[Sfts-faculty] Fwd: IAFA General List: Digest for iafa-general at googlegroups.com - 2 updates in 2 topics

Fri Aug 8 14:32:10 PDT 2025

Greetings, everyone,

The most recent *LA Review of Books <https://lareviewofbooks.org/>*
features compelling writing on current SFF texts and ideas about the
future. This update comes from the International Association for the
Fantastic in the Arts google group, which you can join by visiting
https://groups.google.com/g/iafa-general.

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Subject: IAFA General List: Digest for iafa-general at googlegroups.com - 2
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   - Recent LARB Highlights <#m_-830731917058261815_group_thread_0> - 1
   Update
   - CFP for ACLA seminar: "Fantasy and/against the academy"
   <#m_-830731917058261815_group_thread_1> - 1 Update

Recent LARB Highlights
<http://groups.google.com/group/iafa-general/t/8e9dcc7b196447e3?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email>
David Higgins <dmhiggin at gmail.com>: Aug 08 11:12AM -0400

A few recent highlights from the *Los Angeles Review of Books*:

Bernabé S. Mendoza examines Nnedi Okorafor’s *Death of the Author*: “In
this story, Okorafor personifies and gives creative expression to the
Western division of the human.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/storytelling-as-reparative-act/

Jordan S. Carroll offers a review of recent reactionary futurism:
“fundamentally,
the Far Right believes that the future belongs to them.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reactionary-futurism-2025/

Chelsea Davis hangs out with dead people in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s *The
Bewitching*: “In Moreno-Garcia’s rendering, which blends Mexican
teyolloquani witch lore with elements of the Spiritualist and Puritan
supernatural, a bewitching is a form of obsessive, unwanted attention.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-heart-is-a-lonely-haunter/

Arnaud Gerspacher considers *Sad Planets* by Dominic Pettman and Eugene
Thacker: “This is media studies that far exceeds the conventional bounds of
human culture and technology.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-astronomy-of-melancholy/

**

Thanks always to the volunteers who help with the LARB speculative fiction
section:

Associate Editor (Horror): Jeffrey Weinstock

Assistant Editors: Jeshua Enriquez, Christy Tidwell, and Jordan Carroll

Editorial Assistants: Matthew Iung and Amanda Irene Rose

-- 
David M. Higgins, Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Humanities and Communication
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Worldwide

President, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Senior Editor, *Los Angeles Review of Books*

"Beware of asking people to question what's real and what isn't. They may
reach conclusions you didn't see coming."
-- Crispin Hershey*. The Bone Clocks*, by David Mitchell.
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CFP for ACLA seminar: "Fantasy and/against the academy"
<http://groups.google.com/group/iafa-general/t/3eb00d4eb2e23c11?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email>
David Higgins <dmhiggin at gmail.com>: Aug 08 10:04AM -0400

Please distribute! =)

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Benjamin Robertson <00011a347eb58b74-dmarc-request at jiscmail.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Subject: CFP for ACLA seminar: "Fantasy and/against the academy"

Hello all,

I wanted to draw your attention to a seminar I am organizing for the
American Comparative Literature Conference that will take place in
Montreal, Quebec, Canada from February 26 - March 1, 2026.

The paper proposal window runs from August 26 - October 2, 2025.

Proposals should be submitted to the conference site, which can be found
here: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting

The CFP is pasted below.

Please reach out with any questions you might have.

-- 
Benjamin J Robertson
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Colorado at Boulder
Hellems 101 | 226 UCB
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0226

Fantasy and/against the academy

This seminar begins with the critical fiction that dominant modes of
academic discourse remain incapable of addressing generic fantasy as
fantasy. If science fiction has long been celebrated for its capacity to
estrange us from the historical, empirical world in a cognitive fashion,
fantasy has long been dismissed for its noncognitive estrangements. If sf
dovetails with various critical and historicist approaches to literature
and culture, fantasy is part and parcel of a pathological resistance to
such intellectual techniques. However, as China Miéville writes, in
“Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory,” “At the same
sociological level at which SF and fantasy continue to be distinguished,
the boundaries between them also […] continue to erode. Where that has
hitherto been seen as pathological in SF theory, it is to be hoped that, by
undermining the supposedly radical distinction between the two on the basis
of cognition, that erosion can now be seen as perfectly legitimate.” This
erosion derives in part from what Miéville elsewhere describes as the
fantastical nature of life under late capitalism, a hallucinatory,
ungrounded experience characterized by profound alienation and determined
by the failure of systems of valorization and signification. As modernity’s
enclosures dissolve, the historical or empirical world has become
increasingly recalcitrant with regard to intellectual techniques first
developed under the auspices of industrial capitalism. In this context,
such techniques that assume and reproduce the distinction between science
fiction and fantasy—between the cognitive and the historical, on one hand,
and the noncognitive and a- or anti-historical, on the other—cease to
function. Does fantasy suggest a way out of an impasse that science fiction
and other representationalist literature cannot face or does its ongoing
popularity in popular culture suggest a failure of modernity that cannot be
put right?

I invite paper proposals that address generic fantasy in the context here
described, understood in the broadest possible sense. Papers may address,
for example:

• fantasy’s reception, or lack thereof, in academia;
• fantasy in relation to discourses that also challenge modern
intellectual practices and techniques, such as feminism, postcolonialism,
Afro- and Africanfuturism, Afropessimism, queer theory, Latinx studies, new
materialism, and so on;
• particular fantasies in relation to these or other discourses;
• the limits of thinking with or about fantasy in an academic context;
• fantasy as a symptom of, or antidote to, contemporary discourses of
fascism, authoritarianism, trans- and homophobia, ableism, misogyny, or
white supremacy;
• the politics of canon formation in fantasy studies;
• counter-histories or genealogies of the fantasy genre; and/or
• the nature of (non)representation in fantasy.

Please contact Benjamin J. Robertson at benjamin.j.robertson at colorado.edu
with questions.

------------------------------

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-- 
David M. Higgins, Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Humanities and Communication
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Worldwide

President, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Senior Editor, *Los Angeles Review of Books*

"Beware of asking people to question what's real and what isn't. They may
reach conclusions you didn't see coming."
-- Crispin Hershey*. The Bone Clocks*, by David Mitchell.
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