Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” Territorial disputes in the South China Sea.Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (pdf).Carla Freccero’s book Queer/Early/Modern.Elizabeth Freeman’s book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories.Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.José Esteban Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.Aimee’s latest book Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.I want us to be as a world attuned to the stories that statisticians will call insignificant. Imagining otherwiseįor me, thinking about what queer feminist practice is or disability justice or environmental justice is, it’s requiring us to think about those points on the data map that exceed the normative story. I want to sit with the question of what might it mean to rethink our ecological environmental policy from the perspective of a kind of undercommons, where we understand across scales of life and non-life that these environments are tied together in ways that insist upon moving forward in an anticapitalist, anticolonial, and decolonial way. If we begin from Indigenous thought, then we immediately begin to see that what many folks have imagined as ‘the transpacific’ is already caught up in all these settler ideas about ownership, about management, about incursion and extraction. Aimee’s current work on radical Pacific imaginaries This is key to the work that we do in gender studies and ethnic studies about imagining social hierarchies totally upside down or even beyond upside down, to make the idea of hierarchy completely alien. The defamiliarization that speculative fiction drops you into in the first few pages provides an occasion for you to scrape down your assumptions about how the world works. How speculative fiction can be used to teach gender and ethnic studies That gap can sometimes feel really incommensurable and daunting, but at the same time there’s something about the accretion of small acts, a subtle but radical shift in our orientation to how we think about and care for others. I want to connect the work of imagining a better future with actually putting that into practice. Connecting academic work to contemporary social justice struggles The real goal of the project is to get us to imagine our orientation to the time/space of the future differently from the fantasies of global capitalism-global racial capitalism-and to look to speculative fictions drawn from lived experiences of alienation, abduction, and displacement among migrant communities. Takeaways Aimee’s latest book Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times Aimee’s current project on radical Pacific imaginaries (11:49).Connections between speculative fiction and gender/ethnic studies (09:16).Aimee’s work at the intersection of academia, creativity, and social justice (06:17).Aimee’s latest book Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (02:18).Focusing on Pacific contexts of nuclear subjection and ecological management born out of the post-WW2 era, the project foregrounds feminist, decolonial approaches to thinking across species difference and planetary futures. With teaching and research interests at the conjuncture of transnational Asian/American cultural studies and feminist-queer science and technology studies, Aimee has published a range of articles on techno-Orientalism and Asian/American speculative fiction.Īimee is currently working on another book manuscript, tentatively titled Transpacific Ecologies. That book examines narrations of futurity across various platforms from speculative fiction by writers of color to the financial speculations of the 1 percent. She’s also the author of the Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, which was published by Duke University Press in 2018. Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | RadioPublic | Google Podcasts Guest: Aimee BahngĪimee Bahng is an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Pomona College. In episode 77 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with transnational feminist studies professor Aimee Bahng about how speculative fiction and other geeky genres help us to imagine and create radical, queer of color feminist futures how professors can link classroom activities to local social justice movements how Indigenous thought and politics are challenging US colonialism across the Pacific and why moving away from statistics is such an important part of how Aimee imagines otherwise. How might speculative fiction help educators teach gender and ethnic studies to their students? What would it mean to reimagine the Pacific in an anticapitalist, anticolonial, and decolonial way? What kind of world could we have if we thought beyond the normative story?