Tropical Futurisms: Making Futures

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.24.2.2025.4211

Keywords:

tropical futurisms, making futures, future-making, tropical futurity, tropical materiality, creative practices

Abstract

Tropical Futurisms situates the making of futures in the geo-climatic zone of the tropics with its shared—yet always specific—histories of colonialism(s) and ecological biodiversities. At the same time, this special issue acknowledges the pluralities of tropical cultures and their cosmological insights, technological imaginings, and multispecies vitalities. This second part of the double Special Issue on Tropical Futurisms emphasises creative practices of future-making. It recognises the diverse ways of making futures by positioning them back in tropical material experiences in this time of escalating climate crisis. As with the previous issue on Thinking Futures, this second issue on Making Futures seeks solidarity in the tropics via imagining the future together in plural forms through creative practices. This issue offers insights from theatre performance, architecture, urban planning, street art, arts-nature exhibition, ethnography, photography, activism, film documentary, poetry, translation, and storytelling. It includes works from Tropical Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, Tropical Australia, India, and the Southeast Asia countries of Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. We are interested in the ways these creative works intersect across the pan-tropics, creating new rich and complex forms of future-making.

Author Biographies

Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

Ysabel Muñoz-Martínez is a PhD candidate in Environmental Humanities in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where she works with the transdisciplinary project Narrating Sustainability. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Letters from the University of Havana (2017), and in 2020, she received a Chevening Scholarship to complete the MLitt. Environment, Culture and Communication at the University of Glasgow (2021). She has received complementary education across Europe and the United States in institutions such as the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Cornell University, and the University of Miami. Her research interests include Caribbean culture, post/decolonial studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, transecology, futures, and futurisms. She writes about sustainability in the Caribbean context and now dreams of Caribbean Futures from the Nordics.

Jueling Hu, University of Fribourg, Switzerland & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Jueling Hu is a joint PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of Fribourg and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Hu’s research examines interspecies relations, digital media, and science fiction in Malaysian Borneo. Their interests span multispecies studies, urban geography, environmental media, and Deleuze & Guattari studies. Hu works for Swiss National Science Foundation-funded research project The Cultural Logistics of Chinese Science Fiction. They have been a visiting doctoral student at the National University of Singapore and the University of Nottingham Malaysia. Hu’s research-based audiovisual work has been exhibited via the Malaysian art center HAUS Kuching.

Nsah Mala, UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition and University of Cologne, Germany

Nsah Mala (born Kenneth Nsah), from Cameroon, is an award-winning poet, writer, children’s author, consultant, editor and translator, journalist-communicator, futurist and foresight practitioner, and interdisciplinary scholar working in English, French and Mbesa. Research interests include comparative literature, anglophone and francophone African literatures, public and environmental humanities, literary activism/artivism, creative writing and foresight and futures thinking. He has published widely in these areas including Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere (co-edited with Nicki Hitchcott); Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature; Re-writing Pasts, Imagining Futures: Critical Explorations of Contemporary African Fiction and Theater; Ecozon@; Orbis Litterarum; Electronic Green Journal; Humanities; Peripeti; and ASAP/J. His ongoing research project on ‘Wetland Time’ is funded by the British Academy and his #CongoBasinFutures foresight workshops are supported by the School of International Futures via the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellowship and the Cluster of Excellence Seed Funding at the University of Cologne. Nsah earned his PhD in Art, Literature and Cultural Studies, specializing in Comparative Literature and Environmental Humanities, from Aarhus University, Denmark. His thesis, ‘Can Literature Save the Congo Basin? Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Environmental Literary Activism’, won the Prix de thèses francophones en Prospective [Prize for Francophone Theses in Foresight and Futures Studies] in 2022 from Fondation 2100 and Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at Radboud University, Netherlands, and the Université de Lille, France. Nsah currently works for the University of Cologne, Germany, as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Coordinator of the Cologne Hub for Planetary Wellbeing within the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition. He is also affiliated with the Universities of Lancaster and Nottingham (UK), University of Lille (France), and School of International Futures (SOIF), UK.

Anita Lundberg, James Cook University, Australia

Associate Professor Anita Lundberg is a cultural anthropologist whose ethnographies engage people, places and material cultures of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Her works arise from interdisciplinary theories including rhizomatics, material poetics, tropical imaginaries, myths, liminality, tropical gothic and flanerie. Sites of analysis include Singapore city, cinema, a Malay house, a whale hunting village in Indonesia, street art in Bali, climate change, the environment, and education.  Anita has received awards for research supervision and innovative research and has held international fellowships: LIA TransOceanik (CNRS, Collége de France, JCU); The Cairns Institute (TCI); Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cambridge University, UK; Guest Researcher, Maison Asie-Pacifique, Université de Provence, France; Visiting Fellow, Institute of the Malay World and Civilization, National University Malaysia. She has also been an Anthropologist-in-Residence at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. She has curated exhibitions in NY, LA, Paris and Sydney and her own research, theoretical, and artistic works have been exhibited at the Australian National Maritime Museum, the National Art Gallery of Malaysia and Alliance de Française. Anita has a PhD from the University of New South Wales, Australia and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with Cambridge University, UK. She has an MA in Science and Technology Studies. Anita lives in Bali.

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Published

2025-04-21

How to Cite

Muñoz-Martínez, Y., Hu, J., Mala, N., & Lundberg, A. (2025). Tropical Futurisms: Making Futures. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 24(2), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.24.2.2025.4211

Issue

Vol. 24 No. 2 (2025): Tropical Futurisms: Making Futures

Section

Introduction

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