Contested Homes in Speculative Futurities in Anglophone Bruneian Fiction

Speculative futurities that are delineated in Bruneian author Aammton Alias’s Anglophone novel Gergasi Wrath (2023) offer a critique of human exploitation of nature, land, and indigenous communities who claim simultaneous ownership of demarcated territories. In his latest novel, Alias takes issue with notions of modern development and progress under the guise of capitalist greed, materialism, and power that infiltrates and complicates the concept of home as a locale of belonging, security, and identity. His speculative vision excavates cultures and histories of exploitation within landscapes that are stereotypically labelled as primitive geographies set in Brunei Darussalam, often regarded as a jungle nation. In revising the jungle narrative of tropical danger that feeds into imperialist fantasies, Alias traces techno-Orientalist tropes of disavowed Asian material and nonmaterial bodies and questions local and global practices in the pursuit of capitalist progress, modern advancement, and upward mobility. In this novel, liminality and contact zones become the foci when examining dystopian discourses of conflict between humans and spirits that expose identity contestations between different communities, wherein speculative practices of disavowing and destroying Indigenous and ecological denizens across borders underscore imperialist enterprises within shared spaces of the home. Techno-Orientalism is employed to interrogate tensions and conflicts in the home, which entails geographical lands and spatial territories that provide communities with a sense of place and identity. Following displacement, dispossession, and destruction of human characters and Buni-an spirits inhabiting the tropical Bruneian-Borneo jungle, battles to defend the home upset the colonial construction of center and periphery, which carries repercussions for the way that Brunei Darussalam is constructed and imagined in Southeast Asian speculative fiction.