International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Afronatures and Afrofutures: Speculation, Technology, and Environment in African Literature and Film (MLA 2018)

deadline for submissions:
March 15, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Dustin Crowley / Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

contact email:
crowleyd@rowan.edu

Afronatures and Afrofutures: Speculation, Technology, and Environment in African Literature and Film // MLA 2018, New York City, January 4-7 // Panel arranged by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

Science fiction and speculative fiction have a rich tradition of engaging environmental concern. Using the distance of other worlds and futures, these genres often reflect and refract the human-nature relationship, interrogating and critiquing discourses of otherness and belonging, and projecting the environmental consequences of unchecked war, technology, capitalism, and so on. Similarly, Afrofuturism and other forms of African science/speculative fiction challenge histories and contemporary practices of black marginalization by drawing on and reimagining black history, culture, mythology, cosmology, and more to “build new worlds” and pose alternative futures and possibilities. In his review of Wanuri Kahiu’s 2010 film Pumzi, Matthew Durkin sees environmentalism and Afrofuturism coexisting “to produce an indictment of unrestrained material consumption and its physical effects upon the natural world” (African Studies Review 59.1, April 2016). Yet important questions and potential tensions remain in bridging these fields and genres, including Afrofuturism’s privileging of technology and urbanity and science fiction’s strains of imperialist fantasy and universalization through a planetary scale.

This panel invites papers on African science/speculative fiction and/or Afrofuturism in literature and film as it engages with environmental concerns and discourses. We are particularly interested in projects that explore how these genres might productively challenge and expand each other, reimagining relations of place and belonging, human-nature relationships, the scales and structures of agency and activism, and the centrality of Africa within environmental discourse and practice.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

Negotiating Afrofuturism’s focus on urbanity/built environments and technology with other discourses of environmentalism
The convergence of myth/folklore and science/technology in the literature’s environmental representations
Challenges to the universalism of environmentalist and Anthropocene discourses
Reconfigurations of animals, agency, and the category of the “human” in African science/speculative fiction
Challenges to the imperialist thrust of science fiction through recentering of Africa and reimagining of colonial/neocolonial histories of environmental and ecological degradation
Send a 250-word proposal and CV to Dustin Crowley, Assistant Professor of English at Rowan University at crowleyd@rowan.edu. Deadline for submissions is March 15, 2017.

CFP for MLA 2018 — Commodification of the Spirit

2018 Modern Language Association Annual Convention

January 4-7, New York City, NY

CFP for MLA Special Session: Commodification of the spirit, soul, or religion in film and TV (apocalypse, afterlife, deities, demons); intersections between genre and industry. Abstract and CV by 15 March 2017; Steven Holmes (holmes.stevend@gmail.com) and IdaYoshinaga (ida@hawaii.edu).

Summary: Representations of spirituality are interminable fixtures of Western film and television, from Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) to HBO’s The Young Pope(2016-present). Recent scholarly works focus on the portrayal of religion, deities, and the afterlife in popular culture, from Kyle Bishop’s American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (2010) to Emily McAvan’s The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Urban Fantasy Genres (2012). This panel focuses on the current proliferation of television and filmic depictions of the sacred, divine, or eschatological, whether via undeath (zombies, vampires, ghosts), apocalypse (i.e. The Leftovers), or supernatural (gods, curses, miracles).

Recent TV series explore the imagined inner workings of religious institutions, such as Fox’sThe Exorcist (2016-present). Media corporations appropriate spiritual and mythical histories of indigenous peoples for genre films, as in the case of Disney’s Moana (2016). This 2018 MLA panel considers how television and cinematic productions negotiate the adaptation of religious narratives and the representation of holy institutions. How do corporations and audio-visual texts work to commodify the representation of spiritual beliefs, religions, and practices?

Global, queer, feminist, economic, embodied/affective, faith-based, and indigenous perspectives welcomed.

NANO: New American Notes Online
Issue 13 Call for Papers
Due by: December 2, 2017
Special Issue: The Anthropocene
Guest Editors: Kyle Wiggins and Brandon Krieg

In the Anthropocene–our geological present defined by humans as the dominant, destructive force in the natural world–calamity is familiar. As Jeremy Davies puts it in The Birth of the Anthropocene, “Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, rocks, plants, and animals are experiencing changes great enough to mark the ending of one epoch and the beginning of another” (2). We have entered a moment of environmental crisis, yet the concept of “Anthropocene” continues to be used in “diverse, contested, and even incompatible ways” and its influence on humanism and the humanities remains much debated (6).

For McKenzie Wark, the Anthropocene “is a series of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself again. The soil depletes, the seas recede, the climate alters, the gyre widens: a world on fire” (Molecular Red, xiv). Ironically, Wark sees opportunity in this unsettling. He argues that this age of “carbon liberation” invites a reorganization of time and material resources, one that might generate an endurable relationship between human labor and nature. Jane Bennett sees a related opportunity in the Anthropocene to extend our conception of material geology to include human bodies, noting that humans “are made of the same elements as is the planet,” and that, “Like wind or river, human individuals and groups are geologic forces that can alter the planet in countless and, as the concept of the Anthropocene marks, game-changing ways” (“Making the Geologic Now”). Bennett proposes an ethic of “self” as coextensive with other geologic material as crucial to promoting human survival: “For me, one of the effects of a heightened awareness of the interpenetration of the human and ahuman geologic is that it stretches my definition of ‘self’-interest to include the flourishing of the complex system of bio-geologic processes. This enriched understanding of ‘self’ would then, I hope, enable a more extended pursuit of our conatus, the endeavor to persist in being.” In contrast, in a most apocalyptic take, Roy Scranton argues that the “biggest problem we face” in the era of climate change “is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead” (“Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene”). Nothing can rescue our doomed species. The time has come to rethink what it means to be human on a planet imperiled by human presence.

The aim of this NANO special issue is to explore what shape this new humanism is taking and how literature, film, art, philosophy – really the breadth of the humanities – are responding to the Anthropocene’s challenges. What does art made for a dying planet look like? Do artists, intellectuals, and critics see our species as moribund? What moral, ethical, and political challenges face citizens of the Anthropocene? What stories do we tell ourselves about civilization’s (inevitable) end? What value or purpose do such tales have? Can a new humanism save us?

This issue of NANO welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to the Anthropocene, including but not limited to the following:

• art and the Anthropocene
• philosophy and carbon consumption
• the rhetoric of “sustainability” and “green living” in American consumerism
• ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the Anthropocene
• narratives of resource depletion
• resetting civilization: the Anthropocene’s possibilities for renewal
• climate change and the American novel
• the future of criticism in the age of the Anthropocene
• extinction anxiety and popular culture
• “prepper” and aftermath/cataclysm fiction
• ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene
• teleology, the apocalypse, and the environmental end-game
• new worlds: science fiction stories of species relocation
• charting time in the Anthropocene
• waste, wreckage, and industrial decay
• posthumanism and the Anthropocene
• the Anthropocene in the age of Trump

Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Kyle Wiggins [kwiggins@bu.edu] and Brandon Krieg [Brandon.Krieg@westminster-mo.edu].

NANO is a multimodal journal. Therefore, we encourage submissions that include images, sound, video, data sets, or digital tools in support of a written argument. The multimodal components of the essay must be owned or licensed by the author, come from the public domain, or fall within reasonable fair use (see Stanford University Libraries’ Copyright & Fair Use site, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/ and the U.S. Copyright Office’s Fair Use site, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html for more information). NANO’s Fair Use Statement is available on its submission page, http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/.

For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: editornano@citytech.cuny.edu.

NANO uses modified 8th Edition MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style. See NANO’s Submission page for more information.

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:
• Submission deadline: December 2, 2017
• Pre-production begins February, 2018
• Publication: Spring 2018

Psychology of the Fairy Tale/Fairyland Fiction

deadline for submissions:
February 28, 2017

full name / name of organization:
MLA

contact email:
padmini.sukumaran@gmail.com

Papers examining the fairy tale/fairyland fiction through a psychoanalytic lens are invited. Please submit 250 word abstracts to padmini.sukumaran@gmail.com by February 28, 2107.

The international peer-reviewed journal Abusões, based at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, has issued the following cfp:
http://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/abusoes/

Howard Philips Lovecraft is one of the most influential writers in horror, science fiction, fantasy, or as the author himself put it, “Weird Fiction” from the first half of the twentieth century. The importance of his oeuvre becomes evident through the amount of significant artists whose work have somehow been inspired by Lovecraft’s (Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ridley Scott, Guillermo Del Toro, John Carpenter, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and H. R. Giger, to mention a few), as well as by the pervasive presence of his creations in contemporary pop culture. As a tribute to the 80thanniversary of Lovecraft’s death and to the centennial of one of his most emblematic stories, Dagon, the fourth issue of Abusões Magazine expects submissions on: (1) Lovecraft’s production as an artist and as a critic, (2) Cosmic Horror (both within and without Lovecraft’s oeuvre), and (3) comparatist analyses of fictional works and essays which establish a dialogue with the Lovecraftian oeuvre. Submissions are due March 5, 2017.