseminated in published and forthcoming peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes, book chapters and a ‘minigraph’, as well as at international conferences, and national and international public speaking engagements. One of these publications – The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023) – won both the Justin D. Edwards Prize and a Choice ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ Award in 2024. A number of collaborations have been central to the research process, not least those within the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, where the project was based for its duration. Additionally, research for the project brought together a transnational range of contributors to three edited volumes, and formed a springboard for invited international teaching assignments with Manchester Metropolitan University (UK); speaking assignments at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), the University of Hyderabad (India), the University of Flensburg (Germany), and the University of Sheffield (UK); and teaching and research visits at Weber State University (USA) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa).