Deadline: 1 October
Contact: Ysabel Munoz
Email: ysabel.o.m.martinez@ntnu.no

This special issue invites scholarly and artistic reflections on speculations about the im/possible and un/desirable future(s) of the tropics. We encourage inquiries on future tropical scenarios, social or ecological, utopian or dystopian, embodied or mediated, among local or global diasporic communities.

Tropical Futurisms situate the reading of futures in the shared yet multiple modalities of this geographical zone, acknowledging the social and political complexities, technological engagements, multispecies vitalities, and cosmological plurality within these regions. A glimpse into one of the many possible imaginaries of tropical futurism rooted in local creative practices has been provided by Alex Quicho (2022). Similarly, our call emphasizes the diversity that comes from thinking about futures by positioning them back in concrete thermal, ecological experiences in these times of escalating climate crisis (Lundberg, Vital & Das, 2021).

We seek to gather perspectives from tropical areas, open to their multiplicity and yet firmly rejecting a reading of the tropics as the alterity of extraction or desires under the limited colonial imagination of its heat, humidity, and fecundity (Arnold, 2005; Soluri, Leal & Pádua, 2018). To these voyeuristic imperatives, we juxtapose the activist, multimedia, technological practices emerging from tropical spaces that take on the task of conceiving futures beyond plantation systems, and formulate new visions of tropical ecologies.

We seek solidarity in the tropics via imagining the future together in plural forms (Chattopadhyay, 2021). For us, this praxis of tropical futurisms encompasses envisioning decolonial tropics not only by archiving the past-future but also rebuilding worlds, including Indigenous and multispecies knowledge and experience that is conventionally not seen as belonging to the future. Considering the vibrancy of Indigenous, Afro, African, Asian, Pacific and Latin American futurisms, we are also interested in the ways they intersect in the tropics creating new rich and complex forms of theorizing and storytelling for this particular geography where settler, Indigenous, and diasporic cultures coexist.

Our call encourages contributors from various disciplines including: literature, media studies, history, anthropology, human geography, political ecology, art, architecture, design, urban planning, meteorology, and STS, among others. We look forward to seeing how contributions to this issue respond, expand, or challenge the ideas of Tropical Futurisms. We especially welcome topics such as:

Future scenarios and speculations in tropical contexts
Postcolonial reckoning and decolonial projects
Environmental justice and activism
Tropical Indigenous cosmologies
Tropical sensorial experiences and technoscience
Artistic and creative practices
Aesthetics of the tropics in utopian or dystopian narratives
Tropics as global future
Technological imaginaries
Multispecies world-building
Future relations and entanglements
Chronotropics of mixed temporalities
Futuring gender and ecologies
Conversations between tropical regions
Transformation in local scenarios
The Tropics

We invite a wide range of articles and creative works from researchers who engage with the tropical regions of the world: tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean Islands, tropical Asia, the north of Australia, the Pacific, Hawai’i and the American South.

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the Tropics. ISSN:1448-2940, free open access; indexed in Scopus, Google Scholar, Ulrich’s, DOAJ; archived in Pandora, Sherpa/Romeo; uses DOIs and Crossref; ranked Scimago Q1.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

Submissions due October 1, 2024 (full paper)
Publication date: March 2025
Submissions must conform to the eTropic Style Sheet & Layout
Research article submissions should be about 6000-8000 words
Literary, creative works, and photographic essays of about 4000-5000 words
Titles should be concise and clear (maximum 2 lines at 16 point font)
Include a 100-200-word abstract of the article or creative work + 5 keywords
Submissions should be uploaded to eTropic online journal site
Submit 2 copies of your work: copy 1 with full author details; copy 2 anonymized
Author copy: name of authors, institutions, country, and Orcid ID (https://orcid.org/)
Author copy: provide a 100-word biographical note for each author (at the end of the article)
Precisely follow APA (edition 7) for in-text citations and reference list
Contributions should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file (.docx)
All images must be used with permission and referenced
Suitable papers will be double-anonymous peer reviewed
Authors should consult eTropic archives to understand concepts of tropics and tropicality
Papers requiring Professional Copyediting will need to be discussed with the editor

eTropic website https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/index
eTropic Call for Papers https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/announcement
For enquiries, or for pitching your ideas or abstracts, please email the editor
Special Issue Editors: Ysabel Muñoz, environmental storytelling and activism, Caribbean (Norwegian University of Science and Technology); Jueling Hu, eco-media and Sinophone sci-fi, Borneo (University of Fribourg & University of Amsterdam); Nsah Mala, environmental humanities and activism, ecocriticism and ecopoetics, sustainability science, foresight and futures thinking, Congo Basin (University of Cologne and BRIDGES Coalition); Anita Lundberg, ethnographic material poetics, & STS, Maritime Southeast Asia (James Cook University, Australia & Singapore).

Posted on August 28, 2024