I am happy to announce that a new publication just dropped: “Circling Asianfuturisms: Edmond Y. Chang and Larissa Lai in Conversation” in the Spring 2026 issue of Configurations (Vol. 34, No. 2). I had the pleasure of working with Chinese Canadian author and scholar Larissa Lai, whose work (like The Tiger Flu and Salt Fish Girl) has been a big influence on my teaching and research. Here’s the conversation essay’s abstract:
This interview essay between Larissa Lai and Edmond Y. Chang is based on the closing seminar presented online as part of the 2022–23 María Zambrano Fellowship Online Public Lecture Series entitled “Insurgencies: Speculative Fiction, Cultural Organizing, and Utopian Thought” for the University of Huelva in Spain. In the essay, Lai and Chang discuss the critical and political possibilities of speculative literature and media, in particular from BIPOC and LGBTQ artists and writers, and frame out working definitions of Asianfuturism, which reimagines and “re-valences the racist modes of techno-Orientalism or short-circuits them to find other routes to the future in which [Asian identities and bodies] have presence, agency and perhaps even humanity.”
While I am still trying to make “Asianfuturism” happen, I appreciate that there are folks that are willing to talk to and indulge me in these questions, formulations, possibilities, and worlds. I hope folks get something out of the essay, and I hope people go read Lai’s novels!