CFP Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s Conference (1/31/2023; online 3/24-25/2023)

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Indiana University Department of English

contact email:
iugradconference@gmail.com


source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/11/03/deadline-extended-strange-things-alternatives-imaginaries-and-otherworlds


Call for Papers

Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s

20th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

Department of English, Indiana University, Bloomington

Dates: Friday March 24th – Saturday March 25th, 2023



We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for Indiana University’s 20th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, hosted by the Department of English. This conference will be held virtually on Friday March 24th and Saturday March 25th. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Christy Tidwell, whose recent work includes the co-edited anthology Fear & Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, and a co-edited special issue of Science Fiction Film & Television on creature features and the environment.

In 1937, the Indiana General Assembly officially selected the phrase "Crossroads of America" as the state motto. Almost 80 years later, the Netflix show Stranger Things features the fictional town Hawkins, Indiana as a portal that leads us into the "Upside Down," where all those "stranger" things come from, those Others desiring to annihilate us all. And the kids fight back—the familiar mixture of superpower, blood-spatter, and initiation rite. But we ask: what if we can put the war in abeyance, and cohabitate with that mirroring Otherworld and all the creatures flooding from it? What if we can replace the two-way portal with a crossroads, and (re)imagine other ways—both figuratively and literally—of defining our shared worlds? Indeed, are they really that stranger? We in the humanities have always dealt with things that are strange around us, and we enjoy and yes, have fun imagining strange, alternative worlds and different temporalities, spatialities, identities, and subjectivities that come with them. In 2023, we will make Bloomington such a crossroads, a space where not only people but animals, cyborgs, aliens, indeed, "things" come and go. Out of sync with the normative time and space, we will "make it strange."

Relevant topics may include (but are by no means limited to):

• Representations and interrogations of the “other”
• Crossings of time and/or space
• Worldbuilding
• Materiality or materialisms
• Liminality, borders, and/or margins
• Ghosts, monsters, aliens, and all things “strange”
• Narratives and counternarratives
• Collectivity and collaboration
• Critical identity studies
• Genre studies
• Studies of migration, border, and/or diaspora
• Queer modes of composition and interpretation

Proposals might also situate these topics in the context of rhetoric and composition studies. We invite proposals that consider the “strange” world of the classroom, the role of rhetoric in studies of the strange and the other, and more. Papers that bring together critical and creative elements are also encouraged.

We invite proposals for both individual papers and organized panels: Individual scholarly papers and creative works (15-minute presentations; please submit a 250-word abstract)
Panels organized around a thematic topic (three 20-minute papers or four 15-minute papers; please submit a 350-word panel abstract as well as a 100-word abstract for each individual paper on the panel)

Email your submission to iugradconference@gmail.com by January 31, 2023. In your email, please submit your abstract (both in the body of the email and as a Word attachment), along with your name, institutional affiliation, email, and phone number. Please note that both the keynote and the panels will be given synchronously via Zoom.



Lydia Nixon, Conference Chair

AC Carlson, Conference Co-Chair

Jaehoon Lee, CFP Author



Last updated January 10, 2023

CFP Cities and Fantasy: Urban Imaginary Across Cultures, 1830–1930 (Edited Volume) (1/15/21)

Cities and Fantasy: Urban Imaginary Across Cultures, 1830–1930 (Edited Volume)

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/11/18/cities-and-fantasy-urban-imaginary-across-cultures-1830%E2%80%931930-edited-volume

 

deadline for submissions: 

January 15, 2021

 

full name / name of organization: 

Dr. Klaudia Lee and Dr. Sharin Schroeder

 

contact email: 

sharinschroeder@mail.ntut.edu.tw

 

The long nineteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion and modernization of cities around the globe. It is often also heralded, by critics working with Anglo-American literature, at least, as the starting point for studies of the fantastic. Nonetheless, despite the claims of critics such as Rosemary Jackson and Stephen Prickett that modern fantasy is, in part, a reaction to industrialization,[1] few projects have explored nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fantasies’ engagement with the urban, and fewer still have attempted to address the intertwinement of fantasy and the city across cultures, a gap this volume seeks to fill.

Studies in literary works that engage with the city during the period tend to focus on how writers represented, captured, negotiated, or, at times, contested the changes brought about by various modernisation and industrialisation projects that were often related to imperial and colonial expansion or trade and economic initiatives. The emphasis has often been on the realistic, the everyday, and the busy metropolitan space. Critics have explored how cities have become real-and-imagined places in literary works that have been conferred with symbolic and structural values (see, for example, Robert Alter’s Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel). Works such as Jamieson Ridenhour’s Darkest London: The Gothic Cityscape in Victorian Literature contribute to a growing body of work that focuses on the urban gothic, both as a sub-genre and a narrative mode in literature dating from the nineteenth century to the contemporary time. The urban gothic is an important piece of any project on fantasy and urban spaces, including this one. We also hope, however, to include contributions addressing how other forms of fantasy or work in the fantastic mode has been used to engage with the city. Even marvelous nineteenth-century idyllic fantasies usually engage with the unescapable city in some way, or even substantially. We especially seek contributions that explore fantasy and the city in different cultural contexts, or that explore the relationship between the city and fantasy across cultures, such as how fantastic literature can put cities in conversations—in metaphorical, physical or symbolic terms. 

Instead of focusing on one single national context, this edited volume invites contributions from scholars who work with texts that are situated in different cultural contexts and historic moments between 1830 to 1930. The volume seeks to raise new questions surrounding the relationship between the city and fantasy in a period that witnessed an enhanced global connectedness due to wars, advancement in technologies of transportation and communication, and other socio-economic initiatives. The proposed period covers key historic and cultural events that had both local and global significance. These include the Chartist campaign and the women’s suffrage movement in Britain, the Sino-British Opium Wars, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the May Fourth Movement in China, the early Republican periods in many Latin America states,[2] the First World War, and the transformation of Hong Kong into a crown colony, and an entrepôt. The period also covers the rise of new academic disciplines in Europe and America, including anthropology and folklore, which led to an increased interest in fantastic and marvelous tales from other cultures. Moreover, rising numbers of translations of this literature, as well as increased reading of works in their original languages (a foreign language for the reader), led to new reading audiences and new reception histories for fantastic texts from other countries of origin.

In this volume, we especially encourage contributors to consider topics that engage with more than one city or cultural context, or ones that explore different moments of cross-cultural interaction and contacts. Possible cities include (but are not limited to) Paris, Berlin, Cape Town, Istanbul, Beirut, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. Contributors might consider how writers make use of the fantastic mode to come to terms with new urban realities, or to negotiate their sense of (cultural) identity in the ever-changing metropolitan spaces. Other questions that they can consider include the following: In what ways does an investigation into the fantastic in different urban settings complicate our understanding of its potential in contesting real-and-fictive boundaries that condition or limit people’s ways of life, and their accessibility to different urban spaces because of race, gender and class? How might the fantastic be used as a strategy in literary texts that seek to interrogate or negotiate one’s relationship with the others in cities that were increasingly multicultural in outlook in the long nineteenth century? How might the fantastic be used as a form of resistance against colonial rule, or as an act of writing against the Empire? How might writers invoke the mythic and the fantasized characters from their own literary and cultural tradition when representing or negotiating the urban spaces and the underlying ideological assumptions? In what ways can the fantastic and the everyday co-exist and be used to interrogate new social realities? 

We note that the terms fantasy and the more recently coined urban fantasy are anachronistic and highly contested terms—labels used in retrospect, sometimes in narrowly defined and sometimes in broad senses, to describe existing modes and genres. Contributors to this volume are free to draw on the theoretical accounts of the fantastic that best suit their project and the critical tradition from which they write. Contributors, however, should be consistent in their usage and should note, as needed and to avoid confusion, the varying ways in which their terms have been used.

Topics of interest:

• Types of fantasy that involve the city 
• Imperial and/or colonial cities and fantasy 
• Industrialization, urbanization, and fantasy
• Border/Boundary/Liminality: how the fantastic mode is being used to confront, mediate or negotiate liminal spaces, or various forms of “borders” and boundaries in different cultural contexts 
• Medievalized cities in nineteenth-century fantasy
• Periodicals and fantasy
• Cities in conversation
• Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century responses to European or American fantasies in areas and regions such as Asia, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and vice versa  
• Different fantastic modes and traditions (such as Zhiguai), and their usage and adaptations in urban contexts
• Orientalized cities, such as translations of the Arabian Nights in the nineteenth century and their impact on subsequent literary productions 
• The city as a place of publication for fantasy (in periodicals or books); urban readers of fantasy–the types of fantasy they read.
• Nineteenth-century cities and fantastic Romantic legacies
• The city and the collection of fairy tales and folklore
• The Gothic and the City
• The Everyday and the City: how everyday spaces become sites of fantasy; how the fantastic responds to, or resists against, the everyday 
• Nostalgia, fantasy and the city
• Fantastic urban utopias and/or fantasy and urban reform
• Fantasy and cultural identity
• Urban Typologies, architecture and fantasy 
• Urban palimpsest and fantasy
• Reading fantastic cities in translation
• The reception history of a city’s fantasies either within that city and/or in other cities across the globe

If you are interested in contributing to the edited volume, please send a short bio (100–150 words) and a 400-word abstract outlining the topic and the content, including the key authors and/or texts that will be covered in your essay, to the editors, Dr Klaudia Lee (hiuylee@cityu.edu.hk) and Dr Sharin Schroeder (sharinschroeder@mail.ntut.edu.tw) by 15 January 2021.

The deadline for full chapters, 6,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and works cited), will be 30 November 2021, subject to the final decision of the publisher. We look forward to reading your proposals.

---

[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, p. 4, Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy, pp. 12–13. Jack Zipes also discusses, particularly, the nineteenth-century literary fairy tale as a critique of the Industrial Revolution in When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition, p. 147.

[2] The actual Latin American wars for independence are outside our time frame (1808–1833), but contributors are welcome to consider literary works that were published later but responded to these events.

Last updated November 19, 2020

 

CFP Otherness and the Urban (Spec Issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies) (9/28/2018)

Special Journal Issue: “Otherness and the Urban”

deadline for submissions: September 28, 2018

full name / name of organization: Centre for Studies in Otherness

contact email: otherness.research@gmail.com


Otherness: Essays and Studies 7.1

The peer-reviewed e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for a special issue, forthcoming Spring 2019 – “Otherness and the Urban”


Edited by Maria Beville, this issue seeks to publish research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that examine, in as many ways as possible, the concepts of otherness and alterity as these relate to the experience and representation of the city.


The city is a unique and subjective space. It is fragmented and indistinct. It is at once place and text: to walk the city is to read it. In ‘Semiology and Urbanism’ (The Semiotic Challenge), Roland Barthes notes that the city is a discourse and a language: ‘[t]he city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it’. However, in this discourse, there exists ‘a conflict between signification and reason, or at least between signification and that calculating reason which wants all the elements of the city to be uniformly recuperated by planning’. Our desire to map the city is a desire to map the self: an impossibility that constantly reminds us of our own inherent Otherness.


In this way the city is multivalent. It is both the location and the sign of the Other. And rather than merely existing as a physical place, the city is experience; individualised and multiplied in its alterity. While the city exists as a place to be read and is unique in every individual reading, it is also a place to be written, inspiring writers, artists, and thinkers to become lost in city streets and locales as they struggle to find new ways to meet the challenge of representing the unrepresentable.


Thus, the city is where the subject and space become intertwined. While the city becomes part of the subject and the subject a part of the city, urban space in its resistance of representation remains a constant challenge to notions of self, of sameness, of homogeneity. The city is therefore bound to exist in tension with identity, both individual and collective. Just as is the case with the self, there can be no cohesive vision of the city because the city not only resists mapping, it resists unified narrative in its flux; in its phantasmagoria.


And yet the otherness of the city remains a part of the definition of urban selfhood and understanding this is best achieved through a balanced view of the city’s physical and metaphysical dimensions. No examination of the textuality of the city should overlook the materiality of the city and its impact on the city experience. City design, city building, city governance and city use form the structures of the city which carry and mediate its otherness.


This issue seeks to develop a collective of research papers which examine the otherness of the city and the Other in the city.


Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The city as other in literature/ Otherness in the city in literature
• Otherness and the philosophy of the city
• Urban aesthetics and otherness
• Twinned cities
• Hybrid cities
• Haunted cities
• Folklore and otherness in the city
• Globalisation, otherness and the urban
• The uncanny city (in literature, art, film, media)
• The politics of alterity in the city
• Otherness in the postcolonial city
• The postmodern city
• The Gothic city
• Minority urban experience (in literature, art, film, media)
• Urban Otherness and popular culture

Articles should be between 5,000 – 7,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with a Word document attachment formatted to the Chicago Manual of Style standards. Please send submissions to the editor, Maria Beville at otherness.research@gmail.com


The deadline for submissions is Friday, September 28, 2018.


*Barthes, Roland. ‘Semiology and Urbanism.’ In The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. P191-201.



General Submissions

Scholars are always welcome to submit articles within the scope of the journal for consideration for our next general issue. We anticipate a general issue to come out in the Autumn of 2019.

Please address any inquires to Matthias Stephan: otherness.research@gmail.com.