CFP: “Ethnofuturisms: Spatiotemporal Geographies”

Reposting for this seminar CFP for NeMLA.
Full link to CFP.
 
44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 21-24, 2013
Boston, Massachusetts
Host Institution:  Tufts University
 
In Black to the Future, Mark Dery’s writes, “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of twentieth century techno culture – and more generally African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future – might for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism.” Using the term “Ethnofuturism,” this seminar extends Mark Dery’s lens of critique to include Asian/Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Latino/a, Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous texts. Ethnofuturism uses non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present day dilemmas of people of color, but also revise, interrogate, and reexamine the historical past. Just as Ruth Meyer describes Afrofuturistic texts as “mov[ing] seamlessly back and forth through time and space, between cultural traditions and geographic time zones,” this seminar invites an exploration of diverse spatiotemporalities in order to consider the convergence and divergences between different formulations of “Ethnofuturism,” both in terms of their aesthetics and political impetuses. This seminar hopes to put into dialogue papers that engage with literary, filmic, televisual, musical, and digital media works.
 
Please keep in mind that this is a Seminar. Five to ten participants will complete and circulate their papers (of no longer than twenty pages) prior to the convention. Instead of reading a paper, participants give a brief presentation of their work, with the session focused on structured exchange between the participants. In addition to informal comments and feedback given during the session, each participant will produce and receive one to two “formal” responses of no longer than a page by another panel participant.
 
Please submit 250 word abstracts to tprater@bentley.edu orcfung@bentley.edu no later than September 30, 2012. Final decisions will be made and participants notified by October 14, 2012. Finalized drafts will be due January 15, 2013 and distributed to all participants by January 30, 2013.
 
Tzarina T. Prater
Catherine Fung
Bentley University
English and Media Studies Department
175 Forest Street
Waltham, MA  02452
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)
 

Interview with Ken Liu at AALR

*crickets chirping*

Hi folks!

There’s an excellent new interview with speculative fiction writer Ken Liu online at the Asian American Literary Review. It’s the first interview in a four-part miniseries featuring young speculative fiction writers, all in conversation with the amazing Betsy Huang. The interview with Liu also includes links to some of his stories.

CFP: Science Fictions, Studies in the Novel essays

For a special issue on “Science Fictions” Studies in the Novel seeks critical responses to the genres of SF. Essays would consider debates within SF’s various communities of genre and affiliation, as well as across these communities, with an emphasis on the SF novel or writings of any kind by noted SF novelists. Submission deadline is September 1, 2014; all questions and submissions should be directed tostudiesinthenovel@unt.edu.

Guest Editor: Farah Mendlesohn, Professor and Chair of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, author of Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan 2008), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003).

The Future is Chinese

I’m a little late in levying a critique of this “Citizens Against Government Waste” ad, which aired during the 2010 midterm-election campaign. While this is clearly a reminder that  ”the future” needs to be a hotly contested narrative terrain, I also want to take issue with James Fallows’s fairly creepy admiration for the ad as demonstrating the “proper use of ‘foreign menace themes in US discourse” (The Atlantic). At the end of his post, Fallows adds that he suspected correctly that the ad was not actually filmed in China but used DC-area college students, instead. I’ve never understood the penchant for authenticity in the realm of the speculative. Fallows indicates that “something” about the students’ haircuts, skin and teeth gave away their non-Chineseness. So many assumptions here! Fallows implies that healthy? straight? whitened? teeth come from a US upbringing on great dental care (?!) and nutritional bounty (for some I guess but certainly not for many). Also, aren’t there Chinese international students in DC? What’s at stake in Fallows’s triumphalist assertion that these are not “real Chinese” and that this is not an authentic representation of a Beijing lecture hall in 2030? In extolling the virtues of foreign menace narratives as fodder for capitalist competition and U.S. incentive building, Fallows links his critique of the ad’s erroneous speculations about the fall of the U.S. economy to the ad’s inauthentic construction of a future Chinese lecture hall that could only have been produced from within the U.S. I’m perplexed about a critique of futurity that relies on authenticity for ammunition. What are the relations between extrapolation and accuracy?

Speculative Life at Social Text

Just linking to the latest Social Text featured topic, Speculative Life, for future reference and to share with y’all!

Underbelly of Techno-Orientalism Betrays Exploited Asians

image from shanghaiist.com

I remember reading this article in the Guardian last summer and being appalled — but not surprised — by what was happening in some Chinese prisons. In some “work-to-rehabilitate” facilities, prisoners in China were being exploited and forced to play MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) to create characters that were of sufficiently advanced status to be of real financial value in the gaming marketplace. These avatars would then be sold.

Such “virtual economies” are springing up all over, but I’ve mostly seen news articles about this in South Korea, particularly relating to “virtual crimes,” in which people are attacked — even killed — for online goods such as avatars or virtual items. I suppose this is hardly a surprise, given how wired the peninsula is: South Korea boasts the broadest and fastest internet access in the world. According to a February 21, 2011 article in The New York Times, “by the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second.” The government has also begun taking youth addiction to online media seriously.

Apple has come under fire, literally, for the incredibly dangerous work environment at their Chinese production facilities. There was a large explosion not long ago at one facility in Chengu.

As part of our work here at SpeculAsians, I hope we can continue to draw critical attention to the real exploitation that fuels the economies supporting Techno-Orientalism and its discourses.

Postcolonialism and Science Fiction

Came across an online post of an excerpt from Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, a new book by Jessica Langer. Looks fascinating. I’m really interesting in national and linguistic differences in science fiction (US vs. Canadian vs. British vs. non-anglophone countries). Canada seems to have a different orientation to science fiction than the US, for example. Thinking of films, I wonder what it is that drives the earlier work of David Cronenberg, which seem interestingly mired in a techno-organic hybridity that is less central to US science fiction, or at least in a different manifestation.