Tropical Futurisms: Thinking Futures

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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eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanities, social sciences
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Tropical Futurisms: Thinking Futures
Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3195-5876
Jueling Hu
University of Fribourg, Switzerland & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7015-5265
Nsah Mala
UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition and University of Cologne, Germany
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8784-6380
Anita Lundberg
James Cook University, Australia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0271-4715
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.
Keywords: Tropical Futurisms, Futures Thinking, tropical futurity, climate
futures, ecological futurity, tropical materialisms, past-future, multispecies

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Futures Thinking: Theories, Histories, Practices
he future is here. 2030, the decade when countries across the globe aimed to
meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is fast
approaching. Although considerable progress has been made overall, the
global efforts seem far from meeting what was first drafted in the 1987 ambitious
document provocatively called Our Common Future (Leal Filho et al., 2023). In times
of AI, climate catastrophe, political instability, and the rapid rise of nationalism, the
future feels strangely close and dystopic. Literary scholarship has long been interested
in future speculations, bewildered by the endless capacity to imagine future scenarios
that renegotiate present and past conditions. Nevertheless, futuring, which comprises
future-thinking and future-making practices, is not exclusive to literary studies. As the
premise of the SDGs reminds us, almost every discipline engages with these
questions in one way or another. Consider, for example, astrophysics’ interests in
where the universe is going, environmental studies creating climate models and
scenarios, and urban planners anticipating needs and ideals of futurity, among
countless other examples. Politics, economy, science, and technology all relate to
futures and speculations.
This first issue of a two-part publication dedicated to futures and futurisms in the tropics
revolves around the concept of “Thinking Futures” to highlight how scholars from the
tropics engage with theories about the future by approaching diverse creative
practices, and how they contribute to thinking about their region’s futures. Hence, in
this Introduction, it is important to acknowledge concepts, genealogies, histories,
origins, and evolutions of future-thinking practices attending to common and traditional
modes of engaging with this concept, as well as recognizing the academic field about
the future known as futures studies or strategic foresight. This is both a field of study
and a practice that involves researching and anticipating possible, probable, and
preferable futures. It focuses on understanding trends, emerging patterns, and
challenges to help guide decision-making and planning for the future. Futures Thinking
is therefore a strategic approach aimed at examining and critically assessing possible
future scenarios to determine the most preferable (for people, organizations, societies,
communities, countries), as well as those that are undesirable and thus should be
avoided. In this regard, futures thinking aims to help policymakers and decision-
makers proactively anticipate changes, recognize opportunities, and ease the
transition toward desirable futures (Canina et al., 2022). In our current century of
“polycrisis” (Lawrence et al., 2024), disruptions, and uncertainties, Futures Thinking is
gaining more prominence, especially as evidenced by the recently adopted United
Nations’ Pact for the Future (2024). Notably, its second annex, titled “Declaration on
Future Generations,” encourages the world to embrace foresight and long-term
thinking in dealing with global complex challenges.
T

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In the field of foresight and futures studies the terms futures thinking, futures making,
futures literacy, and foresight are often used interchangeably. This notwithstanding,
we have subtitled the first part of this two-part Special Issue “Thinking Futures” due to
its focus on theoretical contributions—bringing together articles engaging with
concepts, cosmologies, epistemologies, theories, and wisdoms as we seek throughout
this issue to identify what it means to think about futures from and for the Tropics. Part
two, subtitled “Making Futures,” presents articles that portray the work of the authors
in their own voices, using directly artistic, literary, architectural and other creative
dimensions as methods to practically deal with the plurality of futures in tropical
contexts. Nevertheless, these terms “thinking” and “making” futures do not exclude
each other. To the contrary, we acknowledge and embrace the frequent overlap in
uses and meanings of the terms in both parts of this Special Issue on Tropical
Futurisms.
Even though Futures Thinking has a long history, and many scholars suggest that all
human societies have attempted to know and deal with the future in different ways
throughout history (Gidley, 2017; Son, 2015); yet, it is to modern history and the
temperate Western hemisphere that Futures Thinking is attributed. Strategic foresight
as a structured approach to studying and preparing for the future in the Western world
originated at the end of the Second World War (WWII). Specifically, strategic foresight
(later known as futurology in Europe), emerged in the United States military as
generals began to forecast and anticipate potential scenarios of enemy attack,
particularly with the availability of atomic bombs and aviation in warfare. Foresight
scenarios would eventually become an important part of the mission of Research and
Development corporations in the 1950s (ie., the RAND corporation) and into the
present (Dartiguepeyrou & Saloff-Coste, 2023; Kristóf & Nováky, 2023; Gidley, 2017;
Son, 2015; Schultz, 2015).
However, as much of the contemporary scholarship about futurity points out, the future
is not the same for everyone. People and cultures from different regions relate to it by
attending to their unique histories. Hence, in recent decades, there has been a rise in
the number of anthologies and future-oriented projects, following various aesthetics
and social projects that question whose futures the dominating Western narratives
refer to. The field of futures studies has now evolved to include a very wide range of
multiple approaches and methodologies, including Decolonial Futures, narrative
foresight, and multiple forms of futurisms (Indigenous, Afro, African, Chicanx, Asian,
etc.). Examples of these practices and theories have been compiled in the recent
volume The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturisms, a term that describes “movements
that offer us paths to internal and external colonization, modes that remind us that we
belong in the future” (Taylor et al., 2024, p. 1). These and similar works demonstrate
that colonial Western origins of the field of strategic foresight and futures thinking have

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been rightly contested and deconstructed. For instance, decolonial approaches to
Futures Thinking emphasize different histories and trajectories of evolution in the
present and into the future, not always within disciplinary confines: “Our approach to
decolonizing futures practice seeks to facilitate plurality and heterogenous thinking
with a non-disciplinary spirit” (Jae, 2023). In this regard, plurality and heterogeneity
speak to the different intellectual, socio-cultural, political, economic, technological, and
environmental contexts and perspectives that shape the evolution of thinking futures.
Accordingly, Futures Thinking is currently marked by a variety of theories, methods,
and tools. Some key approaches include exploring multiple futures or scenarios,
statistical forecasting and modelling, storytelling, and so forth, using methods such as
scenario planning, Delphi method, futures labs, gaming, backcasting, computer and
social simulations, systems thinking, horizon scanning, etc. Among endless
possibilities, some relevant foresight tools are futures wheel, futures triangles, futures
cone, entangled time tree, three horizons, and causal layered analysis (Terry et al.,
2024; Hichert & Schultz, 2024; Kohler, 2021). Meanwhile, narrative foresight,
especially as formulated by Ivana Milojevica and Sohail Inayatullah (2015), is one of
the most aligned approaches to this Special Issue, which deals significantly with
storytelling and other creative expressions—philosophical, ethnographic,
translatological, reflective, cinematic—about future possibilities for the tropics. As
Milojevica and Inayatullah observe,
In a similar way that narrative has been used in history—to investigate
patterns of change—narrative has also been used in futures studies
since the development of the field. Thick descriptions of potential
events and conditions through the use of scenarios, for example, have
heavily relied on the use of narrative. Trend analysis, as well, outlines
a particular sequence of events wrapped as a meaningful story, even
as it claims to be narrative-free, that is, it is quantitative and thus story
is controlled for. Visioning and backcasting provide detailed and
robust narratives presented as a sequential movement through time—
from preferable to plausible futures towards the present moment.
Utopian and science fiction literature is as well based on the power of
story. (2015, p. 152)
Thus, Futures Thinking is fundamentally a narrative and creative practice, hinging on
the kinds of imaginaries and stories people tell as they think about and/or plan for the
future(s). It is about the worlds humans creatively and systematically build for their
futures, drawing on the plural experiences of pasts and presents. In the case of the
tropics, this practice is of the utmost importance, as environmental and social
catastrophes—both by-products of ongoing colonial logics and impositions—loom in
the present, aiming to thwart tropical futures. From the tropics, new imaginaries of

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futurity—Indigenous, Caribbean, Latin American, African, South Asian, Southeast
Asian, Pacific and Tropical Australian—emerge to retell the stories of this rich and
creative zone. This issue seeks to learn from these different perspectives offered by
scholars concerned with thinking futures of the tropics. Following these thinkers, a new
concept of Tropical Futurisms can begin to take shape.
Thinking Tropical Temporalities with Ecologies
As perused in several essays on this special issue, environmental concerns in the
geographies of the tropics are especially relevant when considering global futures on
a warming planet. If melting glaciers and dying polar bears inform the images of
ecological decline in the temperate areas (Garrard & Carey, 2020; O’Neill, 2022), a
stark image of hurricanes, fires, floods, and dying coral reefs informs such imageries
from the tropics. Yet, these images are not separate; rather, they are in relation, for
melting ice sheets in the frigid zone create a dynamic whereby relative sea level rise
is higher in the tropical equatorial regions (Lundberg 2021; Lundberg et al., 2021, p.
2).
In this distribution, “the tropics are more vulnerable to the direct and immediate impacts
of climate change and its associated variability” (Roy, 2018, p. 5), with tropical
liveability more at risk, and causing movements of people to temperate areas as
climate refugees. Relatedly, as Piguet and others discuss, the way climate migration
research is conducted shows a bias as “the result of a framing of ‘environmental
refugees’ (and refugees in general) as an intrinsically ‘southern problem’ and as a
security risk for the North” (2018, p. 358). ‘The south,’ in this case, is a category that
encompasses mainly the realities of the tropical regions (Roy, 2018, p. 3), and the
fears of a dystopic future in the global north are often images of already existing
conditions in the south (Armiero, 2021). Such dystopian futures are the basis of two
papers in this special issue set in Indian speculative future cityscapes. The papers,
one by Chakshu Gupta and Isha Malhotra and the other by Neeharika Haloi, discuss
neo-colonial wasting and the need for decolonial multi-futures. However, such
interventions in the Western rhetoric of dystopian scenarios are rare, and the tropics
continue to be portrayed as doomed to succumb to climate catastrophe and
environmental degradation before anywhere else, as is imagined in the trope of the
“disappearing islands” that Fiona Cameron (2011) critiques in her study on imaginaries
in the Pacific, and which is further discussed in this issue through Gemma Blackwood’s
paper set on the tiny atoll of Pukapuka. Whereas climate change strongly impacts
these regions, there is a risk of imposing temporal determinism on the tropics with
such “disappearing” narratives. Consider the outdated and essentialist discussion of
the tropics as spaces of “backwardness” compared to the temperate zones’ supposed
progress (Clayton, 2021, pp. 75-76; Clayton & Bowd, 2006, p. 213) as the extreme

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example of assuming certain stereotypical tropical temporalities. In his future-historic
re-surveying of discourses on colonial Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia/Singapore,
Wai Liang Tham critiques examples of tropical essentializing and a need for decolonial
ecology towards Malaysian futurity (this issue).
The tropics undoubtedly “fight back” in these time-related rhetorics, reminding us that,
paradoxically, their materialities are essential to any possible realization of futurity
imposed by the West, even though Western imaginaries of such futurity often exclude
them. This is taken up in this issue in Prabhudutta Samal and Swati Samantaray’s
paper on Zambian futurism, where the authors discuss speculative inventions such as
microdrones, bioengineering, and the race for space. Filmmaker Ester Figeroa’s
documentary Fly Me to the Moon (2019) exemplifies this, showcasing how the United
States space race in the 1950s heavily depended on Jamaica’s bauxite mining and
smelting for aluminium production. The same applies today to many mining operations
for rare materials for cutting-edge technologies that ignite conflicts, like we are
witnessing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zane, 2025). Valuing one region over
the other as futuristic relies on “developmental paradigms” (Chattopadhyay 2021, p.
10) that co-opt futurity and wilfully neglect the different futures envisioned outside the
global north’s well-guarded borders. Far from new, this is symptomatic of old
discourses and systems of knowledge, long invested in “proving” and perpetuating the
idea of inferiority of nonwestern contexts compared to Western technoscapes; projects
mainly fueled by the contacts of the West with the Americas in the C15 and the
subsequent exploitation of lands and bodies. The ensuing narrow narratives of futurity
are thus deeply imbricated in colonial logics of forced access to Indigenous land and
violent extractivism (Liboiron, 2021). In this sense, it is pertinent to follow Boddhisatva
Chattopadhyay’s (2021, p. 11) call to stop trying to decolonize genres of the future like
science fiction—whose core is essentially a colonialist one—and focus instead on
decolonizing the singularity of the future, calling for more bio-imaginative-diverse
forms of understanding futurity coming from places often reduced to margins and
peripheries. In the case of the tropics, these geographies remind us that, far from
marginal, the tropics are central, especially concerning ideas of the future. This is the
core of Abhisek Ghosal’s philosophical paper when he argues that futurizing ‘geo-
tropicality’ offers a way to understand how the crisis in the Indian Ocean warns of
future worldly ecoprecarity (this issue). Tropical spaces also illuminate multiple futures
that are diverse yet united in their engagement with tropicality, not only concerned with
climatic-ecological categories but also with entangled aspects such as sexuality, as
examined by Guhan Priyadharshan P. in his paper on Sri Lanka in this issue, and
disability, which is the focus of Jasmin Peer’s analysis of Tropical Australia (this issue).
There is an urgency for envisioning futures that correspond to the reality, desires, and
potentialities of the tropics’ inhabitants. This area is home to diverse groups that
coincide in imagining futures differently, outside the temperate Western discourses,

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and attending to their similar tropical geophysical materialities and complex eco-social
histories. This Special Issue seeks to contribute to enriching these perspectives,
acknowledging the ways many of these considerations overlap in the tropics, a space
of Indigenous and settler cultures, a place of transculturation (to think with Fernando
Ortiz, 1995). Such a consideration of a tropical futurism at the intersection of
Indigenous, settler, and diasporic cultures is the focus of the article by Florence
Boulard, Marine Lechene, and Lola Kamblock, as they discuss their island home of
Kanaky-New Caledonia in the Franco-Melanesian Pacific (this issue). Together with
broad cultural projects in the tropics that have sought to confront imposed ideas of
what tropical ontologies are, more and more initiatives are interested in reclaiming
their futures outside colonial impositions. As Digital Humanities scholar Schuyler Esprit
puts it when referring to the looming discourses of disappearing low-lying Caribbean
islands: “The decolonial project of home is to assert that the Caribbean is in the future,
that we resist and persist” (our emphasis). The same applies to the broader tropics,
from which people imagine futures beyond solely crises and disasters, focusing
instead on multispecies relationality, collaboration, and justice. This is the case for
Nikodemus Niko’s ethnographic paper on Indigenous futurity of his Dayak Benawan
community in the tropical rainforests of Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. It is likewise
the theme of the paper by Niyi Akingbe which elucidates forest and ocean activisms
through the girl-child heroes of two Afrofuturist children’s stories (this issue).
Resistance and persistence are key terms to navigate such proposals. As we
foreground in this first part dedicated to future thinking, the epistemic resistance of
scholars who continue to assert the tropics as spaces full of imagination and endless
potentialities in the future is crucial. Future thinking practices from the tropics enable
conversations about the possibilities of expanding visions and sharing strategies
among communities facing similar challenges—like looming environmental alterations
and remnants of colonial pasts. This is particularly poignant in the paper by Thanh
Tran and Giang Hoang in which they analyze five eco-cinematic films from
neighbouring countries of the Mekong River in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, tropical
future thinking practices offer formidable confrontation to chronologies that attempt to
define tropical futures without considering their rich and creative contributions to pasts,
presents, and futures.
In this sense, many of the papers in this special issue engage in temporal politics. As
discussed by Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez in this issue, the term “chronotropics,” coined
by Odile Ferly, Tegan Zimmerman, and Joshua R. Deckman (2003), has emerged as
a way of encapsulating Indigenous and other times that break with the Western
imaginary of linearity and its associated anthropocentrism. Although based on
examples from the Caribbean, this notion has resonances across the tropics. Also in
this issue, Laura de la Fuente López articulates the pan-Amerindian concept of time
as a spiral in which past and future are in the present and coexist with human and

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more-than-human cosmovisions. This resonates with Indigenous Australian
cosmovisions, called "Dreamings" in several Aboriginal languages. Barbara
Glowczewski (2022) discusses how this space-time is articulated in mythical itineraries
of ancestral travellers through material actualizations in landscape and with the
pluriversal agency of more-than-human worlds, including the Indigenous astronomical
cosmos.
Towards an Elucidation of Tropical Futurisms
These elucidations on Future Thinking in the tropics contribute to contouring (rather
than defining) what we editors of this Special Issue call “Tropical Futurisms,” a
framework for imagining the future transcending nation-state borders and pivoting
instead around a shared geo-climatic-atmospheric-ecological zone known as the
tropics in order to reconceptualize challenges, communities, and solidarities (see
Tham, this issue). As Speculative Futures thinker Alex Quicho states in her article
entitled “Tropical Futurism Envisions the Climate of Our Fate” (2022): “Moving ‘the
future’ away from ideologies of dominance and control has become imperative.” She
contends that “tropical futurism reimagines a different relationship to the earth.”
Tropical Futurisms, born in increasing concerns for climate-centred futures, capture
the shifting environmental uncertainties surfacing in speculative fiction, philosophical
discourses, ethnographic studies, and ecocinematic presentations of the tropics (to
name but a few). In this regard, Tropical Futurisms is also concerned with inquiring
into social structures causing climate crises. As anthropologist Sophie Chao writes
regarding the current worldly “great unmaking” (Rose, 2013, p.9), extractive
capitalism, ecological breakdown, and climate change are desecrating “lives, relations,
and futures” (2022, p. 166). There have been a bevy of neologisms “to grasp the
spatiotemporal scope and significance of this great unmaking” (2022, p.166), including
the Plantationocene coined by Donna Haraway (2015) to analyze the devastation of
plantations that relied on slavery and other exploited labour based on extractivism of
humans and nonhumans, and the Patchy Anthropocene, conceived by Anna Tsing et
al. (2021), which subsumes the hegemonic abstraction of the Anthropocene to its
various material, spaciotemporal, and multispecies contexts. Chao integrates these
notions into a “patchy plantationocene.” As she summarizes, “patchiness” pays
attention to:
feral proliferations at play within capitalist landscapes, the importance
of noticing and attuning to more-than-human sites and stories, the
need to think with different scales and structures in theorizing material
formations, the challenge and necessity of reckoning with crisis while
also attending to emergence and possibility, and the imperative to

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rethink intersectional injustices within and beyond the human realm.
(2022, p. 168)
Given the tropical specificities of the colonial history of plantations, this patchiness, is
also an invitation for thinking tropical futures. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has famously
argued, “Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-
old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (2009, p. 201).
Our task, by doing tropical futurisms, lies in rejecting old binaries—culture versus
nature, human versus nonhuman—and embracing their interwoven realities
(Haraway, 1988). In this regard, we must consider the specific materiality of the tropics
(humidity, rainforests, volcanos, rivers, seas, corals) and their lively entanglements
with each other, with humans, and with the cosmo-spiritual. Here it is pertinent to
remember the work on “Tropical Materialisms,” which sets forth a decolonial
engagement with New Materialism and Posthumanism, demonstrating how these new
philosophies that trace the entanglements of natureculture manifest in particular ways
in the tropics, and given the multitude of Indigenous cultures of the tropics, how
Indigenous peoples have always celebrated the aliveness of more-than-human worlds
(Benitez & Lundberg, 2022).
Thus, in any vision of Tropical Futurisms, “tropicality” must play a crucial role. More
than just a geographic belt around the planet, or a scientific category, the tropics carry
history and power, ideal and material. Colonialism once cast the tropics as lush yet
chaotic, fertile yet ungovernable, paradisiacal yet pestilential—reflecting how the
concept of tropicality, was first conceived under a colonial-orientalist gaze (Arnold,
2014). However, differing from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), tropicality has
always had a strong climatic-ecological focus. Thus, writing through the specificities
of the tropical materiality of his native Martinique, Aimé Césaire conceived of tropicalité
as an anti-colonial term to celebrate tropicality and divert its colonial imaginary through
a rhizomatics in which the tropics speaks back to the temperate (Césaire & Roussi,
1978) (also see the important discussion by de la Fuente López on Suzanne Roussi-
Césaire’s contribution to decolonial politics, this issue).
Today, Tropical Futurisms takes up this decolonial tropicality to demonstrate the
multiple and competing power dynamics that co-shape tropical landscapes. From the
ways that ongoing global-local relations shape techno-ecological couplings in
Singapore (Chang, 2016; Wong, 2022), local forms of resistance against electronic
waste happening in Africa (Iheka, 2021), to the haunted spaces produced under
colonial and state repression (Comaroff 2007; Harvey 2008), we urge our readers to
genuinely feel the tropics. Joanne Leow, for instance, critiques Singapore’s
“manufactured tropicality,” exposing its dual legacy—not just as a colonial holdover
but as the very foundation of the country’s authoritarian spatial politics (2020, p. 871).

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Meanwhile, Ann Ang examines Filipino literature’s portrayal of bodies under
heatwaves, where the relentless tropical climate serves as both a sensory register of
place and a gothic inversion of historical progress (2023) (see also Tham, this issue,
on the politics of heat in Malaysia and Singapore). These perspectives make one thing
clear: the tropics’ past does not lead neatly into a singular future. There is no straight
line—only ruptures, hauntings, competing claims, which offer openings and flowerings
towards multiple future imaginings emerging from tropical communities.
Thus, multiplicity is another key concept of Tropical Futurisms. This multiplicity is not
only temporal, referring to the plural relationships between pasts and futures, but
also actor-driven, encompassing diverse agents engaged in shaping future
possibilities. We advocate for an ‘art of attentiveness’ or ‘noticing’ (van Dooren et al.,
2016), extending attention not only to human actors but also to
the entanglement between colonialism, capitalism, their unequal relations, and the
broader web of life (Moore, 2015). Colonialism and capitalism have never operated in
isolation; their logics have entangled themselves with broader ecosystems, structuring
human hierarchies and relationships with animals, plants, microbes, rains, and winds.
These non-human actors, often dismissed as background noise, in fact, shape the
very terrain of what we call the future. A multispecies approach means approaching
difference itself to include more-than-human agents and engaging with “the powerful
work that various modes of differentiating and distinguishing do in shaping worlds”
(van Dooren et al. 2016, p. 12). This relational focus further challenges the ownership
of the future. It calls for a multispecies justice that acknowledges, recalibrates, and
embraces interspecies relations. This is an approach long embedded in the ancestral
knowledge of the Bewaka community of Australia, which recognizes the co-becoming
of humans with land (Country et al., 2016). This deep understanding is also expressed
in African philosophy. Archaeologist Ashton Sinamai, speaking from Australia of his
native home in Zimbabwe, explains that the land is alive, “experienced sensorially,
imagined in various forms of consciousness and lived through collective memory of
those experiences” (2022, p. 55). These, and many other Indigenous cultures from the
Americas to Asia, have long recognized that life is built not on domination but on
negotiated coexistence (see Niko, this issue). In this light, world-making becomes an
act of intervention for the future. Hence, we find resonance with Arturo Escobar’s
concept of pluriversal politics (2020), with its call to continually reimagine (or, in his
words, sentipensar) the world, offering a way forward—one that resists the colonial,
patriarchal impulse towards a singular and universal order.
Building upon multiplicity, transgression is also a keyword of Tropical Futurisms.
Tropical futurisms do not seek to merely catalogue different possibilities for the tropical
world and its futures; instead, they emphasize the moment of creating new

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relationships and worlds, where we may capture the movement of transgression—the
forces that drive it and the boundaries it disrupts. The editors of this special issue
argue that the potential of the future exists in motion, and the politics of Tropical
Futurist practice lies in detecting and generating these fluctuations from within and
across tropical communities.
A Tropical Cartography of Thinking Futures
The papers collected together here in part one of this double special issue on “Tropical
Futurisms” demonstrate how Thinking Futures in the tropics decolonizes the dominant
notion of the future as singular, Western-centric, and universal. The papers offer
various insights into thinking through tropicality, multiplicity, intervention, and
transgression as they offer rich examples from the Caribbean and Tropical Africa,
across to India and Sri Lanka, through the Southeast Asia countries of Malaysia,
Indonesian Borneo, and the countries of the Mekong River—Vietnam, Cambodia,
Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand—across to island groups of Pukapuka and Kanaky-New
Caledonia in the Pacific, and finally to the Tropical Far North of Australia.
The Caribbean and Tropical Africa
First, we encounter cartographies of Abya Yala (Latin America) and the Caribbean.
The article “Translation, Decolonial Futures, and More-than-Human” offers another
compelling dimension of understanding futurity in the tropics through language as
relationality. If the Caribbean has had to translate itself often to a West that has othered
it, in this work, the author Laura de la Fuente López demonstrates through an analysis
of Yanick Lahens’s Bain de Lune that tropical futures reclaim their own language and
codes as a process intrinsic to its formation—as demonstrated by creole cultures.
Delving into decolonial concepts of utopia through a plurality of visions, the paper
strongly challenges the West’s claim of a singular future. Both utopia and translation,
as the author reflects, possess a “shared capacity to detect fissures, unravel power
dynamics, and outline possible reparations” (p.32). The author enables access to
these ideas with her own translation practices from French, Franco-Creole, and
Spanish to English and, importantly, evokes terms from Indigenous cultures that in
many ways prefigure contemporary buzzwords in Environmental Humanities. In this
context, the author uses the concept of “creole futurism” as a powerful tool to
understand the multiple linguistic and cultural backdrops against which tropical
futurisms in these regions are cultivated, recognizing “the rhizomatic diversity resulting
from their multiple [African], Amerindian, European, and Asian heritages” (p. 34). The
analysis reveals complex linguistic negotiations that mirror the novel’s eco-social
context, and the author’s own practice highlights eco-translation as one form of
contribution to both futures thinking and futures making.

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Crossing to Puerto Rico, Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez's article, “Archipelagic Futures: The
Speculative and Decolonial Transecopoetics,” explores Roque Raquel Salas Rivera's
poetry, focusing on his 2022 collection, antes que isla es volcán/before island is
volcano. The article examines the poet's resistance to colonial temporality,
reimagining of sovereignty, and commitment to ecological and social justice. It
develops an interdisciplinary approach to decolonial futurity by analyzing three key
operations: "affective eco-literacies," "the breakage of normative time," and "geological
trans-speciation" (p.55). Salas Rivera's work centres on counteracting singular
narratives of the Caribbean as endless plantation. He seeks to break with “’plantation
futures,’ a concept that describes its haunting aftermath in contemporary urban
infrastructures and carceral systems” (p. 57), through expanding “transecology and
chronotropics by rearticulating the relations between transgender bodies, islands, and
temporalities” (p.60). Through "affective eco-literacies," the poet reconfigures
connections between the body and ecological materials, reactivating the potential for
a sovereign nation that is neither patriarchal nor Anglo-America-centric. Salas Rivera
resists colonial temporality through his form, writing in non-linear, fragmented, and
recursive timelines, disrupting hegemonic modes of historical narration, and
redistributing the right to the future to marginalized subjects.
Taking us to Tropical Africa, Niyi Akingbe examines two African children’s books in
connection with ecological issues. Specifically, he engages with Ben Okri’s every leaf
a hallelujah (illustrated by Diana Ejaita) (2021) and Zandile Ndhlovu and Katlego
Keokgale’s Zandi’s Song (2023), suggesting how the books (both texts and
illustrations) and their girl-child protagonists “blaze new trails in environmental
humanities and blue humanities” (p.77). In Ben Okri’s every leaf a hallelujah, Mangoshi
embarks on a journey into the forest in search of a leaf that could heal her sick mother
and ends up fighting to protect trees from ecological harm. Meanwhile, in Zandi’s
Song, Zandi responds to the invitation of the water goddess Maya by undertaking a
“bold oceanic adventure to a special place called KwaUmkhomazi in order to witness
how the ocean has survived decades of environmental pollution from the over-
profusion of plastics and other human wastes carried by rivers downstream to the sea”
(pp. 79-80). Akingbe situates these books within Afrofuturism, Blue and Environmental
Humanities, and travel writing; and ultimately demonstrates how Okri and Ndhlovu
intentionally weave aspects of oral literature traditions (myths and fables), magical
realism, and ecological concerns to advocate for ecological futures based on justice.
In this regard, Akingbe asserts, “The narratives in both every leaf a hallelujah and
Zandi’s Song revolve around ecological [dis]entanglement, and this is tenaciously
pursued to reflect both Okri and Ndhlovu’s environmental convictions” (p. 80).
Concentrating on Zambia in particular, and Africa by extension, Prabhudutta Samal
and Swati Samantaray read Namwali Serpell’s novel The Old Drift (2019) in light of

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how it engages with the entanglements of history, colonization and decolonization,
ecology, and technology. The novel, as the authors suggest, draws on magical
realism, historical fiction, and science fiction to shine a spotlight on “Zambia’s colonial
history, postcolonial [and ecological] struggles, and speculative futures” (p. 99). In this
regard, the story incorporates and celebrates complexity, interdependence, and
resilience among human and nonhuman entities, including technological inventions.
Historically, the novel confronts distorted and dominant accounts of Zambia’s colonial
past, highlights local agency and resistance, unveils unending decolonial struggles,
and how history has influenced the construction of a Zambian national identity, while
envisioning alternative futures for the country. On the ecological front, the authors
argue that the novel foregrounds multispecies ecologies. “The relationship between
humans and mosquitoes, traditionally seen as pestilential, is reimagined in the novel
as a symbol of both resistance and technological innovation” (p. 100), they contend.
Technologically, the article shows how Serpell imagines the futures of technology,
notably how innovations such as gene editing and nanotechnology may shape the
future of Zambia (and Africa). For these authors, Serpell’s vision of the future is one
where boundaries between humans, nonhumans and technology are blurred.
South Asia: India and Sri Lanka
In the context of South Asia, the article by Chakshu Gupta and Isha Malhotra, “Waste
Ecologies and Decoloniality in Tropical Futurisms,” discusses Shiv Ramdas’s novel
Domechild. The authors draw our attention to the materiality of waste to think futures
of the tropics: from wasted landscapes and people to AI infrastructure and post-work
imaginaries. The analysis situates tropical India and its speculative fiction as spaces
where it is possible to rework and challenge the existing conditions that foreground
whiteness, high technologies, and the singularity of the future as the only possible
ways to imagine futurity. Through a close reading of the novel, the article brings
political ecology, discard studies, material ecocriticism, and futures thinking
frameworks to engage with “epistemic responsibility.” Importantly, it poignantly
discusses that waste can be an “ecosophical matter against colonialism, its legacies,
and imposed futures” (p.125). As the authors announce, the novel portrays the
multifold perils haunting tropical ecologies, and in analyzing the parallel urban spatial
structures of the novel, namely ‘the City’ and ‘the Sanctuary,’ they critique the dualities
inherent in the Wasteocene. If the Sanctuary in the novel becomes a space where
“futurisms in/voluntarily abstract the entanglements of various displacements in the
web of tropical life that convene colonial violence through matter-meaning relations”
(p.136), this article likewise contributes to this Special Issue by precisely bringing the
materiality of matter to tropical practices of thinking futures.
Also set in a tropical Indian cityscape is Neeharika Haloi’s paper, “Dystopian Mumbai:
Futurism in Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay.”

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Dystopian science fiction is a powerful medium for imagining post-apocalyptic
scenarios, and this novel, set in 2041 Mumbai, follows the tropical city as it is
recovering from a massive flood, which has led to the migration of its residents into
the towering structure called Bombadrome. The tropical island city of Mumbai has
been unmade by the dual threats of climate change and corrupt politics: “the novel
highlights the mythologies constructed by a corrupt government as it deftly exploits
modern technologies, media, and state-sanctioned violence, leading to climate
disasters that displace millions of its people” (p. 141). Through the framework of South
Asian Futurisms, the article focuses on how colonial histories and environmental
precarity shape dystopian imaginaries through representations of environmental
change and techno-capitalist ideologies. The description of the shores of Mumbai
where Bombadrome now stands is the novel's approach to (tropical) wastelanding,
which renders spaces and peoples as polluted/pollutants. Haloi extends this notion to
colonial tropicality, where the neo-colonial imagination of the tropics works to create
visions of utopias and dystopias in the forms of paradise and hell. However, while
reflecting on the socio-political and ecological challenges of the novel’s present-time,
the study also envisions the possibilities for ruptures that offer glimpses of alternative
non-dystopic Mumbai futures.
In “Towards a Sri Lankan Future,” Guhan Priyadharshan delivers an important
contestation to regimes of “colonial tropicality, which is intertwined with colonial
legacies that presuppose tropical states as incapable of stable governance” (p. 159).
This paper addresses Sri Lankan futures through an examination of issues of
governability, inter-ethnicity, and heteronormativity as depicted in the novel Funny Boy
by Shyam Selvadurai. In a historiographic account of Sri Lanka’s past and present,
the analysis proposes scrutinizing the “continuum” imposed by colonial logics,
confronting its apparent inescapability for the future. By examining the concepts of
“ethnosexual frontiers” and “heterotopias” in the novel—in a move similar to Jose
Esteban Munoz’s in Cruising Utopia—the author encounters the possibilities of
“imagin[ing] a future where ethnic differences are overcome, and sexuality is no longer
policed” (p. 172). Utilizing frameworks from political philosophy, the text emphasizes
the multilayered approaches needed to understand tropical futurisms. To do this, it
brings narratives that disrupt the exclusionary premises of a nation-state that
reproduces colonial tenets, embodied in the examined story by same-sex and inter-
ethnic relationships. Moreover, Priyadharshan engages in speculation, grounded in
past and present realities, as a key practice through which tropical futurisms can be
further theorized.
Also set in Sri Lanka, Abhisek Ghosal brings the concept of geo-tropicality as an
important method to detangle the tropics from its ontological colonial impositions and
refocus on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of territory. Then, by proposing “futurizing”

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as an operation to think with the Indian Ocean and Sri Lanka’s coast, these spaces
become the place where new knowledges emerge together with endless possibilities
to rethink futurity. Specifically, he argues that “Futurizing geo-tropicality in terms of
enfolding the Indian Ocean is a modest decolonial attempt at problematizing the
limited understandings of tropicality in terms of exoticism and to underscore the
archival potentials of the Indian Ocean in calling structured and stratified neoliberal
politics into question” (p. 191). This reading of the ocean as archive of past, present,
and futures contributes to thinking futuring practices from a more-than-human
perspective, foregrounding epistemologies coming from the unruly materialities of the
nonhuman. Yet, anthropogenic factors such as coastal development and infrastructure
complicate these interactions, as the analysis of Romesh Gunesekera’s 1994
novel Reef demonstrates towards the end of the article. Oceanic flows are—as
Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite reminds us with the term “tidalectics”—harbingers
of temporalities different from Western colonial ones, and Ghosal’s contribution is
another example of how this proves true across the geo-tropics and its “interconnected
marine ecologies” (p. 194).
Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Indonesian Borneo, and the Mekong River
Wai Liang Tham’s “‘Malaysia’ Resurveyed: From Representation and Separation to
Alternative Tropical Futurities” examines how colonial and postcolonial discourses
have shaped the idea of “Malaysia” through the intertwined processes of
representation and separation. The essay examines how British colonial narratives
framed Malaya as both a site of immense natural abundance and inevitable
environmental degradation—tropes that persist in shaping environmental governance
in postcolonial peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. Tham argues that these inherited
frameworks have fragmented ecological and political imaginaries, limiting cross-
border mobilization on environmental issues and effacing shared tropical ecological
realities. The first section revisits historical representations of Malaysia, from colonial
botanical classifications to the nationalist projects. Post-independence Malaysia and
Singapore treated nature as an economic resource rather than living systems, as is
evident in developmental policies, urban modernization, and technocratic control. The
second section interrogates contemporary ecological politics, raising alternative
futures via the lens of civil society activism and advocates for a ‘decolonial ecology’
that moves beyond state-centric frameworks. Drawing on speculative fiction,
Indigenous mapping, and counter-cartographic practices to “explore how the
debilitating effects of…alienation from…regional climates and ecologies can be re-
politicised to imagine new tropical futures” (p. 201).
From the island of Borneo, Nikodemus Niko’s article, “Dayak Benawan Indigenous
Futures: Tropical Rainforest Knowledge in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” is an ethnographic
study of the cosmological basis of the sustainable practices of the author’s own

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Indigenous rainforest community. As he states, “[a]mid the growing complexity of
tropical rainforest degradation—leading to climate change, biodiversity loss, and
socio-economic inequalities—the Indigenous knowledge of the Dayak Benawan
emerges as an increasingly relevant alternative solution” (p. 232). Indigenous futurity
is an important component of decolonizing future studies, for in colonial and
neocolonial discourses, Indigenous knowledges are imagined as ancient, not modern,
creating a binary between past and future, tradition and development, backward and
forward. Niko’s article demonstrates this “false dichotomy, for Indigenous notions of
sustainability, as part of sustainable development goals SDGs (United Nations, 2015),
can create a new shared understanding of a better planetary future, with Indigenous
futurism emphasizing ecological flourishing for generations to come.” (p. 219-220).
The article shows how cosmological knowledge and its spiritual connection with the
rainforest is a viable system for navigating ecological changes. The spiritual-material
knowledge of the Dayak Benawan people involves religious rituals, agricultural
practices, and healthcare traditions. These are future-thinking practices that
demonstrate harmony between ancestral spirits, nature, and humans, while
maintaining ecological sustainability and engendering futurity.
The mighty Mekong River traverses the Southeast Asian countries of Myanmar, Laos,
Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In their article “Sustainable Nostalgia to Dystopian
Future: Toward a Tropical Transnational Ecocinema,” Thanh Tran & Giang Hoang
examine the film anthology Mekong 2030 (2020) as an environmental intervention in
contemporary Southeast Asian filmmaking. Bringing together five directors from each
of the five tropical countries through which the river flows, the anthology challenges
dominant cinematic representations of the Mekong River as a static, nostalgic, and
romanticized landscape. Instead, it speculates on dystopian futures to highlight
ongoing environmental crises such as flooding, drought, biodiversity loss, and
deforestation, which link to the loss of faith, reverence for the sacred, and Indigenous
spiritualty, which also coincides with the industrialization of landscapes—factories,
electric grids, and cargo ports. The temporal entanglement between past, present, and
future, according to the authors, plays a critical role in future thinking. The film’s visual
storytelling replaces romanticized nostalgia with a melancholic sensibility,
transforming memory into a mode of accountability in the present. The authors argue
that Mekong 2030 employs what they term “sustainable nostalgia” or “ecological
nostalgia” to evoke ecological memory through film, thus mourning the past is not a
passive act but a way of imagining and shaping alternative environmental futures “to
envision a post-apocalyptic future” (p.243). By stirring public emotions and
responsibility, these art-house representations encourage environmental awareness
and action to shape alternative futures.

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The Pacific and Tropical Australia
Films of Pacific Island atolls, Gemma Blackwood argues in “Ecocinema in Pukapuka:
Climate Change and Pacific Island Future,” are deeply entangled with imaginaries of
possible tropical futures. Through an analysis of two documentaries by filmmaker
Gemma Cubero del Barrio—Our Atoll Speaks (2019) and The Island in Me (2021)—
Blackwood explores cinematic representations of the Pacific Island atoll Pukapuka,
examining how these environmental justice-informed films contribute to alternative
understandings of the existential threat posed by climate change—particularly rising
sea levels—on the island’s future. By centring individual experiences, ancestral
knowledge, and the agency of nonhuman actors in Pukapuka, these films offer a
counternarrative to dominant climate change discourses that depict the Pacific as
having no future, a frequent trope in “the popular international documentary subgenre
of ‘sinking islands’” (p.264). She critiques this subgenre arguing that it falls
into salvage environmentalist narratives that isolate the islands from their histories and
inhabitants. In contrast, Cubero del Barrio’s films foreground ancestral knowledge and
the interconnectedness between humans and nonhumans, offering a vision of the
Pacific’s future that is neither static nor predetermined. By emphasizing local
knowledge, traditions, and communal efforts in maintaining their island, these
narratives intertwine the viewpoints of travellers, local islanders, and nonhumans,
including the movement of seawater and boats captured by underwater
cinematography. This approach prompts a reimagining of environmental responsibility
within trans-Pacific relationships. She argues that these relationships foster “nuanced
interactions with place…both local and distant” (p. 277), allowing for interconnected
understandings of climate crisis, agency, and responsibility.
The notion of a local and distant Pacific is reiterated (differently) in the paper “Across
the Tropical Pacific Ocean: Reflections on the Future of Kanaky-New Caledonia,” by
Florence Boulard, Marine Lechene, and Lola Kamblock. This reflexive piece
articulates the uncertain future of the often-overlooked Franco-Melanesian island
group of Kanaky or New Caledonia. This uncertainty was dramatically showcased in
the May 2024 riots, an event instigated by the French government amendment to the
constitution allowing recent immigrants to the island to participate in local elections, a
move that would further dilute the political influence of the Indigenous Kanak
population, reducing them to a minority power and curtailing their future. The three
authors write as non-Indigenous women from Kanaky-New Caledonia. Although each
has migrated to Australia, the island remains their source of identity and connection,
even though it is not their ancestral home. Calling on Epeli Hau’ofa's famous work,
Our Sea of Islands (1993), the authors recognize the Pacific as essential to the future.
This future, they believe, lies in “its ongoing, multifaceted identity, shaped by its
dynamic, multicultural, and multilingual nature” (p. 283). Their short reflexive pieces,

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interwoven in their paper, are thus not only personal reflections but are also political
practices fostering connections among themselves, their island home, and the wider
Pacific region. Using métissage as both a method and reflection on challenges and
possibilities, they state, “our future depends on acting in solidarity and cultivating
radical hope. This means creating conditions for meaningful coexistence with courage,
humility, and sustained engagement, even when the future is uncertain or difficult to
imagine (p. 283).
Lying on the edge of the Pacific Ocean is Far North Queensland (FNQ) in Australia.
This is the setting of Jasmin Peer’s article that undertakes an ethnographic analysis
of disability futures. The article concentrates on National Disability Insurance Scheme
(NDIS), and, as the title “The Undesirable Present and Future of Disability Support”
indicates, present disability support in the tropical north of Australia is fraught with
problems which require fundamental changes in order to offer a more promising future.
Problems include: bureaucratic complexity and neoliberal systemic exploitation, both
fomented by tropical rural inequality. Peer notes that “FNQ is the tropical heart of
Australia” (p.3) noted for its rurality and regionality which add to critical shortages of
medical and disability services. The “cultural fabric of the tropical north has a unique
fingerprint” (p. 4) with a high population of Indigenous Australians and significant
population of South Sea Islanders who were historically brought to the area as
indentured labourers. The region experiences many complications due to natural
disasters, and with “climate change expected to disproportionately impact rural tropical
regions, addressing the current challenges faced by disabled people in FNQ becomes
more pertinent” (p. 307). Peer concludes that “while ideological shifts are required to
truly herald a new future, with the undesirable future quickly approaching, the current
state of tropical disability imaginaries in FNQ remains pragmatic and crisis-driven” (p.
321). It is imperative to address this immediate future. She argues that to imagine “the
blossoming of tropical disability visions and hope, we must first deal with a practical
envisioning of a future. Only then can we begin to adequately discuss disability
futurisms in FNQ and how a society that embodies and values disability justice in the
tropical North of Australia will uniquely function” (p.322).
Conclusion: from Thinking Futures towards Making Futures
The plurality of futures in the tropics cannot be bound to a single definition. In this
issue, we have offered an elucidation and a significant array of theories that will help
to further conceptualize the tropics and their vital stakes in global futurity. The authors
encourage us to rethink temporality in and of itself, while underscoring the locality of
specific communities where the questions of the future have been engaged. Their
analyses employ theories and methods from multiple disciplines, encompassing
various creative and political practices—from novels, poetry, and cinema, to

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cosmologies, social movements, and policy documents—to examine the plural ways
in which tropical futures are imagined and enacted.
By proposing reflective and non-normative frameworks the contributions open
avenues for academic dialogues on Tropical Futurisms in a more expansive and
capacious way. We hope that they will continue to evolve, especially since they offer
a language with which the tropics can communicate ideas of futurity between its
various regions. Moreover, Tropical Futurisms enter the conversation with multiple
emergent movements aiming to reclaim the future not as a Western commodity but as
a common cause for survival and flourishing, thus inviting us to build other possible
worlds. They invite us to envision alternative worlds that transcend dominant
paradigms of futurity.
These papers furthermore provide crucial guidance to approach the work of so many
practitioners interested in Futures Making. Whereas we present here a selection of the
tools available to understand these practices, the second part of the double issue shifts
focus to contemporary creators who actively reimagine the tropics through creative
methodologies. These two parts complement each other, as we see the analytic and
creative coming together to showcase distinct visions of how tropical futurity can be
understood and, importantly, felt. The second part emphasises that creative and
embodied interventions are other epistemological venues through which we can
practice futures in the now. The examples presented there draw diverse scenarios that
aim to inspire, encourage, and lead to action. Moreover, we witness in the second part
of the double Special Issue a provocative push of the boundaries of any preconceived
ideas of Tropical Futurisms. Amid these distinctions, we reiterate that Futures Thinking
necessarily entails and contributes to Futures Making, and vice versa, as one cannot
happen without the other. We return to a central provocation: how do we, as citizens
and scholars of the tropics, engage in the work of thinking, making, and enacting
futures of environmental and social justice in our own communities? We hope that this
issue sparks a sustained reflection on the possibilities that lie ahead, inviting scholars,
artists, and activists alike to take part in shaping the tropical futures.

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Acknowledgements
We thank the reviewers who gave of their time and expertise to critically review the
papers and offer suggestions for improvement. We also want to thank the authors who
worked gallantly on revisions and meticulously through edits.
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 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 (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

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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 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.