Narratives Of Crisis And Futurity: Shifting Borders, Emerging Voices In Global South Asia (Volume 2)

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.

Moussa Pourya Asl is an Assistant Professor at Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran. He previously served as an Affiliate at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, Finland. He received his Ph.D. in Literary Studies from Universiti Sains Malaysia, where he also held the position of Senior Lecturer from 2018 to 2023. His research interests include diasporic literature, gender studies, and cultural studies. Dr. Pourya Asl has edited two books—Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women (2022) and Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East (2023)—and has published numerous articles and guest-edited several special issues on postcolonial and diasporic literature and theory for leading academic journals.

Manju Jaidka has served as a Professor and Chairperson at Panjab University. She has received numerous prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright and two Rockefeller awards, and has held academic positions at top international universities. The author of over 25 books and nearly 100 research papers, she is also a creative writer and has published poetry, fiction, and drama. The WHO commissioned her non-fiction work on disability management. The recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English is a major addition to her oeuvre. She is currently working on the Encyclopedia of Diasporic Indian Writing in English for Springer.