Abstract
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. This first part of the double Special Issue emphasizes the diversity that comes from thinking about futures by positioning them back in material ecological experiences in this time of escalating climate crisis. This issue seeks solidarity in the tropics via imagining the future together in plural forms. This praxis of tropical futurisms encompasses envisioning decolonial tropics not only by archiving the past-future but also by rebuilding worlds, including Indigenous and multispecies knowledge and experience that is conventionally not seen as belonging to the future. Considering the vibrancy of Indigenous, Caribbean and Latin American, Afro and African, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific and Tropical Australian futures, we are also interested in the ways they intersect in the tropics creating new rich and complex forms of theorizing and storytelling.
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Author Biographies
Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway
Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez is a PhD candidate in Environmental Humanities in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where she works with the transdisciplinary project Narrating Sustainability. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Letters from the University of Havana (2017), and in 2020, she received a Chevening Scholarship to complete the MLitt. Environment, Culture and Communication at the University of Glasgow (2021). She has received complementary education across Europe and the United States in institutions such as the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Cornell University, and the University of Miami. Her research interests include Caribbean culture, post/decolonial studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, transecology, futures, and futurisms. She writes about sustainability in the Caribbean context and now dreams of Caribbean Futures from the Nordics.
Jueling Hu, University of Fribourg, Switzerland & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Jueling Hu is a joint PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of Fribourg and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Hu’s research examines interspecies relations, digital media, and science fiction in Malaysian Borneo. Their interests span multispecies studies, urban geography, environmental media, and Deleuze & Guattari studies. Hu works for Swiss National Science Foundation-funded research project The Cultural Logistics of Chinese Science Fiction. They have been a visiting doctoral student at the National University of Singapore and the University of Nottingham Malaysia. Hu’s research-based audiovisual work has been exhibited via the Malaysian art hub HAUS Kuching.
Nsah Mala, University of Cologne and UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition, Germany
Nsah Mala (born Kenneth Nsah), from Cameroon, is an award-winning poet, writer, children’s author, consultant, editor and translator, journalist-communicator, futurist and foresight practitioner, and interdisciplinary scholar working in English, French and Mbesa. Research interests include comparative literature, anglophone and francophone African literatures, public and environmental humanities, literary activism/artivism, creative writing and foresight and futures thinking. He has published widely in these areas including Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere (co-edited with Nicki Hitchcott); Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature; Re-writing Pasts, Imagining Futures: Critical Explorations of Contemporary African Fiction and Theater; Ecozon@; Orbis Litterarum; Electronic Green Journal; Humanities; Peripeti; and ASAP/J. His ongoing research project on ‘Wetland Time’ is funded by the British Academy and his #CongoBasinFutures foresight workshops are supported by the School of International Futures via the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellowship and the Cluster of Excellence Seed Funding at the University of Cologne. Nsah earned his PhD in Art, Literature and Cultural Studies, specializing in Comparative Literature and Environmental Humanities, from Aarhus University, Denmark. His thesis, ‘Can Literature Save the Congo Basin? Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Environmental Literary Activism’, won the Prix de thèses francophones en Prospective [Prize for Francophone Theses in Foresight and Futures Studies] in 2022 from Fondation 2100 and Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at Radboud University, Netherlands, and the Université de Lille, France. Nsah currently works for the University of Cologne, Germany, as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Coordinator of the Cologne Hub for Planetary Wellbeing within the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition. He is also affiliated with the Universities of Lancaster and Nottingham (UK), University of Lille (France), and School of International Futures (SOIF), UK.
Anita Lundberg, James Cook University, Australia
Anita Lundberg is an adjunct Associate Professor and cultural anthropologist. Her interdisciplinary ethnographies across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore the intertwinings of tropical nature~culture. Anita’s awards and fellowships include: LIA TransOceanik (CNRS, JCU, Collége de France); The Cairns Institute; Evans Fellow, Cambridge University, UK; Guest Researcher, Maison Asie-Pacifique, Université de Provence, France; Visiting Fellow, Institute of the Malay World and Civilization, National University Malaysia; and Anthropologist-in-Residence, Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. She has published extensively in academic journals, editing numerous Special Issues. Anita has curated exhibitions in NY, LA, Paris, and Sydney, and her own research has been exhibited at the Australian National Maritime Museum, the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, and Alliance de Française. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cambridge University, UK, has a PhD in Anthropology, an MA in Science & Technology Studies, and a liberal arts BA. After academic stints in Australia and Singapore, she now lives in Bali.
