Introduction to Narratives of Crisis and Futurity

This chapter develops the argument that South Asian literature occupies a vital position within contemporary global debates on crisis and futurity. Then, it introduces Narratives of Crisis and Futurity by offering an overview of its constituting four parts. Part I, “Ecologies of Crisis: Climate, Disaster, and Healing,” examines how South Asian writing narrates ecological devastation, extraction, and climate displacement while foregrounding memory, trauma, and ethical survival. Part II, “Speculative Futures: Posthumanism, Technology, and Crisis,” turns toward speculative and dystopian narratives that interrogate technocapitalism, caste, artificial intelligence, and planetary collapse. Part III, “Urban and Artistic Reworldings: City, Art, and Imagination as Resistance,” centers aesthetic and spatial practices that respond to crisis through care, memory, and reconstruction. Part IV, “Power, Surveillance, and Feminist Reclamations,” addresses crises that emerge through gendered violence, political surveillance, epistemic domination, and constrained mobility.