The sentimental nightmare : the discourse of the scientific and the aesthetic in Rokeya S. Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream”

This article examines Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s speculative science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream” in the context of science fiction writing in 19th- and 20th-century Bengal. It analyses the story’s intersection with a range of discourses and the way this creates a distinctive text. The story is discussed in terms of the key discursive formations that Hossain contends with: that of the “women’s question” (with an emphasis on the Muslim woman’s question); the nature of the violence that produces a male-dominated state; and the possibility of a scientific–aesthetic intervention capable of countering such male violence. The article argues that Hossain’s speculative science fiction, by portraying the liberatory potential of a transformed scientific state apparatus, produces a model of a feminist Utopia which is not grounded simply in gender, but also in the possibility of a state based on a rational aesthetic.