Contributors Fargo Tbakhi and N.A. Mansour join staff editor Rasha Abdulhadi to share reflections about palestinian art and writing, the speculative register, what lineages they draw nourishment from, and what they long for from future feasts.
In a global literature community, invisibility is not an option; it is a drowning. We aim to sail the speculative ocean, and navigate towards better literary futures
I believe that those who write speculative literature and fantasy in Mexico are creating their own precursors (also in the literal sense because we are often discovering their work as we go). As we continually adjust our understanding of literary work from the past we’re also molding literature to our vision of the future.
Creo que quienes hacen literatura especulativa y fantástica en México están creando a sus precursoras y precursores (incluso en el sentido literal de que, en muchos casos, estamos descubriendo su obra) y ahora mismo se está modificando la concepción que tenemos de las obras del pasado, a la par que se moldea la literatura del futuro.
Our fantasy and science fiction structure exists in a system that tries to convince its inhabitants that the world is binary, that everything is the group that is Us, and everything else, which is Them.
Although the science fiction community has engaged in a significant, concerted, and necessary effort to correct for many of Campbell’s prejudices surrounding race and gender, there has yet to be a similar corrective effort on matters concerning class and labour.
For speculative fiction to become a truly inclusive and egalitarian space, every axis of exclusion must be interrogated, and every potential drawbridge turned into a gateway.
The stories and poem were accepted around the concept “What is the legacy and the future of Africa and the African Diaspora?” We wanted to create an open-ended anthology that wasn’t easily defined as horror, Afrofuturism, and any number of genres in between. It was, and still is, an ambitious goal.
