Science Fiction and the Global South

Zombies and India: The neoMONSTERS Epidemiology

“…(in Sujoy Ghosh's Anukul and Vandana Singh's “Almaru”), biotechnological disruptions (in KS Ravikumar's Dashavthaaram and Anil Menon's The Beast with Nine Billion Feet), and hostile aliens (in Abhijit Chowdhury's Patalghar and Sami Ahmad Khan's Aliens in Delhi), all of which are staple tropes of SF, but also of ancient‐alien‐gods‐from‐outer‐space (in Shirish Kunder's Joker and Mainak Dhar's Vimana), demonic mythic‐scientific artifacts (in Mani Shankar's Rudraksh and Jugal Mody's Toke), novel rakshasas or demons (in Samit Basu's Gameworld trilogy and Arati Kadav's Cargo), and antagonistic monsters‐from‐other‐cultures hellbent on destroying India (in Patrick Graham's Ghoul and Betaal). If monsters are “breaker[s] of category” for J. J. Cohen (“Preface” x), and if SF from the global south is an “intervention into the form of SF itself” since it “reboots and remixes tropes and forms” (O'Connell 695), then monsters in Indian SF seek to disrupt, disassemble, and disintegrate categorical edifices. For example, in cīkhtā kabristān (The Screaming Graveyard), a Hindi‐language comic book from around the turn of the millennium, a Hindu sadhu (godman) “performing profound meditation” at a Christian cemetery is killed by gravediggers; his angry spirit raises the undead to haunt the cemetery; these zombies are ultimately tackled by a Christian priest armed with bottles of holy water (Ciemniewski 169–70): this confounding hybridization of disparate mythos sets the stage for further forays into monstrousness, and testifies to the appropriation of global semantic markers alongside the simultaneous reinforcement of syntactical mythic/fantastic imaginaries in India's popular culture.…”

“When It Comes to Crime, I’m a Nationalist”: National Integrity, Neocolonialism, and the Kenyan Detective Thriller

“…The studied application of hardboiled genre conventions to an East African setting, so the argument goes, sets these texts apart from the various social realisms that dominated African literary exports of an earlier era 1 . Just as, for example, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Buekes, Tade Thompson, and others have sparked a twenty‐first‐century “explosion” (O’Connell 687) of African science fiction, so too, perhaps, do Nairobi Heat and Black Star Nairobi mark the arrival of African crime fiction on the world stage 2 . At the same time, as John Marx writes, Mũkoma’s novels also “depart from earlier postcolonial fiction, in which the sense of geopolitical possibility remained tethered to the promise and limitations of nation‐states” (409).…”