Room Number: TRS 1-073
Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/92052053771?pwd=YitJZ2FPQU1iQW9RM2NRRy9VMnRvUT09
Chair: Humaira Shoaib (U Waterloo)
Speakers:
Lihini Boteju (U Kelaniya), “Re-negotiating the Boundaries of Humanity: A Posthuman Study of Globalization in the Series Altered Carbon”
Nicola Hunte (U West Indies, Cave Hill), “Regenerative Spaces in the Disaster and Dystopia of Caribbean Speculative Fiction”
Shazia Sadaf (Carleton U), “Alternative Futures: Speculation in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction”
Paper Summaries:
Lihini Boteju (U Kelaniya), “Re-negotiating the Boundaries of Humanity: A Posthuman Study of Globalization in the Series Altered Carbon”
This study attempts to explore the ways in which the Netflix series Altered Carbon portrays the ambivalent relations between humanity and posthumanity, representing the paradoxical workings of globalization that efforts to create a utopia of a global human community via a dystopian vision of posthuman centres of power.
Nicola Hunte (U West Indies, Cave Hill), “Regenerative Spaces in the Disaster and Dystopia of Caribbean Speculative Fiction”
This paper will examine the treatment of disaster and dystopic societies in the short fiction of three Caribbean speculative writers to highlight the ways that trauma gives rise to regenerative or redemptive responses in Caribbean literature, through the critical lens of Wilson Harris’s discussion of the cross-cultural imagination.
Shazia Sadaf (Carleton U), “Alternative Futures: Speculation in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction”
This paper will examine Muhammad Hanif’s Red Birds and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West as examples of distinct “anti-utopias” that present a competing futurity with the utopias/dystopias of Western speculative fiction. Hanif’s foresight, however, is less conciliatory and optimistic than Hamid’s, and this paper compares the two different approaches.