International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Deadline: 22 August 2014

This is why the properly aesthetic attitude of the radical ecologist is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material that serves no purpose.

                                                                    — Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

This special issue of NANO begins with a question: in what new ways can trash and waste be acknowledged or conceptualized today?

Contemporary critics are eager to laud sustainability and to celebrate modern and postmodern arts and practices that make inventive use of the wastes of industrial production and the trash of consumer capitalism. These possibilities provide compelling ways to grasp late capitalist culture because it seems to offer a potential answer to an almost unimaginable problem: the ceaseless, ubiquitous, and disastrous production of waste. Some practices of collection and creative reuse in collage, collections, and found-object arts create stunning acknowledgements of the sheer and generally unacknowledged scale of waste (think, for instance, of work of artist Vic Munoz so well documented in the film Waste Land). However, endlessly celebratory emphases on isolated examples of re-use and recycling risk becoming profound disavowals, as if such reuse solved the problem and absolved us of responsibility. Put simply, is this celebration of arts or practices that incorporate or recycle waste simply making us feel better about waste problems that we cannot adequately solve by making some waste useful? Are there ways—through art—to acknowledge or conceptualize waste that would do more than celebrate such recuperations?

How can artists, philosophers, theorists, activists, and others produce new ways to acknowledge or envision events and phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, radioactive wastelands like Fukushima or Bikini Atoll, the animal wastes of feedlots, the water wastes of fracking, or the mountains of trash produced by consumer culture? How can such new conceptualizations address biopower, in which whole populations are controlled by the industrial production of waste or by the dumping of waste? How can new ideas address the ways in which some populations are themselves figured as potential waste or treated as waste, living out what Giorgio Agamben names “bare life.”

In this special issue, we seek critical reports or multimodal notes (up to 3,500 words) that sketch new strategies, modes, or practices of acknowledging waste.

Potential topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Representations of waste
• New trash aesthetics
• Trash beyond the dialectic of recycling
• Trash and populations
• Mapping waste
• Collections of trash and waste
• Waste and the sublime
• Populations and waste
• Waste and abjection
• Wastelands
• Waste and power

Please refer to the sidebar on right side of this page for submission details and preferences. Direct any questions to the Special Issue co-editors: David Banash (d-banash AT wiu.edu) and John DeGregorio (ja-degregorio AT wiu.edu).

Keywords: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords to accompany their submission.

Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

• 22 Aug. 2014: notes due
• Oct. 2014: Comments and peer review complete
• Dec. 2014: Pre-production begins

 We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Below is a CFP for a panel on fantasy and politics I am putting together for a conference on 24-25th October in Atlanta:”Medievalisms on the Move”

http://www.medievalism.net/conferences.html Medievalism folks are open to work on genre, and it would be great to have some contributions from folk who aren’t Medieval Studies specialists (although they are also welcome of course). The deadline is quite soon, on the 2nd of June. In light of that, if you’re interested but not able to provide an abstract by then, an indicative title with abstract to follow would be fine. Contact me off list at <helen.young AT sydney.edu.au> with abstracts, expressions of interest, or queries.

All best,
Helen

J. R. R. Tolkien¹s work is widely associated with a conservative political outlook and approach to identity questions such as gender and race. Scholars have challenged the basis of this association, but it remains powerful in wider culture: for the fantasy genre in particular, “Tolkienian” is synonymous with “medievalist” and with conservatism.

Rather than engaging with Tolkien¹s work itself, this panel will explore ways in which the conservative connotations of “medieval” in the fantasy genre, are being challenged in the twenty-first century. It will examine the ways that medievalisms in fantasy have changed, or remained the same, in the five decades since the first US paperback edition of Lord of the Rings kick-started the genre as a published phenomenon. Are writers, and other creators, simply reproducing the perceived link between political conservatism and medievalism, are they challenging it, or are their engagements more complex?

Papers might ask how contemporary trends in technology, society, politics, and culture influence contemporary writers, readers, and critics as they take up medieval material and the idea of the Middle Ages. Are there shifts in the genre as a whole? Tolkien drew on the European Middle Ages, as do his imitators; is this pattern changing as Eurocentric views become increasingly problematic and the world is ever more globalised? How do questions of identity, including but not limited to, gender, race, dis/ability, and sexuality play out in medievalist fantasy worlds? What impact has the rise of digital media had? What voices, other than Tolkien’s, have shaped the medievalisms of the fantasy genre? The panel invites contributions not only on fantasy fiction, but also games, films, and television series, reflecting the multi-media nature of the genre.

Dr Helen Young
DECRA Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of English
University of Sydney

I write to ask for your help with an important project in development in the MLA publications program. We are beginning preparation of the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler , edited by Tarshia L. Stanley, and would very much like your input.

Please see the survey and call for essay proposals available on the MLA Web site at http://www.mla.org/publications/publication_program/approaches . As with other books in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, this one will contain a discussion of the most important and useful materials available to teachers—in this case, of those on the works of Octavia E. Butler—but will be composed largely of essays by instructors. The deadline for completing the survey and submitting an essay proposal is 1 July 2014, and the survey results and proposals will be sent directly to the volume’s editor.

You are receiving this message because you belong to an MLA division or discussion group whose members we believe might be interested in contributing to this volume, and we encourage you to pass it along to other colleagues who may be interested. We would appreciate your assistance with this project and look forward to hearing from you.

Cordially,

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Director of Scholarly Communication

Modern Language Association of America