CFP: Special Issue, “Speculative Imaginaries & Counter-Futures in the Middle East & North Africa” (July 1, 2025)
| May 6, 2025 | Posted by Webmaster under CFP |
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Co-Editors: Maurice Ebileeni (University of Haifa), Hoda El Shakry (University of Chicago), & Oded Nir (Queens College, CUNY)
–Arabfuturism is a re-examination and interrogation of narratives that surround oceans of historical fiction. It bulldozes cultural nostalgias that prop up a dubious political paralysis and works to solidify and progress a progressive force, towards being subjects and not objects of history- (Sulaïman Majali, 2015)
In a 2015 experimental 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 territorial, existential, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, -futurism “signifies a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narratives” that is part of “a growing counterculture of thought and action that through time will be found and used in the construction of alternative states of becoming” (Majali, 2015).
Arabfuturism, Gulf Futurism, and Muslim Futurism—like their sister projects of Afrofuturisms, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism—speak to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture in order to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. These speculative projects can be understood as a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and bio-politics that theorize other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counterfuturisms, to borrow theorist Jussi Parikka’s turn of phrase, disrupt the geo-spatial logics of the past, present, and assumed future to not only “write alternative histories but also articulate counterfuturisms as imaginaries of times-to-come” (55).
Beyond the toll of US-backed “forever wars,” recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil—from the devastating ethnocide and genocide of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank, to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria, the genocide in Sudan, the collapse of the Lebanese state and economy, and the military coup in Egypt. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that catapulted the Arab Spring across Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and more recently, the 17 October 2019 Revolution in Lebanon. While moments of catastrophe, crisis, and collapse may seem antithetical to imaginaries of the future, the capacity to dream or speculate is essential to undoing to sites of epistemic and ontological violence, while also charting possible paths forwards. Moreover, speculative acts of world-building can realize the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination that empower us to envision entirely new archeologies of the future.
We are seeking submissions that critically address how we can imagine—and stage—a future amidst these mounting crises in the Middle East and North Africa. How can representations of apocalypse, eschatology, dystopia, science fiction, (non)futurity, or fantasy help us grapple with the very real existential threats to communities across the MENA region? How are dystopian technologies or aesthetics being mobilized in our current geopolitical landscape? What are the existing and emergent formal, critical, or conceptual vocabularies for such times of crisis, and what do they tell us about the present-future? How do they shape questions of representation, mediation, and aesthetic value? More crucially—what is the role of cultural production in the face of global destruction? Is there a politics (and poetics) of the impossible or incomplete? Finally, what are the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project?
We invite proposals that explore these questions across the diverse range of speculative literature, film, art, and philosophy in the Middle East and North Africa as well as their diasporic communities. In addition to conventional scholarly articles (between 5,000 to 10,000 words), we encourage other kinds of submissions (interviews, creative fiction or non-fiction, multimedia) that similarly respond to the urgency of our moment.
Suggested topics include:
- How do MENA counter-futures imagine “being subjects and not objects of history” (Majali)?
- How do MENA counter-futures build upon and dialogue with Afrofuturisms and Indigenous Futurism?
- What unique cultural histories or spatio-temporal logics are displaced, invoked, or projected through MENA speculative cultures?
- How do MENA counter-futures upend (neo)colonial narratives about the importance of scientific and techno-modernity to the capacity to imagine futures?
- How do MENA counter-futures challenge the secular investments of Euro-American speculative imaginaries?
- How do certain genre labels, such as science fiction, flatten cosmological and spiritual lifeworlds to be legible within world literary systems?
- How do MENA counter-futures disrupt the periodization and taxonomical stability of speculative genres?
- Eschatology and theological futurism (prophecy, mysticism, cosmogony)
- MENA horror, abjection, and the gothic
- MENA fantasy and science fiction
- MENA speculative philosophy and aesthetic theory
Submissions:
Please send brief abstracts (~500 words) to pomoculture@gmail.com with a tentative title and overview of your proposed contribution that includes the submission type (academic article, essay, interview, creative fiction or non-fiction, multimedia) and estimated word-length.