International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Spoofing the Vampire: What We Do in the Shadows and the Comedic Vampire

Editors: Simon Bacon & Ashley Szanter

contact email: spoofingthevamp@gmail.com

Project Overview

Editors Bacon and Szanter seek original essays for an edited collection on What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and the Comedic Vampire. While the majority of films, television series, comics, games and books portray the vampire as a deeply dramatic, Gothic figure, there are many examples of the vampire and its generic trappings as a source of comedy. Much of this is down to genuine comedic moments and situations, but often, and of particular interest here, is the parodying, pastiching, and self-referencing within the vampire genre itself and the spoofing of other vampire narratives. What We Do in the Shadows, both the original movie and the television series, is a well known example of this, but as early and as varied as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton: 1948) The Munsters (Burns: 1964-66), and Dance of the Vampires (Polanski: 1967), purposely nod and wink at earlier vampire texts. The vampire is nothing other than egalitarian in its targets choosing political, sexual, social and religious topics to lampoon, as well as innocent children, lovelorn teenagers, and the nostalgic elderly, the comedic vampire has spread its bat wings and taken a pretty bumpy flight into our homes and canons. This collection will explore the figure of the comedic vampire in all its incarnations and the implications of taking a beloved dramatic figure a little less seriously.

Chapters in the proposed collection can focus on aspects or intersections between one or more of the following categories:

– Notable comedic vampire film What We Do in the Shadows (2014) by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement or the recent FX television adaptation of the same name.
– Examinations of the place/function of comedy in the vampire film genre. What role should comedy, laughter, or satire hold within the broader vampire zeitgeist? Consider Dark Shadows (2012), Fanged Up (2017), Vampires Suck (2010), Hotel Transylvania film series (2012-2018), Vampire Academy (2014), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Suck (2009), Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire (2000), Dracula: Dead and Loving it (1995), Son of Dracula (1974), or any others not mentioned on this list.
– Address contemporary comedic vampire fictions through a particular scholarly lens.
– Political and social satire and/or comedy in a vampire work of fiction.
– Explore the comedic vampire phenomenon in written vampire fiction. Texts for consideration may include those by MaryJanice Davidson, Christopher Moore, Charlaine Harris, Gerry Bartlett, and especially the Fat Vampire series by Johnny B. Truant.
– The comedic vampire as the result of genre exhaustion for both the traditional vampire genre as well as the paranormal genre. Have we taken the dramatic vampire to its limits? Have audiences bored of the dramatic vampire tropes?
– Nationalism/national identity through comedy: Vampires (2010), Ko?ysanka (2010), Strigoi (2009).
– (Un)intentional comedy extracted from serious vampire content: Twilight series, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [film or series], The Lost Boys, Dark Shadows television series, Blade film series. Could either be humor woven into the drama or external parodies.
– Address comedic vampires and intersectionality. Of particular interest to the editors are non-binary gender and sexuality, feminism, and alternative masculinity.
– The use of comedic vampires with narratives meant for children and young adults: Count Von Count, Count Duckula, Bunnicula, Young Dracula, Vampirina, Scream Street, and Vampire Sisters.

Abstract Due Dates

Preference will be given to abstracts received before Friday 26th July 2019. Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words and be accompanied by a current CV.

Final manuscripts of 5,000-6,500 words should be submitted in MLA style by Friday 28th February 2020.

Contact us and send abstracts to spoofingthevamp@gmail.com

CFP: “Digital Wellness”: Open Information Science Issue on Digital Humanities

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2019

full name / name of organization:
Lucas Gworek DeGruyter

contact email:
Lukasz.Gworek@degruyter.com

On behalf of independent academic publisher De Gruyter, the open access journal Open Information Science, we are announcing a Call for Papers for Topical Issue: “Digital Wellness”: Open Information Science Issue on Digital Humanities.

Guest Editor

Valerie Karno, Director, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, University of Rhode Island

Description

Since its inception, the digital humanities has considered the question “what is it to be human in relation to machines in the digital age?” This issue of Open Information Science asks for papers that consider how we can understand “digital wellness” as part of the ongoing inquiry into what acts, representations, and understandings exist around human-ness in the digital era. Particularly, this volume seeks to explore the possibilities of digital wellness provided through a range of disciplines and forms. We invite papers which consider architectures, platforms, and diverse disciplinary engagements with the opportunities and challenges surrounding digital wellness:

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

How are search engines addressing needs for wellness?
How do literary arts engage wellness literacies through multimodal creations?
How does the digital self interface with wellness?
How do digital borders interface with geographic borders towards impacting human wellness?
How does data creation and visualization impact user wellness?
How do digital formats and texts embrace animals, earth terrain, and environmental conditions towards understandings of wellness?
How is wellness conceived as integrated with or external to digital systems?
How do corporate digital organizational systems influence our notion of the digital person as imbricated in capital (in Multinational or Local companies)
How do digital wealth and investing systems inform our notions of the human and the circuit?
How do digital visual formats rearrange or constrain our conceptions of the human?
How do youth coding programs (like Hour of Code and Family Code Night) affect educational and familial relationships to the human as code?
How are tensions around big data balanced against an increasing number of “micro-forms”?

How to Submit

Submissions are welcome which attend to the following topics’ connections to wellness:

Biotechnology’s visualization of wellness
Computational approaches to wellness
Processing, designing, modeling, implementing wellness
Digital Rights Movements, Open Access, Curation, Data
Affect
Embodied Digital Culture
Archives
Gaming and Simulation
Scale
Networks
Project-based Learning
Relationships between Humanism, Post-Humanism, Earth Matter and Sea/Liquid Life
Distributed Work and Workplace Wellness
Links between the Virtual and the Local
Information Ethics and Wellness
Digital Sound and Wellness
Digital Wellness and Social Justice
Digital Wellness across Racial, Ethnic, Gendered, and Classed Borders
Meditation, Mindfulness, and Relaxation in the Digital Era

Please send 1-2 page Abstracts by June 1, 2019 to vkarno@uri.edu.

Papers will be due by October 1, 2019.

CALL FOR PAPERS – EDITED VOLUME

Decentering the Anthropocene: Spanish Ecocritical Texts and the
Non-Human

Maryanne L. Leone, Assumption College, and Shanna Lino, York
University

Abstracts and articles are sought for an edited
collection to be entitled Decentering the Anthropocene: Spanish Ecocritical
Texts and the Non-Human. Ecocriticism examines literary and cultural
representations of the natural environment and diverse life forms, often in the
context of broader political, economic, and social issues and often with an
ethical commitment to sustainability and environmental justice. In this
context, ecocritical work may interrogate how texts treat anthropocentrism, or
the centralization of humans’ perspectives, needs, and experiences over those
of other beings.

As conversations about climate change and
ecological degradation have become more urgent in the last 10-20 years, Spanish
writers, directors, and artists are addressing the environment in their works
with ever-increasing frequency. Scholars also have begun to take note, leading
to the founding of research hubs such as GIECO (Grupo de Investigación en
Ecocrítica) and the journal Ecozon@: Revista europea de literatura, cultura
y medioambiente. Recent volumes in this field have considered, for example:
contemporary ecocritical cultural production in the context of new
materialisms; the intersection between ecology and ethics, politics, and
culture in Spain from Francoism to the present day; the relationship between
ecocriticism and feminism, myth, and youth literature; and ecocritical analyses
of medieval literature.

This collection aims to expand critical study of
representations of the environment in Spanish culture in two distinguishing
manners: first, by exploring specifically the more-than-human; and
second, by tracing the historical representation of these elements in
Spanish works from the early-modern through the post-crisis periods. Our
purpose is to highlight the central roles that the beyond-human has played in
texts of all periods that counter those political, economic, and social
strategies that have led to the current state of ecological devastation.

Alternate beings evoked alongside the normative
human may include animals, hybrid animal-humans, plant life, ghosts, spectres,
avatars, angels and apparitions, robots, cyborgs, androids, monsters, vampires,
witches, and others. Likewise, ecocritical readings of the more-than-human may
refer to foci such as land- and seascapes, urban, suburban and non-urban
topographies, parks, tourism, waterways, natural resources, and so on.

Ecocritical studies are encouraged of any form
of Spanish cultural production from general and genre fiction (crime, sci-fi,
vampire, graphic, nautical, mystical) to (cyber)poetry, theater, performance
art, film, photography, or other art forms. Theoretical approaches may include
ecosophy, anotherness, ecofeminisms, animal studies, intersectionality,
ecojustice, and others.

Interested contributors should send 300-500 word
abstracts, in English, and brief biographical statements via email to the
editors Maryanne Leone (maleone@assumption.edu) and Shanna Lino (slino@yorku.ca) by September 16, 2019. Essays are to be approximately
20-25 pages long, typed double spaced, written in English, and follow the 8th
edition MLA guidelines, with endnotes and a list of works cited. The editors
will contact authors regarding accepted abstracts by late September. Completed
articles will be due January 6, 2020.

CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction

Collection edited by Sherryl Vint and Sümeyra Buran.

In 1985, Donna Haraway’s massively influential “Cyborg Manifesto” reoriented feminist thought in her call for women to engage with science and technology, to recognize in them and the new worlds they might make new resources for female emancipation and feminist critique. Now, over thirty year later, technology has remade much of the social world, from communications to reproduction to work. Our anthology seeks to bring together cutting-edge scholarship on the contemporary status of feminism and technology, as reflected in speculative fiction. We invite papers for an edited collection on intersections between contemporary technology and both feminist and queer readings of speculative fiction.

We are interested in both works that imagine the future of sexuality and gender in which biological reproduction is policed or controlled as a technology of social reproduction, and those that imagine futures in which women’s bodies are changed or controlled via new biotechnologies. We are interested in articles that explore anxieties about changing demographics, changing gender roles, or the placidity of the body from feminist and queer points of view. Although the examples listed below emphasize print texts, we are open to papers addressing works from any medium. Similarly, our examples focus on recently published work, reflecting our view that this topic is of substantial interest to contemporary writers, but we are open to proposals that address similar themes in earlier texts.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

· Works about how fertility is imagined as a scarce resource in dystopian futures premised on massive sterility and the oppressive control of reproductive women, such as Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale,Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, Meg Ellison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife,Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North or Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless.

· Explorations of dystopian texts which project futures of authoritarian policing of gender and sexuality, that is, compulsory heterosexuality imagined as a police state, such as Maggie Chen’s An Excess Male, Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun, Jenna Glass’s The Women’s Waror Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army.

· Speculations about the future of assisted reproductive technologies such as cloning, IVF, parthenogenic reproduction, inter-species reproduction, ectogenesis, or machine reproduction, such as Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones, Mur Lafferty’sSix Wakes, Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time, Jane Roger’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yoursor Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.

· Works that explore how gender relations are manipulated and/or changed by a changing environment, whether this be new technologies used to control women, as in Christina Dalcher’s Vox, new developments in human morphology, as in Naomi Alderson’s The Power, or gendered experiences of artificial beings, as in Louisa Hall’s Speak.

Please send paper proposals of 500 words to Sümeyra Buran (sumeyra19@hotmail.com) by June 15, 2019. Proposals will be reviewed and full papers invited by August 1, 2019.

Call for Papers: RADICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HORROR CINEMA—EDITED BOOK

Horror cinema is perhaps more readily available today than ever before. With a mere keystroke, one can say hello to all sorts of terrors—from the apocalyptic creatures of BIRD BOX to the puritanical evil of THE WITCH and from the Turkish hell demons of BASKIN to the Korean zombies of TRAIN TO BUSAN. Notably, this resurgence in horror is not confined to our cinema and iPad screens; it is taking place all around us. We live in neo-fascist times, after all, and if some monsters are produced by Amazon, other monsters are destroying the Amazon. Indeed, real-life ghouls are taking power across the globe, rolling back women’s rights, harassing the LGBT community, amplifying racism and xenophobic bigotry, exacerbating wealth disparities, destroying the lives of countless immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, and ensuring that a worldwide ecological catastrophe awaits us in the near future—all with the giddy encouragement of their mob-like supporters. Had George Romero lived long enough to make another Living Dead film, he would have surely given his zombies “Make America Great Again” hats.

Strangely, the synchronous timing of these phenomena—the simultaneous appearance of monsters on the movie screen and on the political scene—has not been widely acknowledged. Much of the literature about this ongoing wave of horror avoids politics altogether. Taking inspiration from the scholarship pioneered four decades ago by Robin Wood and his colleagues with the 1979 publication of THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: ESSAYS ON THE HORROR FILM, we are seeking essays for a new edited book on contemporary horror cinema. We are interested in essays that approach horror from a radical perspective—that is, essays that explicitly engage with anti-racist, gay liberationist, feminist, socialist, anti-imperialist, and/or decolonialist politics. While the subject of the essay might be killer clowns, flesh-eating zombies, or chainsaw-welding cannibals, the point is to probe questions of oppression and liberation.

We invite essay proposals that closely examine individual films (e.g., CAM, HEREDITARY, PSYCHO RAMAN) or groups of films (e.g., mumblegore, New French Extremity films, the work of Jordan Peele). Authors are not restricted to Hollywood horror, and we welcome discussions on films from around the globe. While the focus is on cinema, we will consider proposals that look at other media forms in relation to film, including television and video games. Moreover, while we are particularly interested in contemporary horror, compelling proposals on earlier films will also be considered. Indeed, we would prefer an essay that looked at a well-worn text like PSYCHO or THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE through a fresh lens than an essay that discusses a brand new horror gem in an overly descriptive or politically naïve way. All essays should situate horror in a greater political context, and we invite contributors to address ongoing events—from the endless “war on terror” and the global rise of rightwing populism to the emergence of new resistance movements like Black Lives Matter.

Please note that a great emphasis will be placed on writing style. While we welcome the use of terms and concepts from film and cultural theory, authors should strive for sharp, readable prose. We want to invite readers from as wide of an audience as possible, not alienate them.

Abstracts between 300-500 words and a short biographical statement are due on July 15. Decisions on acceptance will be communicated to individual authors by August 15. Accepted papers between 5000 and 9000 words (including footnotes) will be due on December 15.

Please send submissions and inquiries to:

Greg Burris, gregburris@gmail.com
Assistant Professor of Media Studies
American University of Beirut

Volume 31 Climate Fiction

Call for Papers (anticipated publication date: December, 2019/January, 2020)

Editor: Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw) & Alison Sperling (Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin)

Dan Bloom may have been the first to coin the much-debated moniker “cli-fi” back in 2007, but, as Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda suggest in the special section of Amerikastudien, other terms have been used and include “climate fiction, petrofiction, Anthropofiction, ecofiction, or more particular concepts such as ecodrama, risk novel, and Anthropocenema,” all of which remain “entangled with specific long-standing cultural and critical traditions, ideological frameworks, socio-political and economic strategies, and affective motives.”

As a hyperobject (Morton 2013), climate resists representation and narrativization, but a spectrum of texts that approach and problematize it is both broad and rich. In the literary medium, some of these attempts have been marketed as science fiction (Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl [2009] comes to mind) while others circulate as cli-fi (Marcel Theroux’s Far North [2009] is a good example). Creative non-fiction has flourished, including Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). The media of film and television have figured equally prominently with the new cinema of disaster and post-apocalyptic series.

A number of excellent publishing projects have already investigated various vistas of climate, including Kristi McKim’s Cinema as Weather (2013) and Janine Randerson’s Weather as Medium (2018) as well as the recent special issues of Science Fiction Studies and Studies in the Novel. This issue of Paradoxa aims to build on these efforts but also expand the critical conversation. While we are interested in both in-depth analyses of individual texts and more general, theoretical discussions, we also seek to explode and slipstream the very term “climate fiction.” The term has been one used most often to date but, treating genre labels as practices rather than objects, we wish to invite new perspectives on thinking how our cultural production can engage the hyperobject in question.

The texts, bodies of texts, and media of interest include but are not limited to:

science fiction and fantasy foregrounding climate both terrestrial and extraterrestrial
non-genre and slipstream science fiction
non-fantastic climate fiction
narrowly and broadly understood cli-fi
climate cinema, climate television, climate comics, and climate video games
narratives of catastrophic and violent weather
indigenous climate fictions
non-Anglophone texts
texts originating in the Global South

Specific themes and tropes include but are not limited to:

atmospheric conditions and crises
climate change and climate crisis
climate justice and injustice
human and inhuman timescales and perspectives
hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes
change of climate and terraforming
climate and non-human agencies and perspectives

Possible approaches to such texts include but are not limited to:

economic and political contexts
aesthetic and formal aspects of representing climate
speculative realism

We are particularly interested in texts or bodies of texts that have received little critical attention thus far.

Abstracts of up to 500 words should be submitted by 15 June 2019 to the editors p.frelik@uw.edu.pl and alison.sperling@ici-berlin.org. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by 30 June 2019. Full drafts (5,000 to 7,000 words) will be due by 30 September 2019. Publication of the issue is provisionally scheduled for December 2019/January 2020.

CFP (edited collection): Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene | Brian Attebery, Tereza Dědinová and Marek Oziewicz (Eds.)

“Fantasy’s main claim to cultural importance resides, I believe, in the work of redefining the relationship between contemporary readers and mythic texts. … [If we take] myth … to designate any collective story that encapsulates a world view and authorizes belief, … fantasy offers a glimpse into the process by which mythic patterns transmit cognitive structures even without the sanction of official belief. … Fantasy’s enduring appeal is [its] capacity for mythopoiesis: the making of narratives that reshape the world.”
(Brian Attebery, Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth)

“The Anthropocene is a belief that humanity has already changed the living world beyond repair … [and that] the destiny of the planet is to be completely overtaken and ruled by humanity. … Like most mistaken philosophies, the Anthropocene worldview is largely a product of well-intentioned ignorance.”
(Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life)

In October 2018, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report stating that unless “unprecedented,” “rapid and far-reaching” changes are made, our planet will find itself spiraling into irreversible and catastrophic climate change. Technological and political challenges aside, the reversal of the current ecocidal trajectory requires a radical transformation of how we imagine ourselves in relation to the biosphere. One key space where this work of collective dreaming occurs is myth, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction. Fantasy and myth have been used to explore the notions of heroism, identity, and power; raise questions about the meaning and purpose of life; express social criticism and speculate about the unseen. But what do these questions mean at a time when human activity has altered the planet in game-changing ways?

The aim of this collection is to explore the new challenges and opportunities for fantasy and myth that arose out of highly contested debates over climate change, pollution, vanishing habitats, extinctions, mass pauperization and migrations, and other effects of the Anthropocene. What does fantastic literature have to say about the human-caused changes of the Anthropocene? Do myths about a lost Eden justify the destruction of habitats and species or do they encourage us to change the way we live? What makes fantasy and myth relevant in the Anthropocene? How exactly can they function as vehicles for hopeful dreaming that steers clear of naïvete and helps us imagine alternatives to the Capitalocene’s vision of petrochemical Ragnarok? Can myth and fantasy point a way to restoring the connection with the natural rather than the supernatural? Can they articulate a vision of non-anthropocentric life, in which humans are part of rather than rulers of the biosphere?

Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene seeks original contributions dealing with any sort of interaction between fantastic or mythopoeic fictions and the realities of climate change, megacities, the carbon economy and the other alterations we have made to the environment. While we recognize the contribution of dystopia and science fiction to this debate, this collection aims to offer a sustained reflection upon the nexus of fantasy, myth, and the Anthropocene. We encourage contributors to draw upon a range of theoretical approaches and cultural positions: Indigenous futurism, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, solarpunk, energy humanities, human-animal studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, evocriticism, and whatever else offers insight into the present age and the stories we tell about it. We welcome proposals that examine graphic novels, picturebooks, short stories, novels, films, narrative games and apps, and other mixed-media formats. We are particularly interested in contributions that engage with works for the young audiences, Indigenous futures, minority and postcolonial fantasy, recent and under-discussed works, including international and global narratives, and works originally published in languages other than English—as well as how these diverse works stimulate conversations about the Anthropocene with young people. We seek chapters on how exactly myth and fantasy accept, ignore, or interrogate the Anthropocene’s key issues and assumptions. Whose visions of change do they articulate or exclude? Ultimately, can fantasy and myth help us rethink what it means to be human at the time Amitav Gosh has dubbed “The Great Derangement”?

This collection is intended for publication with a major academic publisher in the US or Europe.

Deadlines
• Submission deadline for abstracts (max 350 words, incl. title and 5 keywords), accompanied by the author’s CV: August 31, 2019
• Authors notified of preliminary acceptance: September 30, 2019
• Publisher identified and preliminary contract finalized: fall 2019
• Submission deadline for chapters (about 5000 to 6000 words, max. word length and documentation style pending publisher’s requirements): June 15, 2020
• Peer review completed. Revision suggestions sent to authors: September 30, 2020
• Revised chapter drafts submitted for final editorial review: November 15, 2020
• Final manuscript submitted for copy-editing by the publisher: early spring 2021

If you have any questions, please contact the co-editors at fmapublication@gmail.com

Literary Monsters

deadline for submissions:
May 20, 2019

full name / name of organization:
Speculative Fiction Association

contact email:
lisa.bro@uga.edu

In today’s culture, it’s almost impossible to avoid “monsters.” Straight from mythology and legend, these fantastic creatures traipse across our television screens and the pages of our books. Over centuries and across cultures, the inhuman have represented numerous cultural fears and, in more recent times, desires. They are Other. They are Us. This panel will explore the literal monsters–whether they be mythological, extraterrestrial, or man-made–that populate fiction and film, delving into the cultural, psychological and/or theoretical implications.

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract, a brief bio, and any A/V needs by May 20, 2019 to Dr. Lisa Bro at lisa.bro@mga.edu

SAMLA will be held at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Atlanta, Georgia this year from November 8-10. Those accepted must be members of SAMLA to present.