Sensing the Future in Contemporary Anglophone Literature: Utopian Practice in Times of Global Emergency

Abstract

Abstract: Due to contemporary experiences of climate crisis, large-scale migration, and global ruptures such as the spread of COVID-19, futurity has become newly problematized in both public discourse and critical discussions in literary and cultural studies. This article argues that literary texts contribute to the renegotiation of futurity for the cultural needs of the present. The article discusses how two contemporary Anglophone novels, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), redirect both ecocritical and critical posthumanist concerns towards an ethics of open futurity that is, counterintuitively, contiguous with the humanist philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas. The novels express forms of anticipation in which open futurity and the experience of encounter with the other form a basic ethical orientation, thereby pointing to an emergent reshaping of utopian practice in times of global emergency.