International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

On April 10th-12th, 2015, UF will be hosting its 12th annual Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, “Comics Read but Seldom Seen: Diversity and Representation in Comics and Related Media.”

Call For Papers

The Graduate Comics Organization at the University of Florida invites applicants to submit proposals to the 12th UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, “Comics Read but Seldom Seen: Diversity and Representation in Comics and Related Media.” The conference will be held from Friday, April 10th, 2015 to Sunday, April 12th, 2015. Proposals are due January 1st, 2015.

The analysis of diversity and representation in comic books is an integral and growing part of Comics Studies. For example, in only the past few years, Adilifu Nama published Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011), which provides a historical overview of black comic-book superheroes and racial dynamics in superhero comics; Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II edited Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (2013), an essay collection which explores representations of race in both comic books and comic strips; and Joseph J. Darowski came out with X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor: Race and Gender in the Comic Books, which examines and tracks race and gender identity in the Uncanny X-Men roster of heroes and villains (2014).

Mainstream comics have been increasingly open to experimenting with diversity in sexuality, race, gender, and disability. Marvel has a new Muslim woman superhero; “traditionally” straight superheroes have been coming out in new universes/continuities; and disability often crosses over into hyperability (as in the cases of Daredevil and Echo, Professor X, Cyborg, and Batgirl/Oracle). However, many of these experiments in diversity have been limited or problematic, and have at times generated controversy (for example, Batwoman’s infamously canceled wedding). Alternative and independent comics, from the underground comix scene on, have long been a space for writers and artists to depict diverse characters who do not fit into the narrow mold of the straight, white, cissexual, neurotypical, and able-bodied male hero.

The goal of “Comics Read but Seldom Seen” is to celebrate and interrogate the representation of marginalized groups in comics and related media. “Related media” can include film and TV comic-book adaptations (as well as their promotional tie-ins), illustrated blogs, video games, news stories with accompanying photographs, street art, museum exhibits, advertisements, and all other cultural objects which juxtapose image and text to create new meaning. We are looking not only for critiques of those instances where imagetexts fall short in their representations of the marginalized, but also for thoughtful examinations of how and when comics and related media “get it right.”

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

• Race, Space and Place in the Comics (The work of the Hernandez Brothers; Jessica Abel’s La Perdida; the work of Marjane Satrapi; Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat)
• Representing Disability and Disorder (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home; autism in Keiko Tobe’s With the Light; epilepsy in David B.’s Epileptic)
• Milestone Media and its history with DC
• Queering the Supercommunity (LGBTQ representations in mainstream comics; “traditionally” straight superheroes coming out in new universes/continuities; conversations and backlash surrounding queer representation in mainstream comics; Northstar’s highly-publicized wedding; Batwoman’s canceled wedding)
• Rethinking Race in ‘Mainstream’ Comics (Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s The Truth: Red, White & Black)
• Where Disability Meets Hyperability (Daredevil and Echo; Professor X; Cyborg; Batgirl/Oracle)
• Manga and LGBTQ issues (Trans in Moto Hagio’s Wandering Son; representations of homosexuality in shounen-ai, shoujo-ai, yaoi, yuri, bara and BL)
• Physical Disability in Manga (Inoue Takahiko’s REAL)
• Diversity and Representation in Imagetextual News Media (the visual rhetoric of diversity in photojournalism)
• Diversity and Representation in Video Games (female leads in games [Portal, Beyond Good and Evil]; gaming characters of color [The Walking Dead]; the visual rhetoric of the Lara Croft reboot; the expansion of “queer” options dictated by player choice in Bioware RPGs)
• Diversity and Representation in Cartoons and Anime (non-white leads in cartoons [anything from kids’ superhero fare like Generator Rex to satire like The Boondocks]; gender and sexuality in anime [Revolutionary Girl Utena, anime adaptations of LGBTQ manga]; “girl power” or female-led cartoons [Powerpuff Girls, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, The Legend of Korra])

In addition to traditional, 15-20 minute presentations, “Comics Read but Seldom Seen” will also consider discussion panels from multiple presenters coordinating around a central topic or theme.

Proposals should be between 200 and 300 words, and are due January 1, 2015. All proposals should be submitted to Najwa Al-Tabaa atnaltabaa@ufl.edu.

Hotels and Travel

Air Travel

We recommend flying into Gainesville Regional Airport (GNV), but bus service may be available to and from Orlando International (MCO). Please confirm availability before booking flights to or from MCO.

Ground Transportation

Gainesville is served by the Regional Transit System, which provides bus service to and from the Gainesville Regional Airport Monday through Friday, and throughout the city daily. Routes, schedules, and fares are available atwww.go-rts.com.

Several taxi cab services are also available:
Gainesville Cab Co.: (352) 371-1515
Cab 24HR: (352) 374-8484
Gatorland Taxi: (352) 359-7142

Accommodations

The GCO has reserved a limited number of rooms at the Reitz Union Hotelon the UF campus. Contact the organizers for the conference’s group code.

Reitz Union Hotel: (352) 392-2151
Standard Rooms priced $89 (group rate) and $99 per night; Deluxe Rooms priced at $99 (group rate) and $109 per night

Holday Inn: (352) 376-1661

Days Inn Gainesville University: (352) 376-2222

Organizers

• Najwa Al-tabaa, GCO President
  contact: naltabaa@ufl.edu
• Najwa Al-tabaa
• Spencer Chalifour
• Melissa Loucks
• Anuja Madan
• Katie Shaeffer
• Kayley Thomas

VSAWC 2015 Proposed Panel: “Modified in the guts of the living”: Victorian Texts in Contemporary Fandoms

In a practice Henry Jenkins famously refers to as “textual poaching,” fans appropriate characters and narratives from canonical texts in order to adapt and rewrite them in novel ways, and for a variety of reasons: artistic, political, communal, financial, emotional, sexual, and other. Contemporary fandoms are vast in scope, multi-platformed, multimedia subcultures which operate via an economy of participation that has typically held itself apart from academic study, while simultaneously being scorned as an ‘illegitimate’ subject of study by the academy. Recently, though, scholars from anthropologists to sociologists and literary theorists have begun to turn their attention to fandom and fanfiction as rich sites of cultural meaning. This attention is often a source of discomfort to the  fans themselves, even as a new hybrid, “acafan” attempts to bridge the divide.

Hybridity is the essence of these transformative works. Lev Grossman states, “Fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse than the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality” (Forward, Fic).

This diversity includes Victorian texts; in multiple fandoms, fanfiction authors have used Victorian source material as a starting point for writing about characters from literature, television, film and celebrity culture, creating what are called, in fan parlance, “crossovers”. These crossovers address lacunae in both canons, overwriting a broader variety of experience onto each source text.

This panel seeks to explore that variety: the biodiversity of Victorian texts within contemporary fandoms. How are the body of the text and the bodies in the texts altered by fan authors? What does this reveal about the canonical texts, the bodies that inhabit them, the bodies that wrote them, and the bodies that produce and consume them now? How, as W.H. Auden might have put it, are Victorian texts “modified in the guts of the living”?

We are looking for contributors a planned panel at the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 2015 conference in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, on April 10-11 (original cfp here: http://web.uvic.ca/vsawc/vsawc-conferences/2015-conference/). Please submit a 250-word abstract to Elise Mitchell (elise_mitchell@uqac.ca) and/or Elyssa Warkentin (Elyssa.Warkentin@umanitoba.ca) by September 25, 2014.

British Society for Literature and Science
Symposium on Teaching

http://www.bsls.ac.uk 

University of Westminster, Regent Street, London – 8^th November, 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION

Literature and Science is currently gaining popularity amongst undergraduates, but opportunities for discussing how – and why – to teach it remain thin on the ground. This one-day symposium, led by the British Society for Literature and Science and supported by the University of Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Science and the Imagination, is designed to help further that discussion.

We are keen to hear from as many different perspectives as possible, and therefore invite contributions from anyone with experience as a teacher, postgraduate teaching assistant, student, or administrator of an undergraduate course on (or containing elements of) Literature and Science, broadly defined.

For this event, we have adopted a different format from the standard academic twenty-minute conference paper, and will ask speakers to present in a more informal tone and for different lengths of time depending on the session. These shorter, less formal presentations will minimise preparation time for speakers as well as increasing discussion time for all participants.

With this low-preparation, discursive format in mind, we warmly solicit expressions of interest (not more than 200 words, including a brief biography and details of experience with Literature and Science teaching) from potential speakers. These should be sent to Dr. Will Tattersdill (w.j.tattersdill@bham.ac.uk) not later than October 10^th 2014. Subjects we are anxious to discuss include, but are not limited to:

• Why Literature and Science is worth teaching to undergraduates (and why it might not be)
• Reflections on how, if at all, Literature and Science needs to be taught differently from other undergraduate programmes.
• Particular difficulties encountered in convening a Literature and Science course, be they conceptual, administrative, logistical, or pedagogical.
• Experiences collaborating with academic staff from other disciplines, including the sciences.
• Student reactions to Literature and Science material, positive and negative.

We are committed to inviting contributions from those teaching literature and science across all historical periods, working across international educational contexts as well as within the British higher education system. There will be invited speakers as well as this open call, and current undergraduates will hopefully be among the delegates.

Many of us teach literature and science on our own initiative, coping individually with both the joys and challenges raised by the endeavour. This is an important chance to consolidate those experiences and build strategies – and collegial networks – which will continue to drive the field forward at its grass roots: undergraduate teaching.

Professor Martin Willis

Chair in Science, Literature and Communication

Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies

University of Westminster

32-38 Wells Street

London W1T 3UW

Director, Centre for the Study of Science and Imagination (SCIMAG) – www.westminster.ac.uk/scimag

Editor, Journal of Literature and Science – www.literatureandscience.org

The University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by guarantee. Registration number: 977818 England. Registered Office: 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW.

CALL FOR PAPERS

PULP STUDIES AREA

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) National Conference

April 1–4, 2015

New Orleans, LA

Deadline for Abstracts is November 1, 2014

Pulp magazines were a series of mostly English-language, predominantly American, magazines printed on rough pulpwood paper. They were often illustrated with highly stylized, full-page cover art and numerous line art illustrations of the fictional content. They were sold for modest sums, and were targeted at (sometimes specialized) readerships of popular literature, such as western and adventure, detective, fantastic (including the evolving genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror), romance, and sports fiction. The first pulp Argosy, began life as the children’s magazine The Golden Argosy, dated Dec 2, 1882 and the last of the “original” pulps was Ranch Romances and Adventures, Nov. 1971.

The Pulp Studies area exists to support the academic study of pulp writers, editors, readers, and culture. It seeks to invigorate research by bringing together scholars from diverse areas including romance, western, science fiction, fantasy, horror, adventure, detective, and more. Finally, the Pulp Studies area seeks to promote the preservation of the pulps through communication with libraries, museums, and collectors. With this in mind, we are calling for papers and panels that discuss the pulps and their legacy.

Possible authors and topics:

• Magazines: Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, Fight Stories, All-Story, Argosy, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spicy Detective, Ranch Romances and Adventures, Oriental Stories/Magic Carpet Magazine, Love Story, Flying Aces, Black Mask, and Unknown, to name a few.

• Editors and Owners: Street and Smith (Argosy), Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales), Hugo Gernsback (Amazing Stories), Mencken and Nathan (Black Mask), John Campbell (Astounding).

• Influential Writers: H.P. Lovecraft, A. E. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and Henry Kuttner. Proposals about contemporary writers in the pulp tradition, such as Joe Lansdale and Michael Chabon are also encouraged. New Weird writers and others, such as China Mieville, whose work is influenced by the pulps, are also of interest.

• Influences on Pulp Writers: H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, and Jack London were all influences, along with literary and philosophical figures such as Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herbert Spencer.

• Popular Characters: Conan of Cimmeria; Doc Savage; Solomon Kane; Buck Rogers; Northwest Smith; The Domino Lady; Jiril of Joiry; Zorro; Kull of Atlantis; El Borak; The Shadow; The Spider; Bran Mak Morn; Nick Carter; The Avenger; and Captain Future, among others. Also character types: the femme fatale, the he-man, the trickster, racism and villainy, etc.

• Artists: Popular artists including Margaret Brundage (Weird Tales), Frank R. Paul (Amazing Stories), Virgil Finlay (Weird Tales), and Edd Cartier (The Shadow, Astounding).

• Periods: The dime novels; Argosy and the ancestral pulps; Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and the heyday of the pulps; the decline of the pulps in the 50s and 60s; pulps in the age of the Internet.

• Theme and Styles: Masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in the pulps; the savage as hero, the woman as hero, the trickster as hero, colonialism in the pulps, racism and “yellow peril,” Modernism in the pulps, etc.

• Film and Television: Possible topics could include film interpretations such as Conan the Barbarian, pulp-inspired television such as Amazing Stories, and new work based in the “pulp aesthetic” such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. 

• Comics: Comic book incarnations of pulp magazines and series; “new weird” reinventions of the pulps such as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Watchmen; comic adaptations of old pulp series such as The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage and others.

• Cyberculture: Cyberpulps such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and pulp-influenced games such as the Age of Conan MMORPG or the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

These are but suggestions for potential panels and presentations. Proposals on other topics are welcome. For general information on the Pulp Studies area, please visit our website: http://pulpstudies.weebly.com/

How to Submit Proposals: Proposals must be submitted through the official PCA conference website: http://ncp.pcaaca.org/

Please send all inquiries to:

Justin Everett, PhD

Interim Director of Writing Programs

University of the Sciences in Philadelphia

600 S. 43rd St.

Philadelphia, PA 19104

j.everet@usp.edu

Jeffrey H. Shanks, RPA

Southeast Archeological Center

2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive

Johnson Building, Suite 120

Tallahassee, FL 32310

jeffrey_shanks@nps.gov

Paradoxa: Call for Papers: “The Futures Industry”

More than thirty years ago, Fredric Jameson suggested in “Progress versus Utopia” (1982) that, far from providing us with blueprints of the future, the function of science fiction was to dramatize our inability to imagine a future distinct from the capitalist present. Much of his work since, including his “genealogy of the future” in Valences of the Dialectic has focused on the importance of speculative fiction for working through the difficulties of utopian thinking in a context thoroughly saturated by capitalist thinking.

Capitalism has colonized our present and our ability to think about the future. But more importantly, it has also consumed this future in the form of futures markets that script certain trajectories as we deplete limited oil reserves and watch the extinction of hundreds of species due to pollution and climate change.

In the twenty-first century, the future has never seemed so polarized, and we oscillate between dystopian visions of scarcity and collapse (what Chris Harmon calls Zombie Capitalism, 2010) and visions of corporate advertising for products such as cellular phones and luxury cars. These “essential” items suggest that their consumers can live in the future now through these technological marvels. Everyone from Monsanto (Monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/feed-the-future-initiative.aspx) to Verizon (verizon.com/powerfulanswers/) to biotech entrepreneur Craig Venter—in his book Life at the Speed of Light (2013)—claims to be building a better world. Such discourse appropriates and erodes the language of those who seek to articulate alternative futures.

This issue of Paradoxa invites papers that address the struggle to imagine—and shape—the future in interdisciplinary frameworks. Mark Fisher argues in Capitalist Realism (2012) that the language of advertising is a key mechanism by which we are encouraged to invest in the future as the future of capitalism. It is imperative that we interrogate these limiting visions of the future and reinvigorate the utopian project of imagining and nurturing alternative visions of the social.

As examples of this reimagining, authors are referred to Arjun Appardurai’s call for “an anthropology of the future” in The Future as Cultural Fact; Elizabeth Povinelli’s analysis of the frozen space-time of neoliberalism and her observation that it destroys alternative futures by “denying them social substance” (Economics of Abandonment 134); Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s work on the economies of biocapital and its Derridean rhetoric of “truth”; Melinda Cooper’s work in Life as Surplus on what she calls “capitalism delirium [which] seeks to refashion the world rather than interpret it” (20).

How might we reclaim the future, not only the material future as a space of greater equity and social justice, but also the future as our imaginative ability to think about estranged and new worlds rather than to capitulate to a future as envisioned by global capital? Can science fiction foster a critical understanding of the intersections of political economy and contemporary technoscience, or does its own status as an entertainment commodity inevitably compromise its capacity as a tool for social critique? What is the role of speculative thinking in political struggle and social justice today?

We invite proposals of 500 words for papers of 5000-9000 words. Proposals are due October 1, 2014 and contributors will be notified within 3 weeks if their abstract is accepted. Full papers will be due July 1, 2015; each paper will be subject to external peer review before acceptance is final.

Please send proposals to Sherryl Vint at sherryl.vint@gmail.com.

CFP: Special Issue of Slayage on Firefly/Serenity / Contact: Michael Goodrum & Philip Smith

Dear Whedon Studies Association Members,

Issue 13.1 of Slayage (Spring 2015) will be a special issue devoted entirely to Firefly/Serenity. It will be guest-edited by Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith, editors of the forthcoming volume Firefly: Academic Approaches to Joss Whedon’s Series to be published by Rowman and Littlefield.

It has been over ten years since Joss Whedon’s Firefly (2002-03) was first screened. Although the narrative covers only one season and a film, the series has enjoyed a long afterlife through comic books, roleplaying games, and the fan community. It has also enjoyed a steady flow of academic responses even if, at times, it has remained somewhat under-represented compared with Whedon’s other work.

The editors seek original contributions concerning Firefly/Serenity. Papers should show a strong awareness of existing academic scholarship on the series and film (including the existing Slayage special issue from 2008). Preference will be given to proposals which take an original approach and/or engage with more recent additions to the Firefly ‘verse, particularly the Serenity comics.

Individuals who are interested in contributing should send a 200-300-word abstract/proposal by August 15, 2014. Submissions will be due September 30, 2014. Please send your proposal to Psmith.firefly@gmail.com.

Final papers will be 5,000 – 7,000 words in length and in Modern Language Association (MLA) style.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Best,

Mitch & Phil

NEMLA 2015

full name / name of organization: 

Chamutal Noimann – BMCC City University of New York

contact email: 

cnoimann@bmcc.cuny.edu

We seek proposals for an approved panel for the 2015 NEMLA conference in Toronto.

Through consistent creation of powerful female heroines the likes of which we have never seen in Victorian literature, Steampunk has emerged as a strong feminist voice that addresses contemporary and current discourses on femininity simultaneously and rethinks our ideas of Victorian gender roles. This panel seeks to examine how Steampunk Young Adult and graphic novels subvert Victorian patriarchy and Empire by creating an alternate past that reimagines them both. Please submit 300-word abstract and bio.

Area: British, Women’s and Gender Studies

Deadline for abstracts Sept. 30, 2014

Session ID: 15117
Session Format: Panel
Link to session submission:https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15117

Focusing on the Post(-): An Interdisciplinary Perspective

October 24-25, 2014

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

The focus of this conference is on what it means to be post-, post, or Post, or whether anyone, any place, or indeed anything can ever be truly “post” after an initial phase. Join us as we explore the state of academic inquiry and discourse in studies that focus on “after” effects, identities, and locations. We are interested in examining how the post makes itself known in a variety of disciplines and ideas, and we have conceived the conference in an attempt to allow for papers that wish to focus on the post itself, on the post under erasure, or on the trace of the past as it locates itself within the post in all areas of study. All scholarly work will be considered, but papers that focus on post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-race, and post-humanism are especially welcomed. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Animal Studies
• Computer Technology
• Critical Race Studies
• Cybernetics
• (Dis)ability Studies
• Engineering
• Environmental Justice
• Feminist Studies
• Gender Studies
• Media and Popular Culture
• Post 9/11/Security/Surveillance Culture
• Post Apocalypse
• Post Print/Digital Media
• Queer Studies
• Science Fiction/Fantasy
• Sexual Politics

Guest of Honor: Dr. Sherryl Vint

Sherryl Vint has published widely on science fiction, including most recently Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed. She is a Professor of Science Fiction Media Studies and Co-Director of the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor for the journals Science Fiction Film and Television and Science Fiction Studies. Her current research is on biopolitics and science fiction.

Scholarly work by both faculty and students from all disciplines is welcomed. The goal of this conference is to cross disciplinary boundaries, unifying perspectives on identity, culture, languages, linguistics, and across world literatures.

To apply: Please e-mail a 500 word abstract (for presentations of 20 minutes in length) before August 1, 2014 to faucssaconference@gmail.com. Proposals should include the participant’s name, institutional affiliation, e-mail, and phone number. Proposals for panels are also welcome.

Decisions on abstracts will be sent no later than August 15, 2014.

The Ph.D. in Comparative Studies is an interdisciplinary program in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. For more information, please visit www.fau.edu/comparativestudies.