What’s Reality, anyways?

Live-Stream via Zoom HERE

We understand speculative fiction as any form of creative writing in which the rules of our reality are not fully, or at all, observed - for example utopian, dystopian and fantastic literature, science fiction and ghost stories (definition Sami Schalk). What these rules are, where reality ends and the fantastic begins, is of course already a political question, the answer to which in mainstream literature is shaped by male, white, neurotypical and Western norms. However, the genre of speculative fiction was also used early on by marginalised authors: Unlike the typically neo-colonial or imperialist narratives of many successful white authors of fantasy and sci-fi, they played out worlds in which racist, ableist or sexist rules were undermined by time travel, magic, dissolution of boundaries between nature, technology and humans, or entirely different ways of being together. In the panel, we discuss why speculative writing is powerful, what the genre's tradition is from a marginalised perspective, and what constitutes current queer or neurodivergent, Black, Afro-German or migrant speculative fiction.

With Ama Josephine Budge, Patience Amankwah, James A. Sullivan and Marcel Inhoff (moderator).

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