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

“Speculative (Un)worldings” turns to contemporary speculative fiction (SF) from the Caribbean and South Asia to make the case that SF is both an aesthetic practice and a practice of (un)worlding—i.e., a practice of unsettling reality-as-is via narrative world-building that pushes the bounds of this reality. Through my project, I offer SF as a generative theory-making and concept-building space for varied fields of critical social theory. By turning to extant archives of SF writer-theorists, I want to surface SF writers’ views on their aesthetic choices and the real-unreal dynamic they play with so as to contend with the ways SF can put pressure on categorizations of real, unreal, fact, fiction.