As climate change accelerates, a sixth mass extinction event looms over the horizon. Apocalyptic scenes proliferate across our screens, almost blocking out fugitive glimpses of other possible worlds. But for those most vulnerable to the slow violence of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism, the end of the world is nothing new. To paraphrase the late scholar Patrick Wolfe, apocalypse is a structure, not an event; the catastrophe is ongoing. Or, as June Tyson sings in Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, “It’s after the end of the world—don’t you know that yet?” The worldbuilding of Afrofuturism, Arabfuturism, indigenous futurism, and other subaltern futurisms is animated by collective memories of the many worlds that did not survive the “new world” of colonial modernity. Futurisms divested from capitalist futurity, these speculative activities reorient the imagination to the poetics and politics of worldbuilding in the wake of catastrophe, so that visions of the yet-to-come are always also returns to the practices, epistemologies, and dreams of those whose worlds were expropriated or destroyed. They suggest an ecological consciousness that understands the present annihilation of biodiverse ecosystems as continuous with histories of colonization, enslavement, and genocide. Positioning the speculative practice of worldbuilding as a poetic act of repairing present and future ecologies in the wake of imperial violence, this series will feature artists, writers, and scholars who think beyond “green futures'' to imagine a world transformed by decolonization and de-growth, a world that cultivates structures of care and kinship beyond the figure of the human.

Kareem Estefan is a writer, editor, art critic, teacher, Darat al Funun fellow, and PhD candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University,  researching the poetics of witnessing and worldbuilding in Palestinian visual culture. His essays and reviews have been published in a number of art magazines and cultural journals, and he is co-editor, with Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017).

Talks
Arab Science Fiction and World-Making from the Center - Nadya Sbaiti
Beyond the World’s End - T. J. Demos
Stories and Seeds as Vessels for Transformation - Vivien Sansour
Reappropriating This World to Build a New One - Haitham Ennasr
Iraq and the Genesis of “Contemporary Art from the Middle East” - Rijin Sahakian