This panel explores how religious symbols, rituals, and stories influence and challenge visions of the future across different contexts and traditions. Using case studies from diverse religions, the papers examine how religious language and imagery shape futures. The first paper investigates Hikaru Okuizumi’s The Night to Kill a Snake(1992), suggesting that its use of religious snake imagery—from Shinto myth to Genesis—disrupts narrative flow and highlights the fragility of religious futures. The second paper examines Vaiṣṇava Purāṇic cosmology, connecting cyclical time and avatāras to contemporary Hindu discussions of climate change and apocalyptic visions. The third paper reimagines life-affirming futures that are more expansive and inclusive of all peoples. The final paper closely examines Garry Kilworth’s sci-fi novel The Night of Kadar (1978) and discusses Islam at the center of future possibilities. The papers highlight how the future is represented, embodied, and practiced. Overall, the papers present imagined religious futures.
This paper examines how Hikaru Okuizumi’s novella The Night to Kill a Snake (1992) destabilizes religiously mediated futures—often sustained by cohesive narrative structures—by proliferating religious imagery to the point where narrativity itself collapses. Through free association, the text disperses snake metaphors drawn from Shinto myth, Genesis, Greek legend, and Japanese imperial symbolism without allowing them to converge into symbolic resolution. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of modern literature as repetitive language without securing memory, this paper argues that the novella’s proliferating religious imagery exposes the fragility underlying both religious futurity and interpretive desire. As images multiply, the protagonist’s imagined future unravels, and the reader’s interpretive expectations are similarly frustrated. Literary art here neither redeems nor resolves; instead, it reveals futurity as radically open, suspended within the unsettling repetition of religious language itself.
This paper studies visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination and discourses on climate change in Hindu theistic traditions as revealed in the Vaishnava Puranas (4-18 c.CE). Hindu imagination sees time as cyclic, and not linear, and understands the cyclic creation and dissolution of the universe as a repetitive and normal process that is good, desired and necessary. In the Vaishnava tradition, Vishnu and his avataras, or bodily descents, in which he incarnates in various anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic forms, comes down to earth in order to save humankind from natural calamities and disasters, such as floods, draughts, etc. Similarly, the proliferation of contemporary discourses on the future, climate change, are often immersed in Hindu mythology and religious culture, and cannot be ignored when discussing the issues of apocalyptic imagination and climate change in Hindu traditions. Thus, my talk seeks to explore the complex links between visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination, the mythologizing of the divine, and the mythologizing of contemporary cultural and religious discourses on climate change.
In reimagining life-giving futures that are more expansive and inclusive of all peoples, Christian theology must be a part of the creative conversation given the ways that it has been co-opted by political powers to assert domination and control. As a result, Christian theology must intentionally re-center marginalized communities and re-imagine more life-giving and expansive futures through theopoetics.
Through a close reading of Garry Kilworth's sci-fi novel The Night of Kadar (1978) as a map key to the challenges that will attend any Islamofuturist project, I argue for a distinction between Islamicate science fiction (as a mere projection of Islam into the future) and Islamofuturism (the placing of Islam at the center of future possibility). Insofar as science fiction is a literature of change—one in which "the limit" is the main problematic—then the very possibility of Islamofuturism relies on the negotiation of Islam's historical and normative limits, on the one hand, and the imaginative limits of the orientalist and secularist conventions of sci-fi, on the other.
I conclude that any viable Islamofuturism must confront four interrelated challenges: that of form, affect, technics, and home. In response, I propose four key concepts that might act as orienting coordinates for the aspiring Islamofuturist today: farq, adab, tafsir, and hijra.