Sci-fi in/and the Middle East

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This seminar uses the genre of science fiction produced in the Middle East as both text and method to explore the history of the region. We engage with historical, legal, and cultural scholarship, fiction, journalism, and film, focusing on themes of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and (in)justice, as well as gender, race, and class. We trace the deep roots of sci fi in the region from as early as the 12th century, and also consider how political needs and desires are reflected in contemporary sci fi output of the 20th and 21st centuries, including the growing subgenre of Gulf futurism. Along the way, we explore concepts of time and temporality, history and futurity, technology, and culture. Science fiction reflects both hope and despair: it fires up the imagination and excavates despondency and hopelessness. It also allows the marginalized to write themselves in, ask questions about who gets to narrate past and future, and convert uncertainty from foreclosure into possibility. As such, we consider the methodological possibilities science fiction can offer people in the Middle East in imagining alternative, and perhaps even emancipatory, futures.