Call for Papers: Postcolonial Science Fiction
Location: Ontario, Canada
Call for Papers Date: 2014-09-30
Date Submitted: 2014-06-25
Announcement ID: 214669
‘To (Not So) Boldly Go’: Science Fiction as Instrument of Colonial Enterprise
Both science fiction and postcolonial theory are concerned with troubling normative understandings of movement, diaspora, and hybridity. Indeed, “The Stranger in the Strange Land” is an oppositional trope that is at the heart of both science fiction and historical colonial encounters. The other-worldliness and futurity of science fiction has offered numerous writers an effective (and increasingly popular) medium to critique political, social, and cultural issues, and in many ways presents an ideal literary landscape to interrogate the colonial enterprise. Even so, there is a relative lack of postcolonial voices in the mainstream SF genre. What accounts for this silence? This panel seeks papers that explore how science fiction fails to disrupt – and conversely further enshrines – colonial hegemony. How do works of science fiction that overtly deal with issues attendant to an emerging postcolonial identity still paradoxically capitulate to a western, heteronormative value system? How is the postcolonial subject further marginalized, and the associated bodily, racial, and gender issues disembodied when figured within an “alien” Other? How might institutional barriers of the genre affect the emergence of a postcolonial science fiction? Papers might consider the ways various science fiction texts, series, and films represent or respond to postcolonial themes.
Please submit 250-300 word abstracts by September 30th, 2014. Visit nemla.org, and follow the instructions there to create an account and submit the abstract directly to the session.
Panel Chair: Jessica H Gray, University of Rhode Island
Jessica H Gray
University of Rhode Island
Email: jhgray@my.uri.edu
Visit the website at https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html
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