Outlook 30th Anniversary Issue: Imagined Spaces As Resistance, Rememberance

Writing today reveals home and the nation as fractured, exclusionary, and unstable, shaped by displacement, violence, and inequality rather than belonging or shelter.

In times of coercion and silencing, imagined spaces function as counter-spaces where suppressed histories surface, ethical questions are asked, and alternative futures remain thinkable.

We are living through a moment in history when real places have become increasingly difficult to speak about. Nations are reduced to charged and violent slogans; borders harden even as people are displaced; homes are reduced to rubble while the occupation continues. Speech is abundant, yet censorship renders any meaningful speech impossible.

In such a climate, imaginary places are not escapes from the world. They are responses to it.

Every imagined space carries its politics. A fictional city, a remembered village, a mythic land, or a speculative future is built in response to power—its violence, its exclusions, its erasures.  What cannot be said directly appears in writing. A dystopia may seem fantastical, yet feel uncannily familiar—less a prophecy than a recognition.

Historically, imagined places have shadowed moments of coercion and transition. Malgudi and Macondo were not created to flee reality, but to expose its fault lines. The imagined nation often tells us more about citizenship, obedience, and belonging than official maps ever can. Such spaces allow writers to ask questions that cannot always be posed openly: Who belongs? Who is excluded? What is remembered, and what is deliberately forgotten?

When the state insists on uniformity—of language, identity, belief, and history—fiction proliferates in difference. As the language of public life grows coercive and censored, writers turn inward and outward at once: toward memory, metaphor, and invention, to recover meaning. Imagination becomes a method of thinking when direct speech is constrained.

Home, across these pages, appears not as a stable shelter but as a contested site. Occupation, war, genocide, development, migration, climate catastrophe, and inequality have rendered home provisional, fractured, or lost altogether. To imagine home today is already a political act: it asks who is permitted to belong, who is declared seditious, and whose memories and dreams are deemed a threat. The nation itself begins to resemble an imaginary place—invoked endlessly by the majority, yet inaccessible to many who live on its margins. To write home today is often to write displacement; to write the nation is to confront its fractures.

For the 30th anniversary issue of Outlook, we bring together writers who treat imagined spaces as acts of resistance, remembrance, and ethical refusal. Their work does not evade the present but confronts it obliquely and creatively. These pages hold cities that remember what has been erased, landscapes shaped by memory and desire, and futures that warn as much as they dream. These are not utopias offered as solutions, nor fantasies designed for comfort. They are counter-spaces—where suppressed histories return, silenced questions are asked, and alternative ways of being are rehearsed.

At a time when conversation becomes dangerous and dissent is penalised, writers return to the pen not out of nostalgia but necessity. Imagined places become shelters for thought itself. To enter them is not to leave the world behind, but to see it more clearly—and to insist that other worlds, though unfinished, remain possible.