Dr. Patrick Anthony Barbosa Brock
CoFutures
What do we do when we talk about Zoefuturism? This essay argues that Zoefuturism and CoFuturisms are not merely aesthetic or speculative categories, but infrastructural practices of collective world-making. I propose a framework for understanding how these movements intervene in social imaginaries through genre formation, manifestos, and boundary-making practices, while also examining their material implications for the communities and infrastructures from which they emerge. To that end, I draw on my previous theorization of the role genre mechanics play in the formation of collectivities.
Although they are envisioned here as operationally connected, speculative fiction, CoFuturisms, and Zoefuturism should not be treated as interchangeable categories. Speculative fiction is a broad narrative mode oriented toward hypothetical worlds, alternative temporalities, and estrangement from consensus reality. CoFuturisms, by contrast, designate culturally situated interventions that mobilize speculative methods to contest dominant imaginaries and produce alternative social horizons. Zoefuturism differs from both in that its central organizing principle is relationality itself: an ontological emphasis on “interconnected becoming” across human, nonhuman, ecological, and material forms of life. Where speculative fiction often asks what futures might exist, and CoFuturisms ask who gets to imagine and inhabit those futures, Zoefuturism asks how forms of life become entangled in the production of futurity.
CoFuturisms as a conceptual umbrella emerged with the publication of the Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms and its survey of speculative works from the world’s periphery, many of which blur the boundaries between art and activism. Like the imaginaries from which they emerge, CoFuturisms are collective constructions shaped by forces operating at both macro and micro levels. As digital media theorist, poet, and software designer Jason Edward Lewis writes, they “create a field of ‘future facts,’ a fully realized reality that exists somewhere down the timeline, waiting for us to catch up to it” (11). More broadly, CoFuturisms often emerge through science fiction (SF) and speculative practices, commonly appropriating their methods, to critique dominant imaginaries and intervene micropolitically in the present. As science fiction scholar Taryne Jade Taylor observes, “CoFuturisms is a movement that is found both within science fiction and fantasy and also reaches past the boundaries of speculative fiction” (2023).
In conversation with the editors of this special issue, I was provided with the following conceptualization of Zoefuturism: “Zoefuturism as a genre is founded upon the understanding that all things are relational—where descriptors, characteristics, or even a sense of ‘being’ depend upon everything around them—and that everything is constantly becoming, much like our DNA. As such, Zoefuturism is not political.”
I interpret Zoefuturism as an attempt to articulate a relational understanding of the world that moves beyond binary frameworks by foregrounding becoming, interdependence, and ecological entanglement. Unlike many futurisms organized around identity, technological acceleration, or emancipatory struggle, Zoefuturism situates relationality itself as the condition of futurity. Its emphasis falls less on representing marginalized futures than on rethinking the ontological assumptions through which futures are imagined in the first place. Yet Zoefuturism cannot escape political implications simply by rejecting explicit political identification. Like CoFuturisms, it shapes how reality is narratively and institutionally organized through language, cultural production, archives, and the social imaginaries that orient collective life. Its politics emerge less through ideological declaration than through interventions into the conceptual and affective infrastructures governing how relations between life forms are understood.
These interventions occur through genre itself. Genres are not merely aesthetic containers but social formations circulating among texts, communities, markets, and institutions. Because genres organize recognition, expectation, and participation, they function as technologies of collective becoming. Speculative fiction provides many of the formal tools that make such interventions narratively intelligible, while CoFuturisms mobilize those tools toward situated cultural and political projects. Zoefuturism, in turn, redirects speculative practice toward relational ontologies that destabilize distinctions between nature and culture, subject and environment, and human and nonhuman life.
Manifesting Worlds
CoFuturisms are intersectional movements that combine narrative, ethical reflection, and speculative world-building across diverse epistemological traditions. If SF is commonly described as a genre that imagines the future, CoFuturisms seek instead to reshape the present. They assemble heterogeneous archives, practices, and modes of creation into new frameworks for collective life. Unlike speculative fiction broadly conceived, CoFuturisms are defined less by narrative conventions than by situated interventions into historical asymmetries of power, visibility, and futurity.
Observing how SF practitioners in Northeast Brazil sought to intervene in the genre as an emancipatory act, and how similar processes appeared elsewhere, I termed this phenomenon genre genesis (Brock 2022). Genre genesis describes how creators reshape the symbolic foundations of a genre to construct new collectivities and modes of belonging. Writers from Brazil’s Northeast, for instance, responded to their inferiorized position within the national imagination by coining sertãopunk, a form of science fiction rooted in the region’s ecological and political realities.
Comparable acts of conceptual creation appear across multiple CoFuturist contexts. Examples include Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturism, the Afropantheology developed by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga, Scott Russel Duncan’s Xicanxfuturism, and forms of Andean Futurism developed by Peruvian SF writers. These practices do more than produce new literary categories; they reshape the infrastructures through which speculative thinking circulates and acquires legitimacy. Zoefuturism operates through similar mechanisms, though with a distinctive emphasis on relationality as both method and ontology rather than primarily identity, territory, or historical exclusion. Fundamentally, they are creations that beget further creations, becoming self-replicating or generative through the interplay of individual agency and collective effort.
Furthermore, I believe that three interconnected processes help explain how these movements function: the pedagogical qualities of SF and speculative thinking; the interventionist tradition of manifestos; the mobilizing role of genres as boundary objects.
a) The pedagogical qualities of SF and speculative thinking
Speculative thinking includes counterfactual reasoning, prefactual thinking, the processing of spatial and temporal asymmetries, and the ability to distinguish between perceived reality and hypothetical scenarios (Lun et al. 2021). These capacities help individuals and communities to imagine alternative pasts and futures, and innovative solutions to problems. Emerging research suggests that speculative behaviors may also appear in nonhuman animals, including forms of play and curiosity observed among bees and zebrafish (Galpayage Dona et al. 2022; Franks et al. 2023).
SF amplifies speculative thinking by distributing it socially through narrative and mass culture. The genre combines recognizable conventions with remarkable flexibility, enabling continual reinvention (Wolfe 2011). Darko Suvin’s concept of the novum, for instance, describes the transformative innovation that estranges readers from familiar reality while opening new perspectives on it. SF thus enables writers to explore time, history, science, and social organization through speculative scenarios that cultivate both wonder and critical reflection.
As Seo-Young Chu argues, SF does not abandon realism but intensifies it through heightened complexity (2010). Because it is highly imaginative, SF often constructs worlds capable of revealing otherwise invisible structures of reality. Increasingly, SF also shapes political discourse rather than remaining confined to escapist entertainment (Taskale 2026). This helps explain why SF aligns so naturally with CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism alike. Speculative fiction supplies the formal and cognitive conditions through which alternative worlds become imaginable. CoFuturisms appropriate those capacities to intervene in disputes over culture, identity, historical memory, and futurity. Zoefuturism mobilizes them differently: not primarily to recover excluded identities or produce counter-histories, but to foreground relational interdependence as the basis for imagining collective existence across ecological and ontological scales.
b) Manifestos
If speculative fiction provides the imaginative conditions for collective world-building, manifestos provide its declarative form. Reading the call for papers for this special issue, I was struck by how closely it resembled a manifesto: “Zoefuturism takes its name from the Greek word for life, zoe (ζωή, zoí). It is a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings.’” This statement situates Zoefuturism philosophically, identifies representative works, and proposes a framework through which they should be interpreted. It also intervenes by reorganizing a field of meaning around a new conceptual category.
Manifestos have historically functioned as instruments of political and cultural intervention. Originally associated with declarations of sovereign authority in the fifteenth century, they gradually evolved into vehicles for public participation. Earlier examples include the manifestos of the Levellers and Diggers in seventeenth-century England, which sought to establish new forms of public speech and political participation (Lamb 2022).
The manifesto form became especially influential within twentieth-century artistic movements. Although Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto carried deeply reactionary politics, its methodological influence in Latin America proved substantial (Schnapp and Rocha 1996; Sartor 2012; Aguirre et al. 2017). Writers and intellectuals appropriated the form to redefine national cultures and articulate alternative aesthetic programs. Brazilian and Peruvian modernists, for example, used manifestos to intervene directly in debates over cultural modernity (Montenegro 2017).
Manifestos therefore operate not simply as declarations but as interventions into public discourse. Entire literary works may function manifesto-like by reorganizing perception and political imagination. In the case of Zoefuturism, the intervention emerges through editorial framing itself: the decision to foreground Zoefuturism as a category for organizing a constellation of related works and ideas. Unlike many earlier futurist manifestos centered on rupture, acceleration, or technological conquest, Zoefuturism emphasizes interdependence, permeability, and becoming.
c) Boundary Objects and Genre Infrastructure
If manifestos provide interventionist declarations, genres provide the infrastructures through which those interventions circulate and become socially durable. Humans are deeply oriented toward cooperation and cumulative cultural learning. Through language, ritual, performance, and material artifacts, societies transmit vast bodies of non-genetic information across generations (Henrich and Muthukrishna 2018).
Drawing on science and technology studies, John Rieder adopts the concept of boundary objects to explain the cultural power of SF (2017). In this framework, SF encompasses not only literary texts but also the broader network of social, commercial, and institutional relations through which meanings circulate. Genres function as boundary objects because they remain flexible enough to accommodate multiple interpretations while stable enough to sustain collective participation.
My concepts of genre genesis and genre infrastructure extend this framework (Brock 2022; 2024). Genre genesis refers to the reshaping of symbolic foundations through collective cultural intervention. Genre infrastructure describes the institutional systems through which these interventions are sustained: publishing networks, reading communities, archives, digital platforms, markets, and criticism.
Creators engaged in these processes demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of what Frelik calls “boundary discourse” (2011): the socially negotiated construction of meaning through genre conventions. Genres are therefore not merely aesthetic categories but cultural and economic systems. By proposing new genre labels or redefining existing ones, creators intervene directly in the symbolic economy of literature and cultural production.
This is why CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism possess unavoidable political dimensions. Yet they do so differently. CoFuturisms tend to organize around highly situated struggles over representation, historical memory, and cultural agency. Zoefuturism instead foregrounds the relational conditions through which forms of life become mutually constituted. If CoFuturisms frequently ask who is excluded from dominant futures, Zoefuturism asks how futurity itself might be reorganized through interdependence rather than separation. Genres thus function not only as aesthetic categories but as infrastructures for negotiating different ontologies of collective existence.
Another Future, If You Can Keep It
The political significance of Zoefuturism and other CoFuturisms emerges not only from their explicit themes but from the infrastructures they construct and transform. By intervening in genres, archives, and systems of cultural circulation, these movements reshape the conditions under which futures become imaginable. Their micropolitics operate through negotiation, coalition-building, and symbolic intervention rather than singular revolutionary rupture.
Critics have argued that CoFuturisms risk absorption into the same capitalist systems they seek to challenge (Boyden 2024). Yet this tension does not invalidate their political significance. On the contrary, it reveals how struggles over futurity increasingly unfold through culture, narrative, and infrastructure. Across the political spectrum, movements are turning toward myth-making and storytelling as mechanisms for shaping public consciousness and social possibility.
CoFuturisms therefore should not be understood simply as expressions of modernity’s obsession with the future. Rather, they attempt to reconfigure that obsession by constructing alternative boundary objects through which communities negotiate meaning differently. Zoefuturism participates in this broader movement, but does so by emphasizing relational ontologies rather than primarily identity-based or civilizational alternatives. Its intervention lies in reframing futurity itself as an emergent property of entangled forms of life.
To recognize that CoFuturisms are constructing new archives is also to recognize that they intervene in the infrastructures through which ideas become realities. The movement from imagination to institutionalization unfolds unevenly across law, politics, economics, and culture. Some ideas remain marginal for decades; others become rapidly assimilated into dominant systems. Yet communities continue to act within this uncertain terrain, contesting the forces that seek to define the future on their behalf.
As anthropologist, anarchist, and social and political activist David Graeber observed, “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (2024). While the process is rarely easy, CoFuturisms and Zoefuturism emerge from this recognition that we can start changing the present through the exquisite pathways described here, starting by just talking about them.
Works cited
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Boyden, Michael. 2025. “Heterotemporality and Posthumanism in Alternative Futurisms.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 50.1 (2024): 69-87. Airiti Library. Web. 1 Aug.
Brock, Patrick A. B. 2022. “Futurism and genre genesis in Brazilian science fiction.” Zanzalá-Revista Brasileira de Estudos sobre Gêneros Cinematográficos e Audiovisuais, número 8.1: 8-18.
Brock, Patrick A. B. 2023. “Brazilian Afrofuturism, Heuristic Function, and the Mass Cultural Genre System.” SFRA Review 53.3, Summer, pp. 18-27.
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Taskale, Ali Riza. 2026. “Materialized Science Fiction: The Tech Oligarchy’s Blueprint for a New Global Order.” Global Studies Quarterly, Volume 6, Issue 1, January 2026.
Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Wesleyan University Press.
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