An interest in the notion of multiple universes, omniverses, metaverses—which we generally group under the heading “pluriverse”—has seen an uptick in 21^st century literary productions, especially in the genres of film, television series, and novels. To be clear, a pluriverse is not just a setting for a narrative. When undertaken in a novel or film, a pluriverse transforms the nature of reality by opening out to the nature of realities. We therefore take the term pluriverse to refer to a concept of world premised on the reality that there are multiple or even infinite universes each governed by incompatible yet interwoven logics of being and relation. Moreover, there is no “The Pluriverse.” Pluriverses themselves are many, as demonstrated by the various pluriverse theories coming from quantum physics, indigenous cosmologies, digital studies, and decolonial politics. This plurality of pluriverses drives the enthusiasm of this panel. Our set of articles engages an array of pluriverse representations in novels and films and asks how they are significant to 21^st century literary aesthetics and contemporary cultures.

We find it exciting that analytical attention to pluriverses has been so scant. This is because the topic feels new—its emergence strikes us as a cusp moment in 21^st century aesthetics and imagination. With this cuspiness in mind, we take this panel to be exigent on multiple grounds (1) the sheer amount of works involving pluriverses yet to be read through this theoretical lens; (2) the stimulating relevance of these works to our understanding of contemporary culture; (3) the various political urgencies in dismantling mono-universal concepts of world that have been central to imperialism and colonialism, including oppressive Western onto-epistemologies that have been variously called “cognitive empire” (Bonaventura de Sousa Santos) and “One World Theory” (John Law) and that can be counteracted by what Arturo Escobar calls a “pluriversal politics”; (4) the need to counter claims that pluriversality is an escapist conceptualization that may be comforting to those living in a world deteriorated by climate change in addition to many other era-shifting global undoings. This panel combines these concerns under a general interest in furthering the emergent field of contemporary literary studies.

The first presentation by Bekah Waalkes, an English Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University, reads Namwali Serpell’s novel The Furrows (2022) as an exploration of how pluriversal simultaneity can be used as a salve against trauma and grief. In this novel, the narrator experiences her brother’s death over and over again in what seem to be different yet parallel universes. Waalkes deploys the concept of pluriversal politics in her reading and engages Black studies’ theorization of nonlinear temporalities, linking together two resonant onto-epistemological projects in a way that helps us to see how Serpell’s novel advances an anti-racist and decolonial sense of pluriversality.

The second paper, delivered by Heloise Thomas, who holds a Ph.D. in American studies and teaches at Universite Bordeaux Montaigne, contributes to the above discussion of trauma and decolonial politics of the pluriverse. Thomas will discuss Annalee Newitz’s novel The Future of Another Timeline (2019) and Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) to analyze how pluriverses can become effective devices of resistance, recovery, and repair through disrupted temporalities and punctured teleologies, especially within feminist, queer, and decolonial politics.

The third and final presentation, by Gray (Lianghui) Huang, a Ph.D. student at Binghamton University, attends to one of the most widely known works of pluriversal aesthetics, the film Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) by Daniels at A24. Huang examines how the whimsical pluriversal aesthetics of this film advances a pluriversal theory that draws together phenomenology, digital culture, and the Taoist notion of Qi. While the first two papers attend to cultural ramifications and political significances of pluriversality in novels, Huang’s paper brings us to the question of how pluriverses relate to sensory experience and multisensory relationships. By bringing together Chinese philosophy and Western phenomenology, Huang likewise contributes to this panel’s notion that theory and cosmology, as part of a decolonial ethics, must be thought in common.

My closing remarks will comment on the dearth of work on pluriversal politics in literary studies and will briefly suggest the many ways that religions studies, indigenous studies, quantum physics, and decolonial studies have paved the way for more robust attention to pluriverse representations within the field of literary studies.