Narratives of Crisis and Futurity

Narratives of Crisis and Futurity presents the second volume of a two volume project that examines the volatile forces reshaping contemporary South Asia. This volume analyzes how authors from across the region respond to ecological devastation, technological acceleration, gendered and political violence, and the destabilization of social and spatial boundaries. Through rigorous engagement with fiction, memoir, and interdisciplinary theory, it reveals how South Asian narratives confront crisis while formulating alternative modes of futurity.

The book unfolds across four interrelated parts. Ecologies of Crisis addresses climate catastrophe, extractive economies, and environmental loss through texts that articulate trauma, memory, and the ethical demands of survival. Speculative Futures investigates posthumanism, caste and technocapitalism, artificial intelligence, and dystopian imagination, positioning South Asian speculative writing as a crucial site where global futurist discourse acquires historical depth and moral urgency. Urban and Artistic Reworldings focuses on the city, the archive, and artistic practice as arenas of resistance that recalibrate belonging, mobility, and citizenship under neoliberal and migratory pressures. Power, Surveillance, and Feminist Reclamations turns to the crises produced by gendered harm, political surveillance, and epistemic domination, demonstrating how narrative form contests violence while enabling new articulations of agency.

Across these sections, contributors engage works by authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Sonali Deraniyagala, Romesh Gunesekera, Janice Pariat, Vauhini Vara, Shehan Karunatilaka, Tahmima Anam, Mohsin Hamid, and Nayomi Munaweera. Their analyses illuminate literature s capacity to reinterpret ecological collapse, recast technological transformation, and expose the fault lines of caste, gender, and migration.

As a companion to Volume I, which traced shifting formations of identity, this volume confronts the conditions under which identity itself requires reconceptualization. It affirms the role of South Asian literary imagination as a critical force that addresses crisis without capitulating to despair and that envisions futures grounded in ethical resilience, intellectual scrutiny, and transformative possibility. This book offers indispensable insight for scholars and students of literary studies, environmental humanities, migration studies, postcolonial theory, and global futurisms.