MCLC: East Asian Science Fiction-cfp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Adrian Thieret <thieret at stanford.edu>
Subject: East Asian Science Fiction--cfp
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Dear list members, please see the following call for papers for a seminar
focused on East Asia at the 2014 American Comparative Literature
Association conference.

Speculating on the Future Past: East Asian Science Fiction

Seminar Organizer(s):
Adrian Thieret (Stanford University), Haerin Shin (Vanderbilt University)

This seminar examines the complex relationship between science fiction as
a global genre and its particular national manifestations in East Asia. SF
has since its inception been considered a literature of modernity ­
science, scientific thought, and industrialization. Through its focus on
such themes as technology and its consequences, SF reaches toward
universality in today¹s increasing globalized world, but just as modernity
continues to assume different guises in different times and places, SF is
marked by particular cultural, social, and historical circumstances that
tie its varied manifestations each to a particular local present and past.
Though places such as Japan and Hong Kong have long figured in Western SF
as loci of technological futurity and otherness, the SF traditions of East
Asia provide a response to such techno-orientalism (not without
occasionally figuring the Western other to its own ends).

Possible topics include:

How has history, especially the history of national struggles against
imperialism, influenced the science fictions of East Asia?
What do the speculations of SF reveal about the particular contexts in
which they are inscribed, and what are the implications of these contexts
on conceptualizing SF as a global genre?

How do these science fictions address or reflect conflicts between the
globalizing influence of capital and national identity and history?
How do the many different media forms of SF (literature, manga, anime,
film, graphic narratives, etc.) function in the global and local contexts
of the genre?

SEMINAR KEYWORDS: East Asia, science fiction, nationalism, literary
history, genre

http://acla.org/acla2014/speculating-on-the-future-past-east-asian-science-
fiction/

Paper proposals should be submitted by November 15 through the ACLA
website, http://acla.org/acla2014/propose-a-paper/.