Welcome to the website for the virtual roundtable on “Speculative Fiction from Southeast Asia in the Twenty-first Century” for the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in January 2024.
This roundtable is a joint effort by the MLA Southeast Asia & Southeast Asia Diasporic and Speculative Fiction Forums. Our roundtable description can be found below. Click on participants’ names in the menu above to view their respective pages. Click on Southeast Asia SF Links for a list of related links and scholarly/critical resources.
Date and time: Sunday 7 January 2024 from 10:15 AM to 11:30 AM (Eastern Time) on Zoom
In “Southeast Asia: What’s In a Name?” Donald Emmerson comments that Southeast Asia is “a kind of science fiction” that can “simultaneously describe and invent reality.” Although Emmerson is being jocular about the artificiality of the region’s name, we see this remark as a springboard for our roundtable about contemporary Southeast Asian speculative fiction. Our roundtable’s participants work on Southeast Asia and also research and write or edit speculative fiction.
In the past two decades, single-author and collective works of speculative fiction have been published in greater numbers and gaining readership in Southeast Asia. Among them are: LONTAR, a journal of Southeast Asian speculative fiction; the anthologies Fish Eats Lion (Singapore), Diaspora Ad Astra (Philippines), Cyberpunk: Malaysia; single-author books such as Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper (Singapore), Katrina Olan’s Tablay (Philippines), Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister (Malaysia). Speculative comics from the Philippines such as Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo’s Trese have obtained North American imprints, increasing their circulation outside Southeast Asia.
However, because Southeast Asian literature is often overshadowed by writing from East and South Asia, especially in Anglo-American contexts, scholarship on this diverse body of speculative writing is only just emerging. Besides Ng Yi-Sheng’s “Spicepunk Manifesto” proposing a Southeast Asian heritage-based speculative fiction, there are essays by
Joseph Ching Velasco on Charlson Ong’s speculative fiction (Philippines) and Weihsin Gui on speculative novels by Tham Cheng-E and Nuraliah Norasid (Singapore); Southeast Asia Review of English has a 2020 special journal issue on speculative fiction with essays about Southeast Asian texts.
Our roundtable expands this conversation with participants at various academic career stages, including speculative fiction writers and scholars, who examine Southeast Asian speculative narratives in different non-mimetic styles and in different languages. We recognize the rich body of scholarship on speculative fiction’s relationship to colonialism and race: for example, John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Jessica Langer’s Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Isaiah Lavender’s Race and American Science Fiction, and andré carrington’s Speculative Blackness. However, we suggest that contemporary Southeast Asian speculative fiction has distinctive qualities as yet unaddressed by this existing scholarship and that our roundtable will elaborate. To maintain a critical yet inclusive framework, we understand speculative fiction according to Judith Merril’s explication: “stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, […] something about the nature of the universe, of man, or ‘reality.’” Our participants examine the fictional projection and extrapolation not only of technologies and societies presently existing in Southeast Asia but also of elements from the region’s folklore, spirituality, and cultural traditions.
We ask: how do speculative narratives employ modes of storytelling from Southeast Asian cultural traditions to imagine possible futures? How does speculative fiction highlight different inequalities in Southeast Asia using non-mimetic methods that are unavailable to other representational modes? In what ways do speculative narratives critique (neo)colonial and state-centered forms of power and knowledge in Southeast Asia by illuminating alternative modes of knowing and being?
(Cover image photo credit: Greg Rakozy on Unsplash)