I was interviewed by Scott Smith of Changeist for the Summer 2013 issue of Current Intelligence: Ethnic Futurism in the Gulf
SS: To the outside eye, views of weird buildings, non-Western tech art, sci-fi films, etc. looks like an aesthetic observation, about finding instances where strong aesthetics of local culture are situated next to icons or genres strongly defined via Western culture. This seems to sell these non-Western futurisms far short, however. From within, say, Gulf futurism, what are the key tensions or contrasts that we might miss from a strictly Western view?
RA: Do you mean Gulf futurism as articulated by Fatima Al Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria? I don’t think it’s an unfair assessment to say that it’s predicated largely, upon the visual (or that this is necessarily a bad thing). The problem with Gulf futurism, though? It’s already here, and like [science fiction author William] Gibson’s futurist pizza, its slices are really, really unevenly distributed.
Gulf futurism, as I understand it, is conceptualised in the mould of Marinetti’s Italian futurism, and inherits many of the same touchstones. All of its seductiveness: sun, sand, and solar-sintered glassy desolation of the Arabian gulf at the extreme promontory of the millennia. All the beautiful/callous brutality, all the proto-fascism of a society that privileges success and speed over human life.
Yet Gulf futurism offers no new imagery to displace the hegemonic ones in power—instead setting up the scaffolding to reproduce the injustices, structural degradation and racial erasures of the present. As ethnifuturisms go, it feels like there’s something missing, too. Where’s the longing, the displacement, the impossibility of return? Where’s the Afghan, the Filipino, the Indian, the Iranian, the Somali, the Pakistani, the Bangladeshi, the Iraqi, and all the other non-Khaleeji Arabs all bound up into one pathologised brown body? [Experimental jazz musician] Sun Ra had to go all the way to Saturn; the Gulf futurist doesn’t need to go anywhere because they’re welcomed, and even reified, right at home.
At base, Gulf futurism is “plus ça change futurism,” all wrapped up in what a friend has dubbed “flying force fields of neo-Arabness.” It’s not imagining a future so much as mapping shards of future detritus—imagery strongly defined-as-future by Western culture, as you put it—in the present. It’s an aesthetic scaffolding that reproduces all the injustices, structural degradation and racial erasures of the present. I do want to tread carefully here, as I still live and work in the region. And I’m awfully reluctant to invoke any kind of rights-based frameworks which I think are problematic in their own way, but you can probably extrapolate and posit what else gets thrown out with the bathwater here. How can it be sci-fi without social justice?