Palestinian Science Fiction: Aesthetics and the Anticolonial Imaginary

A genre well known for its imperialist tropes (think: first encounters, colonization of alien territories), what happens when science fiction sets about creating decidedly anti-colonial imaginaries? For those on the receiving end of colonial violence, the dystopian future is anything but an imaginative space of speculation. High-tech weapons systems, post-apocalyptic cityscapes, occupation, and the threat of extinction are, for many inhabitants of this planet, hardly “significant distortions of the present,” as Samuel R. Delany has described the vocation of science fiction. And yet, for 21st century Palestinian writers and filmmakers, science fiction and its associated genres—from surrealism to cyberpunk to futurisms of various stripes—provide a rich terrain for aesthetic, narrative, and political intervention. For a population whose cultural output has long been confined, on the global stage, to forms of documentary realism and the poetics of the marginalized—as Palestinian filmmaker Larissa Sansour has observed, “New imaginaries are almost forbidden to cultures that have experienced trauma”—what is the power of speculative fiction? And what are the aesthetic features and political aspirations of a specifically Palestinian science-fictional anti-colonial imaginary?

In this course, we will take up recent Palestinian speculative and science fiction as a lens through which to explore the aesthetics of marginality and its transformation into an anti-colonial aesthetics aimed at countering dominant imaginaries and real violence through the creation of new myths. With Sansour’s sci-fi film trilogy—A Space Exodus (2009), The Nation Estate (2012), and In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016)—as our starting point, we will consider how themes such as loss, belonging, heritage, uprootedness, time, place, and national identity find expression through tropes shared in common with a variety of genres, including Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism, magical surrealism, and even Muslim and Arab scientific discourses. How do contemporary artists, both within Palestine and in the diaspora, imagine the future—in a present determined by occupation, colonization, displacement, and genocide? What are the politics and the economics of this cultural production? And how are new narratives, of agency and futurity, emerging from it? Readings will be drawn from Basma Ghalayini’s Palestine +100, Callum Copley’s Reworlding: Ramallah, Ather Zia’s “The Land of Dreams,” Adrien Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha’s Octavia’s Brood, Paul Youngquist’s Cyberfiction: After the Future, N.K. Jemisin’s How Long ‘Til Black Future Month, Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha’s Arab and Muslim Science Fiction, and Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem’s Zion’s Fiction, among others.