CFP New Worlds of Speculation

An item of interest to SF scholars (please feel free to share):

*Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue*
*New Worlds of Speculation*
*Special Issue Editors: Maia Gil’Adí and Justin Mann*
*Essay Submission Deadline: May 1, 2020*

*ASAP/Journal* seeks contributions from arts practitioners, curators,
critics, scholars, teachers, and other culture workers relating to the
global contemporary arts in any medium. This special issue builds on
*ASAP/J*’s recent issues on “Art, Process, Protest” (Volume 3, No. 2) and
“Apocalypse” (Volume 3, No. 3) by examining speculation in its aesthetic,
poetic, and narrative manifestations in contemporary literature, culture,
and the arts. We seek work that explore new analytic perspectives on the
fantastic, the strange, the horrific, and the unforeseen in literature,
film, television, radio, and other varieties of cultural production made by
and about people of color. In this way, we aim to reveal the intimate
connections between speculation and identity that challenge white supremacy
and incite new ways of thinking and being in the world. Essays should
broaden the horizons of research and theory in the fields of multiethnic
studies, literary and cultural studies, media studies, performance studies,
art theory and criticism, and any interdisciplinary field engaging the
questions of speculation and identity.

Articles may examine this topic from any perspective, but we are especially
interested in pieces that interrogate the following questions: What are the
horizons of speculative thinking? How do those horizons map onto the
geospatial and socio-political realities of the past and present? What
political and ethical possibilities emerge from creative enterprise pushed
beyond the brink of the world we know? How does the imagined terrain of the
New World map onto and affect understandings of various forms of
relationality from the microcosm to the universal? How do the unique
histories of colonization and slavery influence speculation in the Americas
and beyond? What genres and forms should be including in our conception of
the speculative and how do these genres help us understand our social and
political realities? How do different cultural forms and media alter how we
approach the study of genres (SFX in audiovisual drama vs. descriptive
language in literature, for example)? What new approaches to scholarship
does speculation invite and what are those new approaches replacing? What
role does the speculative have in our classrooms and how can we use the
speculative as to supplement teaching as well as research agendas?

Essays due by May 1, 2020. Please send queries or abstracts via email to
the guest editors Maia Gil’Adí (*[email protected] <[email protected]>*)
and Justin Mann (*[email protected] <[email protected]>*). Completed articles should
be submitted to the journal’s online submission site at:
*http://journals.psu.edu/asap/index.php/testJournal/announcement
<http://journals.psu.edu/asap/index.php/testJournal/announcement>*

Whereas the *ASAP/Journal* print platform features articles in traditional
print format (text and image), the editors will consider essay submissions
for the online journal platform in the form of visual, electronic, and
musical text, images, and other forms of writing. Visit *www.asapjournal.com
<http://www.asapjournal.com>* for more information about our online,
open-access platform.

Full-length essay submissions of 6000-8000 words (including notes but
excluding translations, which should accompany foreign language quotations)
in Microsoft Word should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual
of Style. All content in the journal is anonymously peer reviewed by at
least two referees. If the contribution includes any materials (e.g.,
quotations that exceed fair use, illustrations, charts, other graphics)
that have been taken from another source, the author must obtain written
permission to reproduce them in print and electronic formats and assume all
reprinting costs. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted
for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English
(generally of 1,000–1,500 words) and must be translated into English if
they are recommended for publication. ASAP/Journal does not consider
already published work or work simultaneously under consideration by
another publishing source. Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts;
when submitting manuscripts, authors should remove identifying information
by clicking on “File”/”Properties” in Microsoft Word and removing
identifying tags for the piece. Authors should not refer to themselves in
the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would
identify them. For additional submission guidelines, please see:
*https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asap_journal/guidelines.html
<https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asap_journal/guidelines.html>*

*Maia Gil’Adí *(editor) is Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Massachusetts Lowell, where she specializes in Latinx literature. Her
work examines the representations of violence in twentieth-century and
contemporary Latinx speculative fiction.

*Justin Louis Mann *(editor) is Assistant Professor of English and African
American Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently at work on a
book project called *Breaking the World: Blackness and Insecurity after the
New World Order*, which interrogates the relationship between black
speculative fiction and American security policy since the Reagan
administration.

Find more information about the special issues and the print journal here
<https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asapjournal>.


-- 
David M. Higgins

Speculative Fiction Editor, *Los Angeles Review of Books*
Second Vice President, International Association for the Fantastic in the
Arts
English Department, Inver Hills College

"For those who cleave to it, a paradox of actually existing revolution is
that in its potential for utter reconfiguration, it is, precisely, beyond
words, a messianic interruption -- one that emerges from the quotidian.
Unsayable, yet the culmination of everyday exhortations. Beyond language
and of it, beyond representation and not."

-- China Mieville, *October: The Story of the Russian Revolution*

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