Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa
In a 2015 multimedia manifesto titled “Towards Arabfuturism/s” the Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that “Arabfuturism/s, like most creative provocations, is born of counter-culture” in which “notions of belonging are constantly challenged by the strangers, the marginalised, the outsiders: workers, rebels, immigrants, artists who see from the margins– looking in – that there is no homogenous culture or identity.” For Majali, like many contemporary artists interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst ecological, territorial, existential, and ideological states of crisis, -futurism “signifies a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narrativ