CFP: International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (deadline Halloween)

  • October 5, 2018
  • Posted by: Elijah Gartin
  • Categories:
No Comments

“Politics and Conflicts”: Some Global Accents

A Call for Papers & Panels by the International Fantastic Division

of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts for the 

International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts #40

March 13-16, 2019

Orlando, Florida

CFP Deadline 10/31/18 

Through Oct. 31, 2018, the International Fantastic Division of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts is soliciting proposals for papers, sessions, creative readings, and other panels for the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts (#40, themed around “Politics & Conflicts”) about the GLOBAL FANTASTIC in any media and discipline.

Our IF Division of the IAFA encourages international research and art about spiritual, fabulist, weird, and experimental manifestations of the non-real/surreal/transreal throughout the world. We research and create narratives on how such speculative or fantastic expressions can engage:

  • The global division of labor through the production of an international fantastic–for instance, the making of speculative or fantastic texts in one part of the world for export to another
  • World Native/Aboriginal/First Nations/Indigenous fabulist fiction, experimental narratives, or wonder tales; indigenous science and technocultures
  • Diaspora, sojourners, and settlement: e.g., alien borders, migration, liminalities, hybridities
  • Literatures in translation including those that offer fabulist creoles, pidgins, and dialects created by cultural authors and artists
  • (Post) colonialism and its monstrous/transgressive discontents
  • Globalectic narratives that illustrate social relations between international (imagined or imaginary) communities
  • Posthuman/dehumanized refugees; the estrangement of middle passages and immigrant detention centers
  • Legends and mythology about/of transnational families and laborers, folklores about/of local businesses and regional industries
  • Fantastic literatures as cultural imperialism or as national literatures
  • Global circuits, time-space compression, and speculative financial flows in the international knowledge economy
  • Xenophobic superheroes; neo-Orientalism of the action genre’s War on Terror; Islamophobia and the fantasy narrative; and so on
  • Zombie capitalism and the necrocultural alienation of the overseas worker
  • Alternative or localized forms of sustainability, materiality, technological practice
  • Syncretized/creolized/hybridized spiritualities and magicks of the world
  • The imported (or exported) apocalypse
  • Millennial SF/fantasy/horror signaling the “digital divide” between regions, classes, countries
  • New international slaveries and speculative resistance
  • The Global North’s “dronification” of state violence and imperial military work
  • Continental, agricultural, island/insular, urban, and other SFnal ecologies
  • Community engagements with “globalized” science and technology

We accept academic proposals about worldwide decolonial, and indigenous texts by university and independent scholars; by translators, librarians, scientists, and other researchers; and by graduate students in all fields. For questions, contact the IF Division Head at [email protected]. Artists of fantastic works may submit proposals to the ICFA Creative Track of writing, music, theater, film, and poetry sessions, as well as for panels on topics of interest to creative professionals.  In March, we will meet at the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside to celebrate, debate, and deduce speculative fiction’s contributions to grasping the politics and conflicts of our past in their capacity to guide us toward more inclusive futures.

To submit proposals by 10/31, visit https://www.fantastic-arts.org/icfa-submissions/ and select the International Fantastic as the Division to which to forward your proposal.

For more on ICFA #40, see: https://www.fantastic-arts.org/annual-conference/. You can also contact the other IAFA Division Heads based on your subgenre/media of interest: https://www.fantastic-arts.org/about/governance/division-heads/.