On this panel, scholars consider the social, literary, cultural, political, epistemological, and institutional implications of interpretive practices that focus on, and attempt to leverage, the intersection of futurity and history in Arab American literatures, discourses, and visual media. This panel is organized around questions like: How does an interpretive focus on the future and futurity affect literary and visual studies of “Arab America”? How do writers and cultural producers of “Arab America” and Arab diasporas read history and the future? How do they imagine historical implication? How do and should we as critics and historians read history and future into Arab American literature and material artifacts? What are these literatures' and archives' histories–political, social, cultural, and institutional–and to whom are these histories and materials proper? Does understanding anglophone and polyphonic Arab diasporic literary and archival history, and also the U.S. Arab production of history, demand a national frame? An ethnic frame? How does an interpretive privileging of futurity affect the ways in which literature is imagined to, and literary critics are able to, represent territorial nationalism and its importance? How does this future frame move or stagnate perennial concerns of the discipline, such as sex/gender construction and human rights, Islamophobia, orientalism, colorism, migration, exile, policing, and necropolitics?

Nusaiba Imady, through the life and works of Mayy Ziyāda, examines the ways in which fiction revises the historical record, utilizing theories of critical fabulation; works that rely on archival research and fiction to tell purposefully untold stories, and feminist theories on hysteria and gendered violence. Seeking out a vision of Arabic intellectual history that could be possible if those brutally suppressed from its creation were given materiality through lore and archive. Installation artist Essma Imady re-visits artists like Walid Raad and theorists like Jalal toufic to interrogate the theme of a futurism imagined and visualized for the Syrian citizen of the present world. George Abraham queries the future possible or impossible through an examination of a mix of Palestinians writing in Arabic, such as Samih Al-Qasim’s Sadder than Water, Mourid Barghouti’s Midnight, and Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s You Can Be the Last Leaf, alongside contemporary Palestinian American poetry projects such as Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds, and recent Palestinian speculative literary collections with Strange Horizons, FIYAH Magazine, and Mizna. Hella Cohen asks, what does futurism look like for Palestinian writers in diaspora? Using Hannah Lillith Assadi's dystopic landscape novel Sonora, short stories by Anglophone Palestinian SF writers Saleem Haddad and Selma Dabbagh, and futurist lyric by Palestinian American poets Fargo Tbakhi, Nathalie Handal, Naomi Shihab Nye, as touchstones, she examines Palestinian-American literary discourses on dystopia/utopia in order to trace their relationship with the posthuman turn.

Panelists will speak for 12 minutes, allowing bookended intros and remarks and at least 15 minutes of Q&A at the end.