“Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.”
Walidah Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
Dear Reader,
This digital collection, “Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms,” grew out of a graduate course I taught under the same name at Florida State University in spring 2019. We took as our point of departure Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Marie Brown’s conception of visionary fiction as works that foreground minoritized voices and histories, that address existing social and material conditions of injustice, and seek to imagine possibilities for better, more equitable worlds. Throughout the semester, we read across a range of cultural media–poetry, short stories, novels, film, and visual art–including works by Bong Joon-ho, Octavia Butler, Marjorie Liu, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ruth Ozeki, Manjula Padmanabhan, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sana Takeda, Sabrina Vourvoulias, and more. We also thought alongside contemporary theorists of science and speculative fiction, cultural studies, queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, Afrofuturism and Ethnofuturisms more broadly. The writings of Gloria Anzaldua, Aimee Bahng, Samuel R. Delany, Grace Dillon, Donna Haraway, Alexis Lothian, Jasbir Puar, Sami Schalk, Ytasha Womack, and others have pushed us to think deeply about the relationship between art and activism, and how our collaborative thinking and writing can participate in the project of decolonizing the imagination that Imarisha and Brown call for in their articulation of visionary fiction.
The critical essays and creative works collected in this digital anthology take inspiration from our readings and discussions this year. In the spirit of visionary fiction as an endeavor that necessarily exceeds the singular, that depends and thrives on many bodies and minds, on thought experiments and lived experiences, we have pushed ourselves and each other to engage the pressing social and political realities of our current moment, to explore alternative modes of thinking, knowing, being and becoming together in compromised presents.
The “Table of Contents” page offers a glimpse of the breadth of our joint efforts. Each of the four units (World-Building, Alternative Histories, and New Epistemologies; Possibilities of Futurity: The Artificial Other from Fiction to Reality; Curing the Craft: Critical and Creative Reimagining of (Dis)ability, Monstrosity, and Medicalization; Colony Collapse! Alternative Futurisms and Othering Catastrophes) contains a collaboratively authored introduction that frames the main questions, theoretical discourses, creative inspiration, and political urgencies that serve as connecting threads between the different projects collected underneath it, including brief descriptions of the projects themselves. In demonstrating how our work speaks to and with each other, we hope it will resonate with you as well and spark generative discussions and activities that can create openings from which to realize the many many worlds we might make together.
Lastly, I encourage you to visit our “Authors” page to learn more about the voices that have given life to this collection. It is their time, energy, and dedication to this project that allows for hope, not as mere optimism for the future, but hope as a worlding practice that creates new conditions of possibility by refusing to view the current systems and structures of knowledge and power as all we have. Hope, in other words, as an insistence on the material and materializing force of visionary fictions and futures that we have yet to imagine. This collection can be read as our small contribution to this endeavor, as a gesture that opens out.
With warmth, excitement, and gratitude for the room we can make for and with each other,
Frances H. Tran
Assistant Professor of English
Florida State University
Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms 