Zhui Ning Chang is a doctoral student in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Their research examines through a decolonial lens the intersections of diaspora, migration, and transnationalism with Southeast Asian speculative fiction in the twenty-first century. In the creative sphere, Chang’s creative non-fiction and reviews have been published in speculative fiction journals/platforms such as Strange Horizons, Fantasy/Animation, and The BSFA Review. Chang is also editor-in-chief at khōréō, a Hugo-nominated magazine for diasporic and immigrant speculative fiction, and a co-editor of the anthology Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010-2020.
Abstract: “Vietnamese Galactic Empire as Asian Futurism: The Poetics and Positionality of Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe”
Despite historical and systemic racial inequities in the Anglophone speculative fiction landscape, the past two decades has seen a rise in the “critical mass” (Nnedi Okorafor) of works by authors of colour. Many of these works reimagine speculative possibility to integrate and interrogate the experiences of racialised communities. This includes authors of Southeast Asian heritage, among which French Vietnamese writer Aliette de Bodard is one of its earliest pioneers. Drawing on de Bodard’s Xuya Universe short stories, this paper first argues that Southeast Asian authors articulate racialised referents in speculative worldbuilding to subvert Anglo-American white masculinist systems. I examine how de Bodard’s immersive elements of language, setting, and culture in a futuristic space empire create an effect of “double estrangement” (Joy Sanchez-Taylor) and embed Vietnamese communities as part of an Asian futurism. Then, I consider how Xuya’s paratextual materials and positioning as a “Confucian-inspired” space society may be seen as flattening Chinese and Vietnamese peoples under a single totalizing banner—a strategically exoticist appeal to both a (white) Anglo-American audience as well as a broader, multiply dislocated (Asian) readership. This positioning is further complicated by the textual significance of mother-daughter relationships in Xuya, resisting not only Anglo-American generic convention but also Confucian patriarchal norms. I reflect on how de Bodard’s text occupies an ambivalent space neither fully orientalised for the Western gaze nor fully divested of historical inequities. As a text, Xuya is a key example of how Southeast Asian authors continue to negotiate the boundaries of orientalist expectation and reaffirms the necessity of a multiplicity of Southeast Asian stories that are discrepant and non-Sinocentric in the Anglophone speculative landscape.