Futurity - Tropicality - Speculation

This section of my interests have developed from Swiss National Science Foundation research project The Cultural Logistics of Chinese Science Fiction (2021-2025). 

I examined the works of Southeast Asian artists that engage with the intertwined themes of speculation and the (rain)forest, with particular attention to the entanglements between technological materiality and ecological futurity. In contemporary speculative fiction and artistic practices across Southeast Asia, tropical rainforests frequently serve as imaginative sites through which possible regional futures are envisioned. The technological textures of the work shape not only the audience’s aesthetic encounters with local ecologies but also the very modalities through which SEA futurities are imagined.

I also explored the multiplicity in Sarawakian writer Chang Keui-Hsing’s novel Crocodile's Eye Lid of Morning (E yan chenxi, 鱷眼晨曦in Chinese). Set in Borneo, the geographic center of maritime Southeast Asia, this novel presents a complex of magical realist stories of human-crocodiles encounters that take place in the late 19th and early 20th-century rainforests, spanning from the period of British colonization to the communist movement in Sarawak.

With Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez, Nsah Mala, and Anita Lundberg, I further developed the concept of tropical futurisms and expend my research to the global tropics. Tropical Futurisms situates the reading of futures in the shared yet multiple modalities of this geo-climatic zone, acknowledging the social and political complexities, technological engagements, multispecies vitalities, and cosmological plurality within tropical regions.