International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction (Edited Collection)
David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell

The 2008 global economic crash awakened many to the inherent precariousness of the global capitalist world-system, and it has provoked renewed demands for financial regulation as well as revolutionary speculations concerning the end of capitalism itself. Phenomena such as the critical success of films like The Big Short and the unexpected resonance of Bernie Sanders’ presidential primary campaign have drawn attention to (and fostered discontent around) the dangers of speculative finance, yet for many, speculative finance is a problem akin to global warming: It seems to occur beyond the size and scale of everyday experience, and it seems nearly unapproachable in terms of critical praxis. Thus, at a nearly universal level, the distance between everyday life and the systemic structures of late capitalism now seem incommensurable and irreal. In the face of such irreality, speculative genres offer unique and extraordinary critical perspectives concerning our contemporary financialized existence.

This edited collection seeks essays that examine a broad range of imaginative productions that bridge the relationships between finance speculation and speculative fiction. The volume’s organizing principle is that speculative fiction, as a particularly modern form, has often (if not always) been attuned to the speculative and fantastical nature of capitalist economics.

Contributions may thus include articles that examine utopias and dystopias, literary speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, New Weird fiction, and other non-mimetic literary imaginings. We also welcome contributions that move beyond the literary, including all forms of digital and graphic media, film, and performance. Likewise, we encourage contributions that focus on work from any and all global, national, extranational, or regional positions.

In terms of the analysis of speculative finance, we recognize that neither finance nor speculation are originary conditions of the twenty-first century, even as they have combined to form a dominant center in the global 21st century economy. Therefore, we seek a broad historical approach that limns the origins, development, and rise to global hegemony of speculative finance, and we welcome contributions that examine the beginnings of speculative finance in early speculative fiction and within imperial systems of extraction, finance, and market formation/consolidation. We also encourage investigations of the contemporary relationships between speculative fiction and speculative finance, and, given the universal ramifications of financialization, we welcome essays from a diverse set of critical positions.

Questions to consider may include (but are not limited to) the following:

· What can science fictional economies tell us about fictive capital (and vice versa)?

· How does literary speculation illuminate, fortify, and/or challenge the models of futurity embodied within finance capital and its associated speculative instruments and practices?

· Is the (lack of) futurity in dystopian sf relatable to the ontology of debt?

· How can the tools of sf studies such as cognitive estrangement or the novum help us to understand the invention of financial instruments — e.g. the credit default swap — and the new financial worlds they built around them?

· What might the operations of speculative finance reveal about the futures, the otherworlds, and the alternate histories produced by our speculative narrative forms?

· Is bitcoin a science fictional currency?

· Are the disjunctive temporalities of (New) Weird fiction mappable to the waves of commodity production and financialization?

· Is the “speculative” of speculative fiction the same as that of speculative finance?

· How does the imbrication of the futures industry, futures trading, and sf/f futurism relate to speculative finance and the universalization of indebted life?

· What can utopianism as an economic subset of sf tell us about the development of speculative finance?

· Do feminist utopias as alternate social configurations provide critiques of the phallocentric drives of finance capitalism?

· How is sf franchising related to the logics of financialization, commodification, and debt?

· How might the application of feminist epistemology to technoscientific sf help to reveal sf’s complicity with the ideology of financialization?

· How might the disjunctive temporalities of time travel, multiple worlds and/or alternate history critique the disjunctive aspects of finance capital and its predation on the future?

· What can sf/f world-building reveal about the operation of global capitalist world-systems theory (and vice versa)?

· What does the ludic aspect of speculative narrative – including the prominence of gaming and simulation – tell us about the universalization of individualized risk and/or futures trading as key aspects of the global shadow economy?

· How does the imbrication of fictive economies with real economies in contemporary video games relate to the conditions of speculative finance?

Prospective contributors should submit a 300-500 word abstract, contact information, and a brief bio or CV to both David M. Higgins (dmhiggin@gmail.com) and Hugh Charles O’Connell (Hugh.OConnell@umb.edu).

Abstracts are due November 1, 2016. Completed essays will be due in May 2017 with the goal of a late 2017 or early 2018 publication date.

Bodies that Become: Conceptions of Female Bodies in Science Fiction

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2016

full name / name of organization:
irmak ertuna, elif sendur/ NEMLA

contact email:
esendur1@binghamton.edu

While we may no longer be in the era of binary adjectives classifying bodies into categories that blind them into the oblivion of male and female, the representation of the female body still lacks the means to escape its demarcations. Today, in both novel and film, a disruptive, secondary female character that destructs, tricks or merely accompanies the male body is a common if not normal part of the narrative. This latter is usually perfect in proportions, immobile and does not use her body except for its own objectification. Yet, fictional or science fictional representation of female body is breaking away from this secondary characterization. Especially genres such as New Weird and Slipstream leave aside the notion of a homogeneous, orderly body – usually represented by a heteronormative male character- for a disorderly, multiplicity that can become something or someone else entirely.

Interestingly enough, it is often female figures that lead this becoming other. For instance, in the works of Jeff VanderMeer, we see women who transgress the limits of humanity and illustrate Haraway’s cyborgs in flesh and blood. These woman can put themselves in the mind of another, be it an alien or an animal. They do so, in and through their bodies that bleed, extend and experiment beyond their limits. By the same token, Norihiro Yagi’s Claymores are monstrous female bodies with control of their body; something that their male counterparts sorely lack.

All in all, rather than a side character that appears to fill a insignificant void defined by the male gaze, these fictional characters are prime movers that seek, move, bleed, excrete yet still form the narrative. This panel asks for papers exploring the representation of the female body in science fiction where this body does overturn the norm in favor of endless possibilities. How is it possible to imagine a female body that enables becoming and movement rather than follows and gets subsumed? How and why is such a shift possible and what does it do for the reader?

Topics include but not limited to:

– Monstrous bodies

– Figure of femme fatales

– Trans and Gender non-conforming representations

– Bleeding, oozing bodies

– Becoming versus being of the female body

– Race and representation of racial female body in science fiction

– Non-binary distinctions and representations of multiplicities

PLease submit 300-500 word paper proposals along with a brief bio to https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16420 by September 30, 2016.

Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Phillip Wegner, University of Florida Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO SEPTEMBER 7TH

2016 marks the 500^th anniversary of Thomas More’s philosophical treatise Utopia. More’s book posed fundamental questions about governance, ethics, economics, and globalization at a volatile moment in European history, between the onset of European exploration and colonization of the New World and the beginnings of a radical intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment. Utopia established a genre of philosophical inquiry and a realm of literary studies that thrives in contemporary intellectual discourse. In the spirit of More’s inquiries into the social and the political, scholars and artists have since taken up the task of rehearsing possible Utopian futures and, inversely, considering frightening dystopias.

In the spirit of More, the University of Florida English Graduate Organization invites abstracts for its 16^th annual conference Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity, to be held October 20th – 22nd, 2016. EGO wishes to address the lasting impact and influence of More’s Utopia across various fields and discourses. Papers and creative work need not deal with More’s work itself; we encourage any and all explorations of utopia, dystopia, and futurity.

Our conference takes up that last concept, “futurity”, as the ever-arriving moment in which visions of utopia and dystopia come to determine the far off as they affect the near and now.  We likewise then seek work that analyzes new technologies and cultural turns that bring the future to the present as they question how our present will deviate into potential futures. We hope to pay particular attention to the ways in which these phenomenons both have presently realized utopian and dystopian pasts as well as investigate future utopian and dystopian possibilities.

This interdisciplinary conference welcomes individual and panel submissions from varying fields, including, but not limited to: literary studies, film and media studies, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, narratology, cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, critical theory, comics and visual rhetoric, and philosophy.

Possible presentation topics include, but are certainly not limited to:

– More and Utopia

– Utopian studies

– Contemporary utopias

– Utopia revisions/rewritings

– Science fiction/future history

– Historical fiction/historiography

– Marxist literary criticism

– Feminist literary criticism

– Psychoanalytic criticism

– Eco-criticism

– Dystopia

– Dystopian YA

– Queer futurity

– Latinx-futurism

– Afro-futurism

– Cyberpunk

– Post-humanism

– Animal dystopias/futurity

– Obsolescence

– Apocalyptic fiction

– Speculative fiction

– Narrative and poetry

– Race and ethnicity

– Gender and sexuality

– Film and digital media

– Science and technology

– Disability studies

– Area studies

Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words for a 20-minute presentation to ufl.ego@gmail.com by September 7th. Along with your submission, please include your contact information, university affiliation (if applicable), and 3-5 keywords that describe your presentation topic. For panel proposals, please submit panelist abstracts along with a panel rationale and description. Lastly, please indicate any audio/visual requirements you may have. Authors of accepted papers will be notified the week of September 12th.

For questions concerning the conference, please contact the University of Florida’s English Graduate Organization at ufl.ego@gmail.com.

There is a metaphysical gravity that pulls consciousness towards the incomprehensible darkness of ‘dread,’ like the impulse to willingly dive into the abyss, as into something utterly unknown – an analogy made famous by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread. But what is dread, exactly, and what are the cultural, philosophical and physical significances of a genre that uses dread as its primary structure of feeling? Is ‘horror’ even a genre? Can it be encompassing of dread, terror, angst or revulsion? Contributions are invited for an edited anthology titled Something Stirs in the Shadows: Textualising Horror and Theorizing the Indian, which will focus on horror – body, dispositional, supernatural, cultural or cosmic – as the silence of philosophy, a (non)genre hard to pin down.

This volume will have two primary focii: horror as a (non) genre, and the Indian Horror Experience. The first concerns itself with the (in)validity of horror as the nihil negativum(negative nothingness), and will consist of theoretical attempts to come to grips with horror as a genre, while the second will consider the Indian Horror Experience as a canon which confirms/negates/problematizes the postulations of Part I. The anthology will therefore be open to horror narratives (literary, cinematic, musical, performative, et al) across time periods and spaces that engage with the Indian experience, as well as broader theorizations on the status of horror as a signifying narrative category.

The anthology attempts to fill the critical gaps that exist both with respect to the study of popular genres in India as well as more holistic theorisations on horror. It is targeted primarily at an academic audience and should act as a companion for the study of national and international genre narratives. It will, however, attempt to find new forms of engaging with horror as well – the interview, the graphic essay and other nontraditional ways of academic writing – and should, therefore, also be of interest to a non-academic audience concerned with a seemingly straightforward ‘consumption’ of horror. It will be published with a leading academic press. Written articles should be around 3000-7000 words (including notes and bibliography) and in English. Graphic essays and contributions in other non-traditional forms may be wordless or follow other narrative patterns. Contributions for Part 1 should have a strong theoretical underpinning and should engage with horror as whole or specific aspects of horror, while those for Part 2 should delve into significant issues of the Indian Horror Experience in whatever ways seem fit.

Possible topics for Part 1, on horror as a genre, include, but are not limited to:

What constitutes horror? Is it a genre or a mood/sentiment/structure of feeling? Is anything that engenders the emotion of “art-horror” (Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or the Paradoxes of the Heart) generically “horror”?
Do the narrative delights of horror stem from form and/or content, its syntactical and semantic elements, or is it open to historical vagaries and reader response?
Horror as a philosophy- Is it binding, in Lovecraft’s words, “…to leave our humanities and terrestrialism at the threshold,” to appreciate the credo of horror? Is horror anti-humanistic?
Horror as space of theorizing – Julia Kristeva, for instance, takes horror as the manifestation of the resistive semiotic elements in classic literary texts in Louis Ferdinand Celine
The transnationality of horror
Genre deviations – comic horror, giallo, video games, etc.
The economics of horror
Postmodernity and horror

Possible topics for Part 2, on the Indian Horror Experience, include, but are not limited to:

Genre deviations in India
Cinema and the evolution of horror
Horror in vernacular/Indian-English literatures
Horror and folk narratives
Histories of the horror genre in India
Colonial/Post-colonial approaches to horror
Indian society, politics and horror
Psychoanalysis and Indian horror
Religion and horror

Abstracts of no more than 500 words are invited by October 15, 2016, to horrorindianbook@gmail.com.

Please attach a current CV with institutional affiliation along with your abstract.

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by October 29, 2016. The deadline for completed articles is April 1, 2017.

Editors: Dibyakusum Ray (NIT, Silchar) and Sudipto Sanyal (Techno India University)

Contact Info:
Dibyakusum Ray (Assistant Professor, English, NIT Silchar, Assam, India)

Sudipto Sanyal (Assistant Professor, English, Techno India University, Kolkata, India)

Contact Email:
horrorindianbook@gmail.com

Submissions open for a Superhero Anthology

Behind the Mask is Meerkat Press’ next themed anthology and it’s all about superheroes! But not how they saved the world this time. We’re more interested in the ordinary day-to-day challenges facing these extraordinary individuals: growing up, growing old, relationships, career struggles, parenting. How they cope with that age-old desire to fit in when, let’s face it, they don’t.

We want superhero stories with originality, diversity, and strong character development that celebrate the genre but manage to push its boundaries as well. Fun, quirky, serious, happy, sad: any tone will do, and we plan to have a nice variety. But bring us something fresh and relevant to this crazy world we live in today.

So without further ado, here are the details!

Short Fiction (3K to 6K words) for Behind the Mask: A Superhero Anthology

We are currently seeking short stories for our next short fiction superhero themed anthology, Behind the Mask.

Submission Deadline 9/15/16

Submission Guidelines:
Include a cover email containing genre, word count, brief bio, and contact information
Please confirm that your story has not been published before
Attach your complete story using Proper Short Story Manuscript Format (Meerkat exceptions: Times New Roman preferred, one space after period, italics are okay, em dashes are okay)

We accept .doc, .docx, .txt and .rtf files.

We do not accept reprints.

We do accept simultaneous submissions for short stories (but ask that you contact us immediately if your story is accepted elsewhere).

Send to Submissions@MeerkatPress.com with subject line: Superhero – Genre – Title – Author

Payment: We pay .02 to .08 per word for short fiction.

Final selections will be made in October-November 2016.

Behind the Mask Final Lineup Announced!