Abstract:
This article examines the intersection of disruption, disability, and ‘post-’ concepts in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 protests. Sparked by opposition to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance amendment, these protests escalated into a broader resistance movement against the erosion of civil liberties, which was eventually suppressed by the National Security Law, a lasting disruption to Hong Kong’s sociopolitical landscape. The article investigates how disability metaphors have been co-opted to uphold enforced optimism for Hong Kong’s neoliberal developmentalism under this new regime. A curative logic that positions health and stability as prerequisites for progress is used to justify the NSL, producing a ‘post-disruption’ identity marked by compulsory able-bodiedness and conformity to state norms. Turning to the surrealist short stories of Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu, the article explores how narratives of disabled lives critique and disrupt the affective politics of neoliberalism. Interpreted through the lens of crip critique, these stories expose the violent disruptions that challenge the neoliberal promise of progress. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism,’ the article argues that post-2019 optimism not only disrupts the lives it seeks to improve but also creates a fractured identity landscape where stability is illusory. This analysis deepens understanding of the ongoing effects of the 2019–2020 protests on Hong Kong’s identity and futurity.

Abstract:
This article addresses the affective pull of the idea or fantasy of the better life that is seemingly promised by neoliberalism. Chan Koonchung's speculative novel The Fat Years (Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 nian), now available in at least thirteen languages worldwide, is one of the most widely circulated literary works by a Hong Kong writer to date. Despite its global success, Chan's novel has been criticized for its Sinophobic and antiestablishment disposition. While some might frown on the perceived Sinophobic discourse in The Fat Years, this article argues for careful consideration of the novel as a complex exploration of the state's manipulations of happiness as a tool of political control, addressing the broader implications of such affective techniques in post-2019 Hong Kong. Although Chan's novel predates Hong Kong's 2019 National Security Law, I frame my analysis within the context of post-2019 Hong Kong to highlight how these new laws are part of a broader continuum of imperialist practices China has long used to exert control. Additionally, I argue that the novel functions as a “small story” — a conscious act of deconstruction or delegitimization of a hegemonic and monolithic image of the Chinese future, especially as it serves as a horizon of potentiality, a not-yet-here. Despite its apparent limitations, I argue that Chan's dystopia can be understood as an aid in affectively reaching beyond the boundaries and quagmire of the stultifying, deadening, capitalist present.

Abstract:
This paper analyzes Yun Ko-eun’s eco-thriller The Disaster Tourist (2020) as a critique of disaster tourism and its intersection with thana-capitalism, a system that exploits death and suffering for economic gain. The novel follows Yona Kim, an employee of Jungle, a travel agency that curates disaster tours, as she is thrust into an ethically corrupt scheme to manufacture a disaster for profit. Set in the fictional Mui, a remote island devastated by environmental collapse and conflict, the narrative explores the moral and social implications of turning tragedy into entertainment. The paper discusses how Yun’s use of metaphors and symbolism in the novel illustrates the socio-environmental injustices perpetuated by the normalization of disaster tourism, where human life is subordinated to economic calculation. The planned sacrifice of local residents to revitalize Mui’s appeal as a tourist destination is framed as a necessary sacrifice for economic survival, exemplifying how death and destruction are commodified within neoliberal, neocolonial capitalism. The paper argues that The Disaster Tourist functions as a counternarrative that exposes the ethical implications of disaster tourism while challenging the normalization of violence and exploitation inherent in thana-capitalism. Through its darkly satirical and haunting portrayal of this system, the novel serves as a powerful critique of contemporary capitalist practices and their socio-environmental consequences.

Abstract: In Priya Sarukkai Chabria's science-fiction novel Clone(2019), the central character Clone 14/54/G is a cyborg replica of her Original, named Aa-Aa, an incarcerated dissident writer who met a violent death just before delivering a potentially incendiary public address. Against her programming, the mutant Clone experiences flashbacks (or "visitations") of her Original's past life and fictional oeuvre, which makes it possible for her to revisit disparate temporalities of Indian history. While many existing interventions attempt to extend or apply the familiar conventions of postcolonial analysis to works of postcolonial science fiction, this essay sets out to ask rather how the emergence of the latter serves to both reconfigure and reclaim the affective stakes of an anti-imperialist politics that avoids a straightforward historical determinism. By reading Chabria's sf novel through affective articulations of spectrality and queer temporality, I present the novel as a form of narrative crypt that provides a phantasmal space for the spectral return of those who have been silenced or erased from history, not only as a consequence of their gender, race, and class, but also because of their inability or refusal to comply with the normative temporal rhythms of the society in which they live.

Abstract:
​​During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future.

Abstract:
This article recognizes the theoretical possibilities of Nnedi Okorafor’s eco-conscious tale, Lagoon, and sets out to explore the “pluriverse”—the agglomeration of worlds, human and non-human—in the novel through an agential realist perspective. Throughout this article, I draw on the notions of agential realism and intra-action as outlined in Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation and diffractive strategy, as well as Stacy Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality, to investigate how the novel articulates the coexistence and imbrication of human and nonhuman lives, thus evoking a complex view of Africa’s environments and helping us rethink questions of agency and resistance.