Cap-Lit, Cli-Fi, and Vi-Fi by Diasporic Women Writers

This event examines how diasporic millennial women writers Ling Ma, Saleema Nawaz, and Oana Aristide advance feminist and anti-capitalist critiques through speculative pandemic fiction. The paper’s first half analyses Ling Ma’s Severance, a prescient cap-lit (anti-capitalism literature) narrative that critiques racial capitalism through the story of Candace Chen, a Chinese American worker steering her way through corporate greed during a devastating pandemic. By exploring the intersections of labour exploitation, global supply chains, and neocolonial practices, Severance contributes to debates on systemic inequities exacerbated by crises. An interlude on Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World highlights corporate opportunism during disasters, drawing eerie parallels to real-world responses to Covid-19.

The lecture’s second half explores Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue, a haunting cli-fi (climate change) and vi-fi (virus fiction) narrative where environmental collapse and a universally lethal virus reshape the globe. Through vivid depictions of human vulnerability and resilience, Aristide addresses themes of displacement, survival, and ecological reckoning. A second interlude revisits Songs for the End of the World, interrogating climate grief and the ethical dilemmas around women’s reproductive rights in apocalyptic times.

By synthesizing cap-lit, cli-fi, and vi-fi, this paper aims to show how feminist speculative fiction critiques extractive capitalism and ecological neglect while reimagining solidarities in the face of planetary crises.

Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, ​where she teaches literature from South Asia, the Perso-Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of ​several books, including ​​​Britain Through Muslim Eyes (2015), ​​​​Rivers of Ink​: Selected Essays​ (2017)​, and ​​​Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (2019). She edited Dastarkhwan: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (2021), co-edited ​​A Match Made in Heaven (2020), and co-authored Storying Relationships (2021)​​. Claire was Editor-in-Chief for a decade of the ​​Journal of Commonwealth Literature​, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her upcoming book is Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Pathogenic Novels (Liverpool University Press, spring 2026).