Posts Tagged ‘ACLA’
CFP: ACLA 2013 – ‘Alterity Beyond Utopia’
ACLA 2013 (Toronto, ON) – April 5-7, 2013
Seminar: ALTERITY BEYOND UTOPIA
Seminar Leaders: Gerry Canavan (Marquette University) and Ramzi Fawaz (GWU)
Note: You must submit your papers through the ACLA website.
Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2012
Few genres can boast the capacity to position and reposition identities, bodies, worldviews, and material realities more effectively than science fiction. With its capacity to denature our assumed understanding of everyday life – projecting worlds in which emergent sciences and technologies, encounters with alien lifeforms, and transformations in embodied experience potentially unravel present ideologies and social hierarchies – it is no wonder that science fiction has become an important part of left-wing cultural criticism since the 1970s. Despite the flowering of scholarship on science fiction narrative and creative practice, however, contemporary academic practices of science fiction criticism remain deeply beholden to Darko Suvin’s 1972 formulation of SF as a “literature of cognitive estrangement … whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” The Suvinian approach to science fiction studies thus refashions the genre around political (almost exclusively leftist) ruminations on utopia, understood in Suvin’s approach as an idealized post-capitalist world.
This panel seeks to trace the heterogeneous political pathways of American, European, and global science fiction to consider science fiction studies and the conceptual category of radical alterity beyond utopia. As a number of cultural critics have recently suggested, the traditional Suvinian approach to SF has often obscured the depth and variety of estrangements that science fiction, and speculative narrative more broadly, engages to critique, reimagine, reinvent, and restructure a variety of assumptions about modern social and political life; indeed, any historical overview of SF production reveals that its political imaginaries far exceed any single leftist vision of utopia. Since at least the late 19th century, American writers, filmmakers, and artists have used the tropes of SF to critique (and offer alternatives to) Jim Crow segregation, the patriarchal assumptions of the nuclear family, and the demonizing of sexual minorities; similarly, Russian creative producers helped revitalize science fiction narratives in the 1920s, and later in the 1960s, by using it as a vehicle to critique the systematic oppressions of a totalitarian communism. In these and countless other examples, SF has served as field of creative possibility for critiquing specific historical circumstances, while positioning readers and viewers within larger global contexts of oppression (not merely capitalist, but patriarchal, racist, imperialist, etc.). In this sense, science fiction might be understood as a genre less defined by a universal utopian strain than its capacity to position and reposition its audience in new identities, alternate histories, and alternative modes of being in the world.
We seek papers that contribute to fleshing out the creative positioning work of SF in a variety of historical and political contexts. What sorts of conceptual possibilities—political, cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, existential, spiritual, libidinal, queer—open up when we consider science fictional figurations of alterity outside the desire for socio-economic utopia? What happens when we treat the literary and cultural productions of SF as a kind of creative positioning project, rather than a utopian projection? What happens when we begin to imagine new systems, and build new worlds, that fit on no conventional cognitive maps? We invite papers that investigate any aspect of the relationship between radical alterity, utopia, and the complex transnational and transhistorical network of interrelated genres variously called science fiction, speculative fiction, and SF.
Olympics and Anti-Olympics
In preparation for this month’s ACLA conference, here’s Jules Boykoff in New Left Review on anti-Olympics activism in Vancouver.
The IOC would introduce British Columbians to ‘celebration capitalism’, the whipsaw inverse of Naomi Klein’s ‘disaster capitalism’. From day one, the Olympic party was a full-on budget-buster. The five-ring price tag was originally estimated at $1 billion; by the month before the Games, costs had ballooned to $6 billion, and post-Olympics estimates soared into the $8–10 billion range, with the City of Vancouver alone kicking in nearly $1,000 for every single person in town. The model followed was so-called public–private partnerships, in which the public pays and the private profits. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson—a New Democratic Party-style liberal—was no exception; when it came to the Olympics, the co-founder of the Happy Planet organic juice company was guzzling the public–private partnership Kool-Aid.
Vancouver has become a poster city for neoliberal-era gentrification, the gap between rich and poor widening into an abyss. As a measure of what Henri Lefebvre would have called its ‘spatial contradiction’: Vancouver is reputedly the most liveable yet the least affordable global city. In 2010 the median house price was $540,900, while median household income was $58,200. Nowhere is the difference between nouveau riche and old-school poor more glaring than in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, an 8-by-15-block strip of gritty urban intensity that—outside aboriginal reserves—is Canada’s poorest postcode. Yet the sharp juxtaposition between high ‘liveability’ and dire poverty does not undermine Vancouver’s status on the silver-frosted terrain of global capitalism. Hosting mega-events like the Olympics tends to enhance this status, a massive extra boost for turbogentrification.
ACLA Reminder: “Globalization, Utopia, Film” Abstracts Due Tomorrow
“Globalization, Utopia, Film” (ACLA, Vancouver, Canada, March 31-April
3, 2011)
DEADLINE: Friday, November 12
This seminar considers the production of narrative in post 1950 cinema as it relates to aesthetically and politically charged questions of globalization and the desires for Utopia. To situate ourselves between these two categories is to take our cue in part from Fredric Jameson’s assertion in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979) that “[A]ll contemporary works of art–whether those of high culture and modernism or of mass culture and commercial culture–have as their underlying impulse…our deeper fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived.” At issue here is not simply the identification of Utopian tendencies in filmic works that diagnose the state of contemporary capitalism but also the question of how Utopias and theories of global capitalism interact to generate new narrative forms. If contemporary Utopian discourse represents the political obverse of globalized capitalism, could these two categories still somehow imply each other in filmic narratives dealing with globalization or the production of alternative life-worlds? Does Utopia’s persistence in filmic narrative offer support for Jameson’s claim in Valences of the Dialectic (2009) that “the worldwide triumph of capitalism…secures the priority of Marxism as the ultimate horizon of thought in our time”? Where, if anywhere, might the mutual imbrication between Utopia and globalization meet its limits? How might theories of “World Cinema” or investigations of cinematic genres such as noir and science fiction further interrogate this curious co-dependency?
Submit abstracts via the ACLA website, http://www.acla.org/acla2011/?p=816.