Realms of Possibility: The Ongoing Nakba and Scopes of Speculative Futures

Keywords: Speculative Fiction, Futurity, Palestine, Settler Colonialism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

As we continue to witness the death and destruction of Palestinian lives and spaces, it would be easy to succumb to the bounds of expectations set by the dystopian world around us; however, as Sherene Seikaly (2024) urges, “In the reality of this vanished world, we must find new exits” (4). This paper turns to new exits presented in the Palestinian speculative futures of Lyd (Younis and Friedland, 2023) and Palestine +100 (Ghalayini, 2019), a science fiction documentary and an anthology of speculative fiction short stories, respectively. This paper argues, that while these speculative imaginaries continue to be shaped by the enduring impacts of settler colonialism, they simultaneously proffer ways out of these dystopian realms.
For Palestinians, the enduring nature of settler colonialism is often understood as the ongoing Nakba; Palestinian dispossession and displacement that was part of constructing the Israeli state in 1948 continues today through legal, infrastructural, and political maneuvers (Barakat, 2017; Sayigh, 2018; Seikaly, 2023). Focusing on how the producers and authors of Lyd and Palestine+100 grapple with the ongoing Nakba’s central elements of fragmentation and erasure, what emerges is how these futures are intimately tied to the present, not only in the dystopian elements included, but more significantly in the enactments of better worlds. In its eliminatory mission, a central component of settler colonialism is to destroy the capacity to imagine an Indigenous future (Harjo, 2019), but these speculative imaginaries already show how such visions of the future are enacted in the present.