ABSTRACT
Overnight, public and communal installations of children's shoes appeared on the steps of governmental buildings and art galleries across the country. Critical inquiry into climate change and its impacts have taken off as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary endeavors with activists, artists, and academics scrambling to make sense of what it means to be "living on a damaged planet" (Tsing et al., eds, 2017). Constituting what Chela Sandoval (2000) refers to as a "methodology of the oppressed," "a set of processes, procedures, and technologies for decolonizing the imagination" (68), the cultural forms included in this issue respond to the ways impending global impacts of climate change often lead to universalizing assumptions that promote colonialist power hierarchies and exacerbate, not eradicate, racial inequalities. Whether it is Betsy Huang's (2010) argument that Asian Americans can "retool" the genre, "providing different narratives lenses for revising generic imperatives and epistemologies" (102);Grace Dillon's (2012) observation that "Native slipstream thinking, which has been around for millennia, anticipated recent cutting-edge physics" (4);or Jayna Brown's (2021) assertion that "unburdened by investments in belonging to a system created to exclude [Black people] in the first place, we develop marvelous modes of being in and perceiving the universe" (7), there is a deep tradition of Indigenous scholars and scholars of color who understand how speculative fiction can illuminate the time and place of those who exist out of sync with settler temporality.