International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

JGB Day 2016: ‘J. G. Ballard and the Natural World’
School of English, Birmingham City University, Saturday, 29 October, 2016
2nd Call for Papers

‘Is there such a thing as authentic “Nature” these days? Or is it now merely an adjunct to the electronic media, almost a TV gimmick? Is it rapidly turning into a theme park?’

Confirmed speakers: Keynote presentation by Richard Brown (Leeds), ‘Ballard: Food, Sex and Nature’; Gabriella Bunn (Nottingham) ‘Climate (Change) Fiction?: J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World’; Thomas Knowles (BCU), ‘Dreams of Mediation: J. G. Ballard’s The Day of Creation’.

J. G. Ballard’s fictions famously explore the meeting point between the inner world of the psyche and the outer realm of ‘reality’. Ballard called this convergence ‘inner space’, a dimension which, in a Romantic echo, is half perceived and half created. This one-day, interdisciplinary symposium seeks to understand the importance of Ballard’s works as we enter into (or continue on in) the age of the Anthropocene. What do Ballard’s vivid depictions of flora and fauna, or their disturbing absence, have to say to a world that is obsessed with images of plant and animal life, but is destroying the same at an unprecedented rate? How do Ballard’s landscapes, transformed by human mismanagement and/or the imagination, speak to concerns about our rapidly changing climate? What hope does the power of the imagination, central to so much of Ballard’s writing, offer in terms of anthropogenesis – and what dangers might it disguise?

250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations are invited, and both creative and critical responses are welcomed. Themes might include, but are not limited to

o Ballard and ecology
o War and the environment
o Animals/plant-life/the natural world in Ballard’s fiction
o Ecology and the city
o Ballard and the weather
o The mind/world dyad
o Sight and sound in a changing world
o Nature and mediation

Please send proposals and any questions to thomas.knowles@bcu.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is the 30th of September 2016.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS:
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling
Edited by Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest

We seek chapter proposals for a volume titled Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, which aims to provide an account of the history of the franchise, its transmedia storytelling and world-building strategies, and the consumer practices that have engaged with, contributed to, and sometimes also challenged the development of the Star Wars franchise. We aim to have the collection in print by 2017, the year that marks the 40th anniversary of the first Star Wars film’s release. In those forty years, its narrative, its characters, and its fictional universe have gone far beyond the original film and have spread rapidly across multiple media—including television, books, games, comics, toys, fashion, and theme parks—to become the most lucrative franchise in the current media landscape, recently valued by Forbes at roughly $10 billion (Damodaran 2016).

A key goal of this project is to highlight the role and influence of Star Wars in pushing the boundaries of transmedia storytelling by making world-building a cornerstone of media franchises since the late 1970s. The chapters in this collection will ultimately demonstrate that Star Wars laid the foundations for the forms of convergence culture that rule the media industries today. As a commercial entertainment property and meaningful platform for audience participation, Star Wars created lifelong fans (and consumers) by continuing to develop characters and plots beyond the original text and by spreading that storyworld across as many media platforms as possible.

While there is much to be said about recent installments in the franchise, we discourage submissions that focus exclusively on Star Wars texts produced since the sale to Disney in 2012. Priority will be given to those submissions that demonstrate an ability to engage with the breadth of Star Wars media and fan activity, including (but not limited to) digital and analog games, novels, comics, televisions shows, tie-in merchandise, fanfic, and Star Wars events, places, and gatherings (conventions, exhibitions, shows, theme parks, performances, etc.); or that bring new approaches from transmedia and franchise studies to old topics. Chapters solicited from invited authors, for example, already propose a broad range of topics, including transmedia worldbuilding in comics and novels surrounding the original trilogy; the limits and criteria that define the limits of “A Star Wars Story”; transmedia erasure and the Holiday Special; and the Star Wars collectible card game.

Submissions might consider, but are certainly not restricted to, some of the following topics:

Children’s media, kidification, and Star Wars
Star Wars and/on television
Star Wars video games
Transmedia “metaseries,” e.g. Dark Empire
Star Wars comics and graphic novels
(Un)Adaptation and Dark Horse’s The Star Wars (2013-2014)
Licensing, intellectual property, and canon
Star Wars “Legends” imprint of novels and comics
Children’s literature, YA literature, and Star Wars novels
Star Wars and fandom, cosplay, fanfic, consumption practices, collecting
Generational shifts in Star Wars fandom and creators as consumers
Gender, race, and sexuality in Star Wars (especially where readings of lesser known characters, novels, comics are forwarded)
Genre flexibility across Star Wars media
Star Wars action figures and world-building through play
Star Wars (tabletop) role-playing games
Star Wars merchandising, franchising, and branding
Mash-up/remix culture and Star Wars
Music in and across Star Wars media

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the editors about the suitability of your topic for the collection.

Submissions should include a provisional title, a 200-word abstract, and a 100-word biographical note. Abstract submissions are due by October 1, 2016.

Please send submissions simultaneously to both editors, Sean A. Guynes (guynesse@msu.edu) and Dan Hassler-Forest (d.a.hassler-forest@uu.nl), with the subject line “SURNAME Star Wars Transmedia Book.”

Drafts will be due February 5, 2017, with a quick turnaround for editing and revisions so as to publish by Autumn 2017 before the 40th anniversary year ends.

Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict: A Conference in Fairy-Tale Studies

Where: Wayne State University, Detroit, MI

When: August 2-5, 2017 Deadline for Abstracts: January 10, 2017 Acceptances by February 15, 2017

Plenary Speakers and Workshop Leaders: Pauline Greenhill, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Veronica Schanoes, Kay Turner, Jack Zipes, and more to be confirmed.

Conflict can give rise to violence but also to creativity. In the 1690s, French fairy-tale writers imagined through their fairy tales ideal resolutions to political conflict (Louis XIV’s absolutism), as well as conflict in conceptions of gender and marriage practices. The German tale tradition was transformed by the migration of French Huguenots to Germanic territories after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which prohibited the practice of Protestantism in France. The German Grimm Brothers drew from the tale tradition to create a cohesive notion of Germanic traditions and to contest French domination in the nineteenth century. Postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sofia Samatar draw from wonder tale traditions in ways that disrupt Western narrative traditions. And multimedia storytelling that dips both into history and the fantastic has advanced decolonial and social justice projects. These are only a few examples of the ways in which authors think with stories in times of conflict. With this conference we hope to bring fairy-tale scholars together to reflect upon the genre in relation to questions that include but are not limited to: migrants and migration in different geographical locations and historical periods; political and social upheaval; and transformations with an eye to alternative futures.

One of our goals is to encourage a dialogue between creative and scholarly thinking with wonder tales in times of conflict. The conference will consist of plenary talks, workshops, panels with papers, and roundtables.

Papers for panels: Please send us a 300-word abstract along with your institutional affiliation for papers of no more than 20 minutes.

Roundtables: If you would like to propose a roundtable, please include a 150-word abstract of the topic and a list of participants with their institutional affiliations; each presentation by roundtable participants should be no more than 10 minutes.

Cristina Bacchilega (cbacchi@hawaii.edu) and Anne Duggan (a.duggan@wayne.edu)

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