Migrant Futures

"Elegantly written and meticulously researched, Migrant Futures breaks new ground in taking a comparative ethnic approach to Asian American literature and culture through the genre of speculative fiction. Scholars interested in critical ethnic studies, Marxist approaches to literary studies and gender and queer theory will be educated and persuaded by Aimee Bahng's compelling theorization of how speculation and economic extraction have traditionally gone hand in hand." - Rachel C. Lee, author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

"Presenting readers with alternative visions of the future, Aimee Bahng's ambitious book turns attention to the dominant way in which we think of futurity: financial speculation. Against the ways the functioning of derivative markets depend upon a particular kind of storytelling about the future, which is often bet against, Bahng amasses an archive of fictional works that seeks to counter such storytelling by imagining and sharing a different version of the future. A stellar and important work." - Min Hyoung Song, author of The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American

"Compelling and unique . . . Aimee Bahng's skillfully made point: that the emerging field of critical finance studies, paired with feminist science studies, can help to reconfigure not only literary criticism but also Americanist, anti-/decolonial scholarship, queer theory, and science fiction studies. Migrant Futures truly sits at the edges of disciplines and casts its illuminating light over all of them." - Sean Guynes, ASAP/Journal

"In her readings of various Asian and Asian American texts and experiences, Aimee Bahng makes a significant intervention into Asian futurism. Instead of struggling to identify a specific Asianness in futurity, Bahng’s work attempts to connect Asian futurism with other neocolonial, postcolonial, and imperial experiences." - Eunice Sang Eun Lee, Situations

"The ideas in Migrant Futures are big, novel, and fantastic. But more than that, the structure itself is an act of academic decolonization and speculation." - Joshua Earle, Catalyst

"Illuminating. . . . Aimee Bahng’s ambitious book contributes to the nascent but growing field of critical finance studies, as well as to the more established tradition of scholarship on racial capitalism." - Gabriella Friedman, American Quarterly

"Rarely does an academic monograph leave its readers feeling buoyant, but Migrant Futures succeeds at doing just that. Bahng’s stellar book demonstrates that doomsday prophecies about capitalism’s all-encompassing power come to their pessimistic conclusions by way of an atrophied cultural canon." - Christine Okoth, Journal of American Studies

"Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures offers a bold intervention into the future: both in the sense that it charts new ground for speculative thinking about the landscape of futurity as well as its stunning capacity to reshape the future of Asian American and ethnic studies." - Keva X. Bui, Journal of Asian American Studies

"Bahng analyses the ways in which real-world economic practices, fictional texts, media coverage of recent events, and deeper, often forgotten histories (as well as the remembered histories that obscure them) are imbued with speculation; they all construe some pasts, and promote some futures (while suppressing others), so as to fantasize the present as the past cause of particular futures-to-come. Her focus on the global undercommons . . . could not be more timely." - Mark Bould, Extrapolation