Panel: Asian Futurisms

Futurism can refer to the genre known as science fiction, aesthetic movements meant to liberate art from the confines of western and colonial paradigms, or to speculative fiction and imagined visual realities that propose new worlds and ways of being. Asian Futurism, in turn, is a difficult movement to define, if it can be described as one movement at all. This discussion with several groundbreaking artists and writers will explore the queerness of time, the othering of Asian ways of being, the drag of history upon the present moment, and how these ideas are all depicted, addressed, and complicated in a multitude of Asian Futurisms.

Mehrin Masud-Elias (moderator), is a poet, writer, and lawyer from Bangladesh. Her debut collection of experimental poetry is in the submission process for poetry prizes. She is a co-founder of Twelve Gates Arts as well as a member of the Board of Pasión y Arte. She won the 2021 Peregrine Prize, the 2022 inaugural Universe in Verse prize from UPenn’s Kelly Writers House, and is an invited poet for the Rothermere American Institute-funded poetry collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oxford.

Nudrat Kamal is a PhD student of Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focuses on South Asian literature in Urdu and English, particularly in the intersections of environmental humanities, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, and science fiction and fantasy.

Jaret Vadera is an artist and cultural producer whose work examines the ways that images, and technologies colonize vision. Vadera’s work is influenced by science fiction, post/decolonial theory, Rorschach tests, koans, and impossible objects. Vadera’s prints, collages, sculptures, videos, and installations have been exhibited and screened at venues in the US, Canada, and India.

Ching-In Chen is descended from ocean dwellers and author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant and chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters. Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and a core member of Massage Parlor Outreach Project.

Shimul Chowdhury is a new media artist and professor of Digital Media and Creative Technology at Florida SouthWestern State College. She holds an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her artwork has been featured in the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, The Front Gallery, and The 4Most Gallery, among others. She is currently the Art Director at MIPSTERZ.

Mimi Mondal‘s latest publication is the Dungeons and Dragons adventure “In the Mists of Manivarsha” in the anthology Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. In 2020 her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light was nominated for a Nebula Award, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines including Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction.