Kavita Philip

History and Speculation, Past and Future, are not as separate as they once were in our disciplinary imaginations. Science fiction has emerged as one of many new speculative frequencies in today's scholarly spectrum. Visual representation is an older mode that brings thought and feeling, analytics and prediction together. It pre-dates both historical and fictional narrative forms. Shaped by long histories of artistic and critical conversations, images today are being used in ways that extend and complicate our interdisciplinary scholarly methods. Here, they are put to work in order to pose different questions and suggest alternative analyses of the histories and futures of Asia's changing landscapes.

A conversation between philosopher of digital cultures Anna Greenspan and historian of China Jeffrey Wasserstrom, speculative-fiction writer Anil Menon, and historian of science Kavita Philip, exploring the emerging work from scholars who have grown up with the global influence of science fiction in popular culture while being trained in the disciplinary spaces between science, engineering, social science, law and the humanities. The following questions are addressed: what are the prehistories of science fiction and the futures of such interdisciplinary work? How do India and China, as places where important new science fiction is being written, and as nations exploding now into emerging markets characterized by technological dynamism, fit into older historiographic frames that saw the European Enlightenment as the source of modern science, and the ‘developing world’ as destined only to ever play catch-up? How should the politics of digital futures and non-European pasts figure in historical research and in fiction writing, keeping in mind the historian's fear of presentism and anachronism, and the fiction writer's dislike of political moralism?

When, in 1947, India became independent, its archetypal citizen-subject was the farmer; 60 years later it was the software engineer. Increasingly central, rather than marginal, in global economic networks, India’s popular image at the beginning of the twenty-first century is of a postcolonial nation that has successfully used technology to leapfrog over its historical legacy of underdevelopment. This shift in ideal citizen archetypes, from farmer to digital entrepreneur, has brought with it new assumptions about the role of information technology in shaping citizenly behaviour and nationalist subjectivity. This paper reads the contradictory aesthetics of this arrival by interrogating popular technological tropes.

The authors suggest that postcolonial science studies can do more than expand answers to questions already posed; it can generate different questions and different ways of looking at the world. To illustrate, the authors draw on existing histories and anthropologies and critical theories of colonial and postcolonial technoscience. To move forward together, rather than remaining mired in regretful contemplation of past biases, the authors offer some analytical and practical suggestions. In reading hegemonic forms of postcolonial computing, this article offers tactics for rereading, rewriting, or reimagining those scripts.