Tropical Futurisms: Thinking Futures

Tropical Futurisms situates the reading of futures in the shared yet multiple modalities of this geo-climatic zone, acknowledging the social and political complexities, technological engagements, multispecies vitalities, and cosmological plurality within tropical regions. This first part of the double Special Issue emphasizes the diversity that comes from thinking about futures by positioning them back in material ecological experiences in this time of escalating climate crisis. This issue seeks solidarity in the tropics via imagining the future together in plural forms. This praxis of tropical futurisms encompasses envisioning decolonial tropics not only by archiving the past-future but also by rebuilding worlds, including Indigenous and multispecies knowledge and experience that is conventionally not seen as belonging to the future. Considering the vibrancy of Indigenous, Caribbean and Latin American, Afro and African, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific and Tropical Australian futures, we are also interested in the ways they intersect in the tropics creating new rich and complex forms of theorizing and storytelling.