WisCon Chronicles 9: Intersections and Alliances

Call for Materials

Aqueduct Press is seeking submissions that engage with WisCon 38 (2014) and its programming.  (You need not have attended WisCon in order to submit a piece for this anthology.)  We are especially interested in material on the themes of intersections and alliances (although we will consider other responses to the convention). 

We find ourselves considering what it means to live at the intersections of various identities, some of them more privileged than others.  We ask how we can function as good allies to each other in often challenging situations.  We’re living through an intense time of social change, and a variety of questions arise as we have these often difficult conversations about feminism, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and more.  Among them are questions about what leads to positive social change and how best to effect such change in our communities. 

We may be in conflict with one another about optimal tactics, yet we share the same goals for positive social progress and a healthy, safe, and welcoming community.  In conversation with each other, we hope this volume will help elucidate some of these difficult but necessary questions.  Passion is welcome, and nuance, even more so.

This will be a mixed-genre volume:  essays, short fiction, poetry, art, comics, are all welcome.  Preferred word length is variable, but ideally 1000 – 5000 words for prose.  We offer contributor’s copies and a nominal payment.  We are also looking for cover artwork, for which we can offer $100.

Submission deadline is October 15, 2014.  E-mail submissions to mohanraj@mamohanraj.com, with the subject line WISCON SUB:  [title].  You may submit up to 3 items.  You may submit in multiple genres if desired.

Mary Anne Mohanraj, Editor

ETA: Mary Anne has extended the deadline by two weeks.

Call for materials for WisCon Chronicles Vol. 8

 by Farah Mendlesohn

I am very pleased to announce that I have been invited to edit this year's Wiscon Chronicles: Volume 8. The title will be Feminism(s), and I invite non fiction and fiction contributions which draw on experiences at this years; Wiscon, and express the diversity of feminist thinking: issues that might be considered include intersectional feminism, issues of race, generation, disability, gender identity, size and class. I want both serious pieces and playful pieces. Art, graphics and music will be considered.

Contributions should fall between 1,000 and 5,000 words long but this is not a rigid requirement.

Proposals are due by 1 August 2013, completed works (and it is acceptable only to send completed work, without a prior proposal) by December 1 2013.

Farah Mendlesohn farah.sf@gmail.com

Call for poetry submissions

This is from Rose Lemberg, who's editing...

...a feminist speculative poetry reprint anthology from Aqueduct Press titled The Moment of Change (referencing Adrienne Rich's "The moment of change is the only poem")*. I hope this anthology will bring feminist questions to the foreground, while featuring queer poets, poets of color, and international poets as much as possible. My interpretation of speculative is pretty broad, as is my interpretation of feminism; please try me.

To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first feminist anthology within the history of speculative poetry (for a list of speculative poetry anthologies, follow the link).

To this end, I would like to solicit reprint submissions at the editorial address, feministspec at gmail dot com.  Submissions are not limited by gender and sexuality, age, race and ethnicity, disability, immigration status, etc - everyone is welcome. Please send me your previously published poems that you think are feminist (maximum 5 poems per submission, please). Date of original publication does not matter, but please supply the  previous publication details for each poem.

If you have ideas for poems by others that can fit the anthology, please let me know at the editorial address ( feministspec at gmail dot com).

Rights: We ask for non-exclusive one-time reprint rights, non-exclusive promotional rights, and non-exclusive ebook reprint rights. These rights should be available when you send me your submissions (i.e. if the poem is under exclusivity period somewhere, that would be problematic).

Payment: one copy per contributor.

Submissions are open now, and will remain open until June 15th, 2011. I will respond to all submissions by July 15th, 2011.

Please ask any questions here, and please spread the news! A static website is coming soon.

* Thanks to Rachel Swirsky (rachel_swirsky ) for suggesting this title!

Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the Midwest

This conference and call for papers looks interesting:

Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the Midwest

THE SOCIETY FOR UTOPIAN STUDIES 35th Annual Meeting

Hilton Milwaukee City Center
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
October 28-31, 2010

Milwaukee in the 1960s and 1970s was a key site for civil rights marches, particularly around the open housing movement. From 1897 through much of the 20th Century, the city was governed by a succession of Socialist mayors, elected on their platform of practical, "sewer socialism." And Wisconsin itself and its Midwestern neighbors have long been home to experiments in intentional community.

We encourage papers, panels, presentations and performances on literary, political, social, and architectural aspects of the civil rights struggle, intentional communities, and practical socialism with a Midwestern focus for the 2010 conference. We also welcome papers on other aspects of the utopian tradition - from the earliest utopian visions to the utopian speculations and yearnings of the 21st century, including art, architecture, urban and rural planning, literary utopias, dystopian writings, utopian political activism, theories of utopian spaces and ontologies, music, new media, or intentional communities.

* * *

Milwaukee has a rich array of museums, restaurants, theaters, parks, and universities for conference attendees to visit. The city boasts the first U.S. commission by Santiago Calatrava, at the world-class Milwaukee Art Museum; Frank Lloyd Wright buildings; an excellent opera company; microbreweries galore; award-winning chefs; 19th Century beer baron mansions; Lake Michigan, and more.

Please send a 100-250 word abstract by June 1, 2010 to:

Brian Greenspan
Department of English
1812 Dunton Tower
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6

Or e-mail submissions to: brian_greenspan@carleton.ca (please put "sus submission" in the subject line). As you submit your abstract, please indicate if you have any scheduling restrictions, audiovisual needs (overhead projector; DVD/VHS player), special needs, or a need for a written letter of acceptance of your proposal.

For information about registration, travel or accommodations, please contact the Conference Coordinator, Peter Sands, at: sands@UWM.EDU

CFP: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom

Special issue: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom (Summer 2011)

Transformative Works and Cultures
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/
editor AT transformativeworks.org

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

Sarah Gatson, Sociology, Texas A&M University, http://sociweb.tamu.edu/faculty.php?faculty_id=12
Gatson@tamu.edu

Robin Reid,  Literature and Languages, Texas A&M University-Commerce, http://www.tamu-commerce.edu/litlang/reid.asp?menuName=people&pageName=faculty Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu


DESCRIPTION

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011.

Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and
ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

*Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

*Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

*Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall's The Wind Done Gone, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea).

*Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb Noire, and other panfannish and professional
projects).

*Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).

SUBMISSIONS

Submit final papers directly to TWC by October 1, 2010. Please visit TWC's Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines. Please contact the guest editors with questions or inquiries.

ARTICLE TYPES

Theory: Apply a conceptual focus or theoretical frame. Peer review. 5,000-8,000 words.

Praxis: Apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks. Peer review. 4,000-7,000 words.

Symposium: Provide insight into developments or debates surrounding fandom, transformative media, or cultures. Editorial review. 1,500-2,500 words.

CFP: Postnational Fantasy: Nationalism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction

I've just seen this.

Call for Papers: The Postnational Fantasy: Nationalism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction

We seek chapter proposals for our forthcoming anthology to be published in Spring 2010. The Postnational Fantasy: Nationalism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction places itself at the nexus of current debates about nationalism, postnational capitalism, the reassertion of third world nationalism and its cosmopolitical counterparts, and the role of contemporary Science Fiction (SF) and fantasy in challenging, normalizing, or contesting these major conceptual currents of our times. This new collection of essays, thus, brings together, in one volume, the interplay of critical and theoretical insights both from Postcolonial and Science Fiction studies.

In a way SF and Postcolonial Literature both have traditionally dealt with the question of the other. Thus, while SF has been traditionally concerned with the issues of the alien and the ontological other, the leading postcolonial works have usually focused on giving voice to the silenced colonized others. Just as the SF writer must 'train' the reader in his or her imagined setting, so does the postcolonial author feel the need to inform the reader while attempting to represent the postcolonial subjects. This combination of representation and didactics, crucial to SF and postcolonial writing, can therefore be an interesting starting point for bringing the two overlapping fields of artistic endeavor together, as both have a lot to offer in theorizing and debating the national, the postcolonial, and the cosmopolitan in the era of high capital. As of now, not many critical texts attempt to rewrite postcoloniality through a textual and theoretical reading of contemporary SF nor has there been a worthwhile attempt in postcolonial studies to incorporate the contemporary SF in the cultural and political debates. It is, therefore, one of the goals of this volume to enrich both Postcolonial Studies and SF studies with a nuanced borrowing and intermixing of their primary texts and modes of interpretation, which would, we hope, enrich both fields of study by sharing their common and particular modes of reading and responding to the texts. Important also in our study would be the nature of representation itself, but especially the affective value of the texts in generating and foregrounding the questions of feelings invoked by the SF and the postcolonial text, and the impact of this emotive state on the issues of national, postnational, and cosmopolitan identity formation.

We invite essays of 5,000-6,000 words in length exploring the following themes, or any other themes that might fall within the purview of our stipulated vision of the anthology:

• Issues of nationalism and national identity in SF and fantasy.
• The idea of the other in the context of geopolitical identities.
• The setting/background of the fantastical in the context of
contemporary debates of the cosmopolitical.
• The postcolonial imagination of SF and fantasy from the Third World.
• The affective value of SF and its connotation in the context of
global politics.
• SF as an additive of resistance or postnational alternative.
• The questioning of gender and heteronormativity in SF in an age of
cosmopolitanism.

We strongly encourage young scholars and advanced graduate students to contribute to the anthology. Please send your proposals, not more than 200 words, along with a brief bio by April 30, 2009. Send your proposals to the editors at pnfantasy@gmail.com. Include your proposal and bio in the body of your email and also as a Microsoft Word attachment. Essays selected for inclusion in the final volume will be peer-reviewed by specialists in the field.

About the Editors:

Dr. Masood Raja, Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory
Department of English, Kent State University

Swaralipi Nandi, PhD Scholar
Department of English, Kent State University

Jason W. Ellis, PhD Scholar
Department of English, Kent State University