Panel: Asian Futurisms

LIVESTREAM PANEL ASIAN FUTURISMS

Moderated by: Mehrin Masud-Elias

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.

This program will livestreamed on 11/5 at 11:00 AM EST

NUDRAT KAMAL (she/her) 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 (he/him) 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.

MODERATOR:

MEHRIN MASUD-ELIAS (she/her)

is a poet, writer, and lawyer from Bangladesh. Her collections of experimental poetry, Natural Alien and Apocalypsia, are 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 and the 2022 inaugural Universe in Verse prize from UPenn’s Kelly Writers House.

NOV

5

11:00 AM

CHING-IN CHEN (they/them) 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.

MIMI MONDAL’s (she/her) 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.

SHIMUL CHOWDHURY (she/her) 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.