Category: CFP

Co-Editors: Maurice Ebileeni (University of Haifa), Hoda El Shakry (University of Chicago), & Oded Nir (Queens College, CUNY)

–Arabfuturism is a re-examination and interrogation of narratives that surround oceans of historical fiction. It bulldozes cultural nostalgias that prop up a dubious political paralysis and works to solidify and progress a progressive force, towards being subjects and not objects of history- (Sulaïman Majali, 2015)

In a 2015 experimental multimedia manifesto titled “Towards Arabfuturism/s” the Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that “Arabfuturism/s, like most creative provocations, is born of counter-culture” in which “notions of belonging are constantly challenged by the strangers, the marginalised, the outsiders: workers, rebels, immigrants, artists who see from the margins—looking in—that there is no homogenous culture or identity.” For Majali, like many contemporary artists interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst territorial, existential, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, -futurism “signifies a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narratives” that is part of “a growing counterculture of thought and action that through time will be found and used in the construction of alternative states of becoming” (Majali, 2015).

Arabfuturism, Gulf Futurism, and Muslim Futurism—like their sister projects of Afrofuturisms, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism—speak to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture in order to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. These speculative projects can be understood as a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and bio-politics that theorize other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counterfuturisms, to borrow theorist Jussi Parikka’s turn of phrase, disrupt the geo-spatial logics of the past, present, and assumed future to not only “write alternative histories but also articulate counterfuturisms as imaginaries of times-to-come” (55).

Beyond the toll of US-backed “forever wars,” recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil—from the devastating ethnocide and genocide of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank, to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria, the genocide in Sudan, the collapse of the Lebanese state and economy, and the military coup in Egypt. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that catapulted the Arab Spring across Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and more recently, the 17 October 2019 Revolution in Lebanon. While moments of catastrophe, crisis, and collapse may seem antithetical to imaginaries of the future, the capacity to dream or speculate is essential to undoing to sites of epistemic and ontological violence, while also charting possible paths forwards. Moreover, speculative acts of world-building can realize the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination that empower us to envision entirely new archeologies of the future.

We are seeking submissions that critically address how we can imagine—and stage—a future amidst these mounting crises in the Middle East and North Africa. How can representations of apocalypse, eschatology, dystopia, science fiction, (non)futurity, or fantasy help us grapple with the very real existential threats to communities across the MENA region? How are dystopian technologies or aesthetics being mobilized in our current geopolitical landscape? What are the existing and emergent formal, critical, or conceptual vocabularies for such times of crisis, and what do they tell us about the present-future? How do they shape questions of representation, mediation, and aesthetic value? More crucially—what is the role of cultural production in the face of global destruction? Is there a politics (and poetics) of the impossible or incomplete? Finally, what are the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project?

We invite proposals that explore these questions across the diverse range of speculative literature, film, art, and philosophy in the Middle East and North Africa as well as their diasporic communities. In addition to conventional scholarly articles (between 5,000 to 10,000 words), we encourage other kinds of submissions (interviews, creative fiction or non-fiction, multimedia) that similarly respond to the urgency of our moment.

Suggested topics include:

• How do MENA counter-futures imagine “being subjects and not objects of history” (Majali)?
• How do MENA counter-futures build upon and dialogue with Afrofuturisms and Indigenous Futurism?
• What unique cultural histories or spatio-temporal logics are displaced, invoked, or projected through MENA speculative cultures?
• How do MENA counter-futures upend (neo)colonial narratives about the importance of scientific and techno-modernity to the capacity to imagine futures?
• How do MENA counter-futures challenge the secular investments of Euro-American speculative imaginaries?
• How do certain genre labels, such as science fiction, flatten cosmological and spiritual lifeworlds to be legible within world literary systems?
• How do MENA counter-futures disrupt the periodization and taxonomical stability of speculative genres?
• Eschatology and theological futurism (prophecy, mysticism, cosmogony)
• MENA horror, abjection, and the gothic
• MENA fantasy and science fiction
• MENA speculative philosophy and aesthetic theory

Submissions:

Please send brief abstracts (~500 words) to pomoculture@gmail.com with a tentative title and overview of your proposed contribution that includes the submission type (academic article, essay, interview, creative fiction or non-fiction, multimedia) and estimated word-length.

Abstracts Due: July 1^st, 2025.
Submissions Due: January 31^st, 2026.

Guest Editors:
Hoda El Shakry (University of Chicago) & Oded Nir (Queens College, CUNY)

–Arabfuturism is a re-examination and interrogation of narratives that surround oceans of historical fiction. It bulldozes cultural nostalgias that prop up a dubious political paralysis and works to solidify and progress a progressive force, towards being subjects and not objects of history- (Sulaïman Majali, 2015)

In a 2015 experimental multimedia manifesto titled “Towards Arabfuturism/s” the Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that “Arabfuturism/s, like most creative provocations, is born of counter-culture” in which “notions of belonging are constantly challenged by the strangers, the marginalised, the outsiders: workers, rebels, immigrants, artists who see from the margins– looking in – that there is no homogenous culture or identity.” For Majali, like many contemporary artists interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst ecological, territorial, existential, and ideological states of crisis, -futurism “signifies a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narratives” that is part of “a growing counterculture of thought and action that through time will be found and used in the construction of alternative states of becoming” (Majali, 2015).

Arabfuturism, Gulf Futurism, and Muslim Futurism—like their sister projects of Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism—speak to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture in order to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. These speculative projects can be understood as a critical mode of reading assemblages of gender, race, class, bio-politics, colonialism, capitalism, and environmental collapse that theorize other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counterfuturisms, to borrow theorist Jussi Parikka’s turn of phrase, disrupt the geo-spatial logics of the past, present, and assumed future to not only “write alternative histories but also articulate counterfuturisms as imaginaries of times-to-come” (55).

This panel explores the diverse range of speculative cultures across literature, film, art, and philosophy in the Middle East and North Africa alongside those in their diasporic communities. We invite proposals that explore literary topoi, themes, and imageries of apocalypse, eschatology, science fiction, (non)futurity, or fantasy in MENA cultures. This panel is not limited to modern writings and welcomes papers that expand the periodization and taxonomical stability of these genres from contemporary perspectives. 

Select presenters will be invited to submit papers for an upcoming special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture.

Suggested topics include:

– How do MENA futurisms imagine “being subjects and not objects of history” (Majali)?

– How do MENA futurisms build upon and dialogue with Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism?

– What unique cultural histories or spatio-temporal logics are displaced, invoked, or projected through MENA speculative cultures?

– How do MENA futurisms upend (neo)colonial narratives about the importance of scientific and techno-modernity to the capacity to imagine futures?

– How do MENA futurisms challenge the secular investments of Euro-American speculative imaginaries?

– How do certain genre labels, such as science fiction, flatten cosmological and spiritual lifeworlds to be legible within world literary systems?

– The “pre-modern” forms of speculation that emerged from the MENA region

– Eschatology and theological futurism (prophecy, mysticism, cosmogony)

– MENA horror, abjection, and the gothic

– MENA fantasy and science fiction

– MENA speculative philosophy and aesthetic theory

Guest editor:
Jeff Diamanti, University of Amsterdam

This special issue of PMC seeks essays that develop practice-based methodologies and critical theories of fields of research. Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline. A forest, tribal territory, archive of literature, or body of water, for instance, yields data and patterns in need of an analytic. The data demands interpretation, theorization, and disciplinary vetting. In Kantian epistemology, the world is coherent and legible but not self-evident. In this orientation, the lab, library, or desk is the site where information becomes knowledge, and for this reason “the field” has remained an opaque realm for philosophical inquiry and epistemic habit (even as “the world” begins to force itself back into disciplinary reckoning). Any epistemic culture bears a determinate (and determined) relation to the field, but how exactly remains an under-examined question. Will time in the forest, the archive, or body of water modulate assumption, expectation, concept formation, or conclusion? Can the field write itself into our analytic disposition? Ought we assume a normative orientation toward what often bifurcates field frequencies, embedded relation, biosemiotic idiom (in short, the world) from the stylistics of disciplinary habit (what we make of it)? What might motivate the recent imperative in feminist science, new materialist philosophy, and ecological theory to find commensurabilities and reciprocities between the field and the interpretative apparatus, as for instance in the work of Edouard Glissant, Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing, Thomas Nail, Isabelle Stengers, and Elaine Gan?

Prospective contributors should submit completed articles to J.Diamanti@uva.nl by January 31, 2023.

The journal invites contributions that engage with field theory in philosophy, media studies, environmental studies, literary studies, anthropology, urban studies, and queer theory. Postmodern Culture does not have a specific word length requirement and can publish long pieces. Essays appearing in the journal tend to be between 6,000 and 9,000 words and could be non-discursive or non-traditional in format. Submission guidelines and more information can be found at https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture.

Guest Editors:
Austin Svedjan & John Paul Ricc

For nearly two decades, the “antisocial thesis” has enthralled queer theoretical thought, permeating a variety of debates concerning relationality, sexuality, gender, race, psychoanalysis, and temporality. So named by Robert L. Caserio during an infamous 2005 MLA panel, the antisocial thesis, Caserio elaborates, described a “decade of explorations of queer unbelonging” positioned against anintensifying “gay rage for normalizing sociability.” As Robyn Wiegman warns, however, the antisocial thesis “is not ‘a’ thesis. It is an arena of interpretative battle.” Elaborating on the discussion generated by the 2022 MLA panel on Leo Bersani’s Homos, a text that affirmed “a potentially revolutionary inaptitude—perhaps inherent in gay desire—for sociality as it is known,” this special issue of Postmodern Culture, “Afterlives of the Antisocial,” attempts to reevaluate this “arena,” including its scope and subsequent reverberations, dissents, and adoptions of its claims. This special issue offers the opportunity to pursue resonances of the antisocial across disciplines and fields, whether they be in queer theory, feminist theory, trans studies, crip theory, queer of color critique, afro-pessimism, etc. We seek work that engages with the “antisocial” and its cognates, as well as work that takes the concept as an object of critique. What, for instance, has the “antisocial thesis” and its theoretical kin enabled us to understand, and what has it misconstrued or overlooked? Are there other, better theses of the antisocial than the ones to which we are accustomed? What forms of sociality persist in the legacy and the wake of the antisocial? Among these registers (and more), this special issue thereby aspires to engage broadly with the “antisocial” as simultaneously a genealogy of thought, a frame through which to discern contemporary antagonisms of the social, and an object of criticism and point of departure.

Possible topics may include but are by no means limited to:

–Leo Bersani’s theories of sociality

–Queer theory after Bersani

–The antisocial thesis’s textual genealogy (Homosexual Desire, Homos, No Future)

–Resistances to the antisocial (e.g., Muñoz’s call to “bury antirelational queer theories”)

–The antisocial thesis and afro-pessimism

–Affect and antisociality

–Aesthetic form, art and the anti-social

–The antisocial thesis and blackness

–Sociality after the antisocial (e.g., “angular sociality,” “hypersociality”)

–The antisocial and notions of the common, community, communal, and non-belonging

–Identity, post-identity, anonymity, impersonality

–Queer monadology, Queer solitude

–Antisociality, dissociation, and Neurodivergence

–Social reproductions

–The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory and Trans Studies (“Queer Theory’s Evil Twin”—Stryker)

–Queer futurity

–Queer negativity/queer pessimism

Prospective contributors should submit completed articles to: Austin Svedjan (svedjan@sas.upenn.edu) and John Paul Ricco (john.ricco@utoronto.ca) with “Antisocial Submission” in the subject line by January 31, 2023.

Postmodern Culture does not have a specific word length requirement and can publish long pieces. Essays appearing in the journal tend to be between 6,000 and 9,000 words. Submission guidelines and more information can be found at https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture.