Finnish Literary Research Society Annual Conference 2026

 May 20-22, 2026

Online Panel: Indigenous Futurisms Beyond the West: Arab and Global South Speculative Fiction

Over the last decade, indigenous futurism has demonstrated how speculative genres have evolved as fictional spaces where indigenous communities reclaim nature-culture futurity, resist settler-colonial epistemologies, and practice ancestral belief systems and traditions in a futuristic setting (Dillion 2012). However, much of this scholarship has been theorised through Global North perspectives. This panel proposes a comparative and decolonial investigation of Arab and Global South futurisms that “transcend the Western taxonom[ies]” (Verso and Jurado 2024) and to be primarily situated in the non-Western indigenous futuristic imaginaries and grounded in local epistemologies, ancestral ecologies, cultural memory, and ontologies of technology, time, and space that are more solution-oriented than Western speculative fiction.

In this regard, Arab and Global South speculative fiction, especially ecological and cultural speculative texts set in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America emerge as reservoirs of alternative knowledges and worldviews, and reveal strategies of survival and environmental imagination that challenge Eurocentric frameworks. In light of Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality” (2010), Rita Felski’s conceptual understandings of attachment, recognition and modes of knowing beyond critique (2015, 2020), Anna Tsing’s multispecies assemblages (2015), Donna Haraway’s “natureculture” (2016), Arturo Escobar’s relational ontologies (2018), this panel seeks to move beyond Western critique by foregrounding creative, transdisciplinary, and cross-epistemic approaches that unsettle entrenched speculative binaries and imagine relational modes of knowledge. In doing so, we seek scholarly papers that approach literature, film, and other media formats to illuminate how indigenous futuristic narratives trouble binaries between fact and fiction, realism and speculation, technology and tradition, nature and culture.

Finally, we prefer interdisciplinary conversations that are relevant to but not limited to the following themes:

• Interconnectedness, or disconnections, between reality and fiction in speculative fiction;
• Colonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial interventions;
• Climate futures, nature and culture;
• Technology and tradition;
• Indigenous practices, and futuristic imaginaries;
• Human, non-human, and machine space;
• Cultural Memory, histories, myth, and storytelling;
• Language, setting, and futuristic spaces;
• AI, aliens, and blurred boundaries of consciousness;
• Society, environment, and cultural modernity;
• Cryonic fiction and cultural rootedness
• Intelligent architecture vs. psychologically-imposed borders

References:

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dillon, Grace L., ed. 2012. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and

the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Felski, Rita. 2020. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility

of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Verso, Francesco and Cristina Jurado. 2024. Arabilious: Anthology of Arab Futurism. Roma:

Associazione Future Fiction.

Submission Guidelines:

We request online panel participation. Please submit an abstract of 500 words (maximum) indicating the panel's title via the linked portal: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHAoz_X8IdtgoOv1ndJuQhWw55ujUg...

Kindly send a copy of your abstract and and a short bio (250 words maximum) to Majda Atieh (Department of English and Translation, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman), m.atieh@squ.edu.om, and Subarna De (Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, the Netherlands), s.de@rug.nl by 28 Feb 2026. Selections will be announced by 30 March 2026. We will consider selected essays for publication in a special issue with a Q1 journal. For detailed information on the Finnish Literary Research Society’s Annual Conference 2026, please see here.