Sang-Keun Yoo in “The Geopolitics of Speculation: Korean Science Fiction and the Limits of Futurity” will switch the locus of genre-discourse by asking what happens when science fiction, which has long been theorized as a genre of imperial modernity associated with technological expansion, develops in a colonized and divided nation rather than an imperial center. Yoo will introduce the concept of the “geopolitics of speculation,” defined as the historically specific conditions that structure not only which futures are imaginable but which become narratively unimaginable. Drawing on twentieth-century Korean science fiction across literature and popular media, Yoo will argue that Korean SF reveals how futurity itself is unevenly distributed within global modernity. Then, Yoo traces how Japanese colonialism, Cold War division, and U.S.–Korea hierarchy constrained speculative imagination across later decades. In 1960s works, Korean writers struggled to imagine Koreans as legitimate occupants of technologically advanced futures such as space travel. In 1990s–2000s alternate-history and space narratives, even reunified or technologically advanced Koreas repeatedly fracture into new forms of division, revealing persistent limits on imagining sovereignty and decolonization. By situating Korean SF alongside Afrofuturism and Latinxfuturism, Yoo will rehistoricize global SF and show how colonial and geopolitical structures delimit the horizons of futurity itself.

Similarly, in “Blackness in Serialization: Racial Consciousness and Korean Nation-Making in Early Twentieth-Century Periodicals,” Jang Wook Huh will explore the issue of race from a non-white, non-black perspective. Huh will examine how racial consciousness shaped the making of the modern Korean nation-state by reading Korean translations of Japanese and American periodicals—from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. During this period, serialized publications circulated racial and ethnic taxonomies, often accompanied by visual representations of the globe influenced by social Darwinism , which encouraged Koreans to reconsider their place within shifting human hierarchies. Print culture functioned as a key medium for disseminating racial discourse, which gained traction amid the decline of the Joseon Dynasty, the rise of the Korean Empire, and increasing Japanese intervention. Huh argues that these conditions gave rise to a body of serial literature that mobilized anti-Black sentiment to assert Koreans’ claim to modernity in the context of international rivalry. Huh discusses how the Korean intelligentsia deployed Blackness as an “empty signifier”—a site for projecting nationalist desire and managing racial anxiety.

Last but not least, Haerin Shin develops these questions of race and futurity into the question of what constitutes personhood in the era of artificial intelligence, looking forward to the emancipation of nonhumans. Shin in “The (Non-)Lives of Artificial Persons in Boyong Kim’s ‘Scripter’ and Greg Egan’s Permutation City” interrogates the ontological and juridical status of digitally instantiated personalities whose existence is predicated upon, yet irreducibly discrete from, their human models. In Egan’s novel, the “copy-right” to self-terminate functions as a convenient dressing that grants virtual replicas the illusion of autonomy while reinforcing their fungibility; the proposition of substrate independence upon which the scanning industry operates, however, undermines the logic behind such inhumane treatment. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s notion of machinic heterogenesis, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, and Upendra Baxi’s critique of techno-narcissism, this essay argues that the extension of inalienable rights to nonhuman actors risks perpetuating anthropocentric frameworks that reduce radical alterities to mere reflections of human selfhood. The objective is to pursue a recuperative revision of humaneness as the principle of radical respect rather than ontological identification; if techno-narcissism constitutes an unavoidable mode of being for the human species, a pathway around its limitations may lie not in disavowal but in the acceptance of its inapplicability to heterogenetic alterities of machinic origin.