REFUGEE FUTURITIES
Speculating through Displaced (After)Lives.
a decomp journal e-zine edited by Elaina Nguyen, amanda wan, Ben Connor, Olivia Lim, Ipek Omercikli, and Jane Willsie
In loving memory of Dr. Y-Dang Troeung, whose teaching, scholarship, and generosity brought us together as editors and inspired this issue’s engagement with refugee futurities and worldmaking.
Artistic productions that draw from refugee experiences complicate understandings of time, space, modernity, and borders that have been normalized, whether through the violence of imperial war or the everyday workings of nation states as projects of modernity (e.g. environmental degradation, practices of citizenship, and capitalist extraction). This was the guiding premise for the decomp journal e-zine, “Refugee Futurities: Speculating through Displaced (After)Lives.” Through this zine, we invited works of fiction, poetry, art, and mixed media that imagined and/or drew attention to the relational and creative practices that are made possible from positions of refugeeness.
Our turn to speculation in this zine responds to how queer, disabled, racialized, and refugeed figures are often subjected to violences that preclude them from having a future. Conceptualized in relation to the multiplicities of refugeeness, speculation can loosen conceptions of futurity based on a linear progression in time and space that fails to sense what is already present—and lost—within aesthetic and archival practices centered on the conditions of refugeeness. “giizhgaandag زعفران,” for example, offers artistic collaboration mediated through text and textile, offering a form of relational practice that speaks to questions of spirituality, cosmology, and displacement within and beyond language. "The Two of Coins" speaks to narratives around life and death that are passed on through practices of tarot reading. Meanwhile, "Then: beaded embroidered handbag: 3 generations" and “(there was an old Pipal tree in my ancestral home in North India)” turn to intergenerational geographies around distance and separation that are produced in exile.
As a concept with as many surfaces as depths, “speculation” is not always a salve for healing from displacement. Indeed, speculation can conjure forms of harm, such as in the context of financial speculation that seeks to manipulate entire peoples and lands into tokens of finance capital, or in the speculative fictions that frame the narrative of war as necessary, ethical, or even pleasurable. However, speculative fiction can also challenge these narratives by conjuring images of harm that prompt us to address these conditions in the present, as “Ohio Dust Bowl” does by depicting a near-future story of climatic disaster. “Race and Refugees” invites closer readings of narratives that deem some refugees more worthy of asylum and humanitarian protections. “DECAYING: VIVA” explores the labours undertaken by Latine/x migrants. “Sink or Swim” and “Biological Materials” consider the interconnections between pedagogy and the abandonment of refugees and asylum seekers as cycles that need writing through. Where “The Last Block Party of W. 253rd St.” relates gentrification to the precarity of refuge, "Arma's Restaurant" considers the circulation of stories around precarity in exile through film—alongside the role of food in practices of placemaking. Speculation, then, is far from a dualism between real and unreal, or beauty and harm.
By reckoning with forced displacement, ongoing colonialism, and imperialism, creative works in this issue also explore what it means to carve out lives and futures while refusing to reproduce speculative futures imbued with white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, and colonial private property. Stitching pearl cotton on fabric, “Ship and the Sea” surfaces the multiple possible futures that await within the Sea, as a site of pain and death but also the potential for escape. “American Aquarium” wonders about feelings of safety and sadness in refuge, whether in a loved one’s arms or the possibility of care.
The works in this zine follow from a body of critical scholarship that draws from “refugee epistemologies” to contest mainstream depictions of refugees as crises to be managed and instead explore how experiences of loss, movement, and displacement can inform contemporary presences that challenge and exceed state and imperial violence. As Y-Dang Troeung writes in Refugee Lifeworlds, the refugee—a figure made and remade in a world of global precarity—opens up ways of knowing futurity by embodying key resources and knowledges. Drawing from stories of movement, exile, queerness, memory, and human and more than human kinship, we hope the works in this e-zine can enact radical and transformative ways of inhabiting futurity from positions of displacement.
