When the global financial system spiralled into a crisis in 2008, it seemed to take the world with it. In the wake of this economic and political disaster, it became commonplace to insist that finance capital and its ideological companion neoliberalism had conscripted every aspect of human life into its homogenizing, quantifying objectives. This was not just a variation on what Randy Martin had much earlier called “the financialization of daily life,” a term that sought to describe the ways in which US citizens were asked to think of themselves as financial subjects. Rather, the text that exemplifies the cultural affliction of the post-2008 global North is undoubtedly Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009). In Fisher's hands, the edict “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (often attributed to Frederic Jameson) morphed into an inescapable and oppressive critical mantra. What, after all, was the work of the literary scholar if all forms of cultural production were already aligned with capitalist ideology or would soon be subsumed by it? If the outcome of both cultural production and cultural criticism was already known, then what is the motivation behind producing either?

For Aimee Bahng, whose first monograph Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times rejects these inevitabilities outright, capitalism does not have an uncontested claim on the future. Yes, she admits, the outlook is bleak if we accept “the financial colonization of the future” (11). But if literary critics were to shift their perspective towards the work of “cultural producers from the global financial undercommons” (8), then they would, like Bahng, encounter fictions that speculate differently. To arrive at this conclusion Bahng constructs a vast but by no means exhaustive counterarchive of speculation that includes Alex Rivera's independent film Sleep Dealer (2008), Nalo Hopkinson's speculative fiction Midnight Robber (2002), and Sonny Liew's graphic narrative Malinki Robot (2011). In putting these texts in conversation with examples of historic and ongoing forms of US colonial speculation, Bahng reveals both a web of financial extraction and the points at which errant migrant activity interacts with efforts at capturing the future.

This method is deployed with admirable dexterity in Bahng's retelling of Henry Ford's attempts to build a Ford plant in the Amazon rainforest. Alongside Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), US efforts to assess the potential for industrial expansion and natural-resource extraction in Brazil are clearly recognizable as speculative fictions. How else could one explain the bizarre insistence that all clocks in Fordlandia be set to Detroit time? The overlaps between speculative fiction and speculative policy are even more pronounced in the second chapter on Yamashita's more widely read Tropic of Orange (1997). Here, Bahng begins her discussion of migrant labour, border crossing, and the preemption of national security threats with an anecdote about the Science Fiction in the National Interest group. SIGMA – as the collective of US science fiction writers would come to be known – were invited to a national-security conference in 2007 as an addition to conversations about “border futurities” (52). Unlike the members of SIGMA, Yamashita's Tropic refuses to endorse fictions of frictionless economic activity at the US–Mexico border. That text's speculative acts are wholly committed to acknowledging the work of a migrant labour force in constructing the US nation-state. The overall effect of Bahng's focus on peripheralized speculative fictions is one of profound realignment. Migrant Futures refuses the financial exceptionalism of the United States and, as the white, male subject of settler colonial financial fantasies fade into the background, other geographies and figures come into focus.

Bahng is committed to broadening what we have come to associate with speculation but such a task also inevitably explodes other boundaries of genre, discipline, and politics. Though Migrant Futures consistently engages with work in critical finance studies – and, like recent work by Annie McClanahan and Iyko Day, emphasizes the racial components of financialization – Bahng's work is as much in conversation with critical ethnic studies, science fiction studies, and queer studies. The most explicit reference to queer studies is located in the final chapter of Migrant Futures, though the field's influence is felt throughout. In her reading of Larissa Lai's queer speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl (2002), Bahng astutely connects the themes of “genetic drag” and “temporal drag” to parse out the text's “antipositivist speculations that unsettle the financialized future” (149). This remarkable final chapter is noteworthy both for its generative engagement with its primary source and for its optimistic tone. Rarely does an academic monograph leave its readers feeling buoyant, but Migrant Futures succeeds at doing just that. Bahng's stellar book demonstrates that doomsday prophecies about capitalism's all-encompassing power come to their pessimistic conclusions by way of an atrophied cultural canon. Literary scholars looking for alternatives might do best to recognize that speculating differently is the remit of the margins.