I’m happy to announce that Masood A. Raja, Swaralipi Nandi, and I have signed a contract with McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers to publish our forthcoming edited collection on postcoloniality and science fiction tentatively titled, The Postnational Fantasy: Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction.
I would like to thank our wonderfully brilliant contributors who have submitted their work to be a part of this edited collection. And, I would like to thank my co-editors, Masood and Swaralipi, who have helped me nurse this project from an afternoon office conversation into a book that is nearing materialization.
I have included a brief description of the project below. As the publication process develops and a finalized table of contents is available, I will post it to dynamicsubspace.net and Masood will post it to his blog here.
The Postnational Fantasy: Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction places itself at the nexus of current debates about nationalism, postnational capitalism, the reassertion of third world nationalism and its cosmopolitical counterparts, and the role of contemporary Science Fiction (SF) and fantasy in challenging, normalizing, or contesting these major conceptual currents of our times. This new collection of essays, thus, brings together, in one volume, the interplay of critical and theoretical insights both from Postcolonial and Science Fiction studies.
In a way SF and Postcolonial Literature both have traditionally dealt with the question of the other. Thus, while SF has been traditionally concerned with the issues of the alien and the ontological other, the leading postcolonial works have usually focused on giving voice to the silenced colonized others. Just as the SF writer must ‘train’ the reader in his or her imagined setting, so does the postcolonial author feel the need to inform the reader while attempting to represent the postcolonial subjects. This combination of representation and didactics, crucial to SF and postcolonial writing, can therefore be an interesting starting point for bringing the two overlapping fields of artistic endeavor together, as both have a lot to offer in theorizing and debating the national, the postcolonial, and the cosmopolitan in the era of high capital. As of now, not many critical texts attempt to rewrite postcoloniality through a textual and theoretical reading of contemporary SF nor has there been a worthwhile attempt in postcolonial studies to incorporate the contemporary SF in the cultural and political debates. It is, therefore, one of the goals of this volume to enrich both Postcolonial Studies and SF studies with a nuanced borrowing and intermixing of their primary texts and modes of interpretation, which would, we hope, enrich both fields of study by sharing their common and particular modes of reading and responding to the texts. Important also in our study would be the nature of representation itself, but especially the affective value of the texts in generating and foregrounding the questions of feelings invoked by the SF and the postcolonial text, and the impact of this emotive state on the issues of national, postnational, and cosmopolitan identity formation.
Dynamic Subspace 