{"id":1829,"date":"2021-11-01T18:48:16","date_gmt":"2021-11-02T00:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/?page_id=1829"},"modified":"2021-11-01T18:57:12","modified_gmt":"2021-11-02T00:57:12","slug":"jfa-31-2-2020","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/jfa-31-2-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"JFA 31.2 (2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Introduction: Expanding the Archive<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Emily Midkiff and Sara Austin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) won a Hugo award. This repository of nearly five million original works, representing over thirty thousand fandoms, stands out in the world of science fiction and fantasy awards not only because of the sheer number of authors it represents but also because it is the first Hugo win for unpublished fanfiction, and many of the authors are young women. This victory draws attention to what is \u201carchived\u201d and, by extension, what is valued.

Materials gain different cultural capital when archived and studied. In \u201cThe Child, the Scholar, and the Children’s Literature Archive,\u201d Kenneth Kidd addresses this in the context of children\u2019s literature archives: \u201cBy preserving children\u2019s materials, and conferring upon them special (primarily historical but also affective) value, the archive asserts the research value of children\u2019s literature within the broader culture of academic and university research\u201d (9). A very similar thing could be said of science fiction and fantasy archives, where the mere act of archiving claims value for the genre and its objects but also makes claims about what is valuable within the genre.

The often-contested canon of speculative fiction demonstrates the importance of asking what is worthy enough to be collected. Recently, there has been more pushback about what is central, and to whom. The documentary film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror<\/em>, produced by Tananarive Due and directed by Xavier Burgin, begins with the assertion that \u201cblack history is black horror\u201d and Dr. Ebony Thomas\u2019s The Dark Fantastic<\/em> considers the simultaneously central and marginalized Black female characters in recent books and film. Each of these examples makes a case for expanding the idea of the canon (and what we value enough to archive) to include more voices.

Curators of archives, whether in libraries, classrooms, scholarly work, or even fandom collections, must address how curated materials and their cultural context represent choices that speak to the curator\u2019s and the consumer\u2019s values and priorities. When archives hold the power to exclude and include, to value and affirm both people and genre, then how do we as scholars decide what belongs and how do we think through the consequences of those choices for ourselves, our students, and our field? The articles in this issue begin to answer that question by engaging with a variety or archival methods and technologies.

Our issue opens with two articles arguing for which types of speculative fiction should and can be archived. First, librarian Sandy Enriquez and archivist Andrew Lippert consider the marginalization of queer fan fiction in archives in \u201cFandom and Sexuality in the Archives: Collecting Slash Fan Fiction and Yaoi<\/em>\/Boys\u2019 Love Manga.\u201d While slash fiction as the subject of scholarly research is not new, collections like theirs at the University of California, Riverside remain limited. Enriquez and Lippert include an overview of archival theory and critical archival studies, a useful opening for this issue, and discuss the difficulties of collecting this \u201ctaboo\u201d material.

Next, Nicholas Clark discusses how speculative fiction dinosaur texts must balance fact with fiction if they are expected to function as an archive of popular scientific communication in \u201cThe Mosasaurus\u2019s Tongue: Narrative, Fiction, and Scientific Speculation in Raptor Red<\/em>.\u201d Clark investigates the space between theory and speculation in Robert Bakker\u2019s novel and argues that it offers an effective example of how dinosaur fiction can communicate new scientific concepts to readers, but only if fiction and fact are clear.

The second part of this issue deals with questions of cultural archives and archival bodies. In \u201cToward Korean American Ethnoformalisms: The Historian-Archivist and Speculative Gendered Empowerments in Minsoo Kang\u2019s Of Tales and Enigmas<\/em>,\u201d Stephen Hong Sohn engages in the archival recovery of Kang\u2019s work as an example of Korean American speculative fiction. Sohn argues that Kang\u2019s historian-archivist character connects his seemingly disparate short stories by repeatedly discovering and recording tales of women who are empowered by speculative abilities and refute the centrality of men in times of war and violence.

Then, in \u201cThe Colonization of Bodies and Cyclical Nature of Othering in Nnedi Okorafor\u2019s \u2018The Popular Mechanic,\u2019\u201d Mary Laffidy analyzes the framework of postcolonial science fiction in Okorafor\u2019s short story and how it highlights the ways in which biomedical experimentation collects an archive of often-unconsenting human samples. Laffidy focuses on the figure of Papa as an example of petro masculinity situated within a futuristic Nigeria to discuss how oil companies devalue nature, culture, and the human body. She concludes that the story reminds readers of colonialism\u2019s \u201chistorical existence and cyclical nature to prove how the systems of the present determine the violence of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To close the issue, Kaylee Jangula Mootz\u2019s \u201cThe Body and the Archive in Louise Erdrich\u2019s Future Home of the Living God<\/em>\u201d shows how Native bodies challenge our definitions of the archive to include the data and memories of a people, as demonstrated by Erdrich\u2019s story. Jangula Mootz situates her reading within the growing climate crisis, arguing that reading the body as a living archive is necessary for humanity\u2019s survival.

Archives hold our collective cultural memory. They can serve as tools for scholarly recovery and reconciliation, but only if we allow and encourage them to do so. The articles in this issue suggest sites where our current ideas and expectations for the archive might open and expand, increasing access to new forms of knowledge and valuing the works of multiple communities and types of scholarship. Presented together, these voices blend into a compelling argument for expanding the archives of speculative fiction in both form and content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Articles<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Introduction: Expanding the Archive
Emily Midkiff and Sara Austin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fandom and Sexuality in the Archives: Collecting Slash
Fan Fiction and Yaoi<\/em>\/Boys\u2019 Love Manga
Sandy Enriquez and Andrew Lippert<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mosasaurus\u2019s Tongue: Narrative, Fiction, and
Scientific Speculation in Raptor Red <\/em>
Nicholas Clark
<\/em>
Toward Korean American Ethnoformalisms: The Historian
Archivist and Speculative Gendered Empowerments in
Minsoo Kang\u2019s Of Tales and Enigmas <\/em>
Stephen Hong Sohn
<\/em>
The Colonization of Bodies and Cyclical Nature of Othering
in Nnedi Okorafor\u2019s \u201cThe Popular Mechanic\u201d
Mary Laffidy
<\/em>
The Body and the Archive in Louise Erdrich\u2019s Future Home
of the Living God <\/em>
Kaylee Jangula Mootz<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviews<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Carys Crossen\u2019s The Nature of the Beast: Transformations of
the Werewolf from the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century
Rev. by Antonio Alcala Gonzalez<\/em>

Catherine Belsey\u2019s Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories
in Cultural History
Rev. by Amanda Dillon<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laurence Talairach\u2019s Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror, and
Anatomical Culture
Rev. by Jeanette A. Laredo<\/em>

Sarah Cole\u2019s Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the
Twentieth Century
Rev. by Rob Latham
<\/em>
John M. Bower\u2019s Tolkien\u2019s Lost Chaucer
Rev. by T. S. Miller<\/em>

Juliette Wood\u2019s Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore:
From Medieval Times to the Present Day
Rev. by Indu Ohri<\/em>

Jennifer Schacker\u2019s Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children\u2019s
Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime
Rev. by Don Riggs<\/em>

Natalie Wilson\u2019s Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in
21st Century Horror
Rev. by Carol Senf
<\/em>
Omar Ahmed\u2019s RoboCop
Rev. by Matthew Sorrento
<\/em>
Jerry Rafiki Jenkins\u2019s The Paradox of Blackness in
African American Vampire Fiction
Rev. by Jonathan W. Thurston<\/em>

Tim Lanzend\u00f6rfer\u2019s Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in
Contemporary Literature
Rev. by Jonathan W. Thurston
<\/em>
Simon Brown\u2019s Creepshow<\/em> AND Joshua Grimm\u2019s It Follows
Rev. by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.<\/em>

Karl Bell\u2019s Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety,
and Spectrality
Rev. by Lindsey Carman Williams<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darren Arnold\u2019s The Devils<\/em> AND Lindsay Hallam\u2019s Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk with Me
Rev. by Madison Mae Williams
<\/em>
Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel\u2019s Sideways in Time:
Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction
Rev. by Paul Williams<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction: Expanding the Archive Emily Midkiff and Sara Austin In 2019, the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) won a Hugo award. This repository of nearly five million original works, representing over thirty thousand fandoms, stands out in the world of science fiction and fantasy awards not only because of the sheer number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1829","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1829"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1862,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1829\/revisions\/1862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}