Sensational Futures

The racialization of Asian peoples, as both “model minorities” and “the yellow peril,” has been instrumental to envisioning futures that reproduce racial capitalism as well as social and material inequities. In Sensational Futures, Frances Tran takes up this problem of Asian futurity to explore other possible modes of conceptualizing the future. Engaging an eclectic archive of transnational Asian and multiethnic literature, film, and public art, she demonstrates how the speculative multisensory worlds these texts animate recreate futures that have been discarded and delegitimized because they do not conform to liberal humanist and racial capitalist scripts of progress. She reaches beyond the spectacular visualization of Asian futurity captured in contemporary discourses of rising Asia and the Asian Century for practices that can sense futures otherwise. By bringing this temporal and sensory awareness to bear on debates over the future as problems of research, education, sustainability, and mourning, Tran attends to how a sensory, embodied aesthetics can attune us to alternative ways of conceiving and orienting ourselves toward the future.