CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents

CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents

This project investigates future fictions from five distinct traditions: Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Arab/Gulf-futurism, Latin@futurism, and Indofuturism. All these fictions respond to the burning issues of the present, the transnational discourses of demographic change, climate change, and technological change, but they imagine different, localized ways of engaging with these transnational discourses. Research Questions What contributions can contemporary future fictions make to our understanding of global issues? The project is split into three sub-questions to structure the enquiry: 1. What are the cultural and scientific bases for the development of different geography based future fictions? 2. What are the future changes – societal and technological – imagined in these future fictions? 3. How can we understand the response to global challenges – demographic change, climate change and technological change – in the local changes imagined in these futures? Based on this, the project will develop a theory of “COFUTURES” (Co: Complex –Coexisting –Comparative). Context The project studies the recent proliferation of fiction based on ethnic, cultural, or national identity as take-off points for imagining possible futures even if their locations of production are globally spread. While many of these have older histories, these fictions have come together in this decade as alternative visions of the future that are resistant to perceived colonial or neo-colonial hegemony and are read as new forms of self-assertion. No methodologies have been developed to study all these together as shared phenomena, and no theories exist that can even make sense of them as similar yet distinct phenomena. There have also been no attempts to understand the specific sources for these futures in terms of the kinds of scientific and technological developments they project and the societal developments they imagine as localized responses to global challenges. This is the COFUTURES aim.