Speculative (Un)worldings: The Many Worlds of Caribbean and South Asian Speculative Fiction

“Speculative (Un)worldings: The Many Worlds of Caribbean and South Asian Speculative Fiction” turns to contemporary speculative fiction from the Caribbean and South Asia to contend that speculative fiction, an aesthetic practice, is also a practice of (un)worlding, i.e., a practice of unsettling normative conceptions of reality via narrative world-building that pushes and breaks the bounds of this reality. Following Sylvia Wynter’s Man-as-human, the (un)worlding I seek is an unsettlement of a global order that takes white, male, heterosexual, financially secure, Global North-dwelling individuals as the aspirational ideal. Speculative fiction, I find, is a potent critical-creative site for theory-building and concept-shaping, making it a generative interlocutor for fields that insist on reimagining dominant ways of relating, such as gender and sexuality studies, decolonial studies, critical race theory, and complex systems science. The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes spacetime in speculative fiction by turning to Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2018) and S. Hareesh’s Moustache (2020) to show how speculative fiction surfaces the constructed nature of spacetime, confronting us with our relationship to futurity and accountability. In chapter two, I turn to love in speculative fiction. I look at Leone Ross’s Popisho (2021) and Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (2021) in which cross-species entanglements and bodily transformations push characters to confront hidden parts of themselves, such as desire, reproduction imperatives, and respectability politics. In chapter three, I consider Luis Othoniel Rosa’s Down with Gargamel! (2020) and Usman T. Malik’s Midnight Doorways: Stories (2021) to offer speculative fiction as a key interlocutor for complex systems thinking because of its disruption of notions of Reality/Unreality, Fact/Fiction by making room for questions like: whose reality is it anyway? And whose fiction?