Call For Papers

Deadline extended to July 1, 2019 from May 15, 2019.

This special issue will address Black Canadian and Indigenous work in/with the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, both genre fiction proper and slipstream fiction. While there has been quite a bit of attention to African American SF and increasingly to the burgeoning of genre fiction on the African continent, and while Indigenous SF has been growing and attracting more attention, there has not been as much attention to the relationships between Indigenous and Black SF in Canada or to the particular ways Canada’s settler colonial past and present inform the ways Black Canadian and Indigenous writers engage with science fiction, fantasy, and horror. How do Black and Indigenous writers respond to the different positions colonialism historically imposed on those who were subjected to alien abduction versus alien invasion? How do these genres re-present histories of slavery, genocide, displacement, and dispossession? While the dynamic between Black and Indigenous histories is at play across the Americas, as Nalo Hopkinson’s work illustrates nicely, we ask whether there is something specific about the Canadian iteration of that hemispheric history. What does it mean to engage in a comparison of Black and Indigenous writing in the genres from this location, the settler-colonial formation called Canada? How else might we think of the relations and relays between blackness and indigeneity in modes other than the comparative? How do the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror attend to the historically triangulated relations among settler, Indigenous, and racialized immigrant peoples, including, for instance, Asian Canadians? What might be different about Asian Canadian engagement with this settler-colonial history? Whether in outer space, an alternate universe, a haunted house, or a mythic time, the worlds built in genre fiction seem to open up and provoke questions of how to both represent and transform the colonial conditions of our shared and still incommensurable world. How do Indigenous and Black Canadian writers working in or with these genres explore the possibilities for alternative kinds of social and political power—in other words, how do they take up the utopian impulses of conventional SF? This is the challenge of finding “new ways of doing things” that Nalo Hopkinson describes as the possibility in science fiction that is taken up by “the colonizee” as a form of critique.

Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash

We ask, further, how this comparative focus might allow for a critical engagement with Fredric Jameson’s claim that science fiction returns us to history by representing it as a speculative future, thus helping us to imagine ways past current political impasses. What does an Indigenous / Black novum look like? How do works of Afro- and Indigenous futurism also complicate the temporality of the novum by at times exploring what-could-have-been and what-always-has-been? In writing of recent African science fiction, Matthew Omelsky argues that it engages with a new form of biopolitics that he calls “neuropolitics,” by which he means the extension of power to “the control of memory and thought”; to what extent does Black / Indigenous SF exhibit a similar set of concerns?

Across these speculative, weird, and fantastic modes of storytelling, world-building and theorizing, how do Black and Indigenous authors grappling with the histories and the present of Canada find space to write within, persist within and demand the impossible?

For this special issue, we seek both scholarly essays on these questions and contributions from writers reflecting on their own work in/with these genres. In engaging with the questions outlined above, contributors might address, without feeling constrained by, the following specific themes:

• Land and colonization
• Contact and encounter
• The postcolonial and the decolonial
• Indigeneity and diaspora; sovereignty and belonging
• Comparisons between Canadian decolonial and US / diasporic / African / antipodean (re)visions
• Comparisons between Asian Canadian and Indigenous and/or Black-Canadian SF
• Contemporary ‘race science,’ scientific studies of ‘race’ and Black / Indigenous SF
• Speculative / racialized revisionings of gender and sexuality
• Critical utopias
• Temporality: how does Indigenous and Black Canadian SF do the ‘future’ differently?
• Enlightenment critique: scientific rationalism vs. non-European epistemologies
• Tensions between Indigenous design/technologies and those introduced from without
• Publishing media for genre fiction
• Film and graphica
• Monstrosity
• Haunting
• Possession and/or dispossession
• The different modalities of fantasy, SF, horror
• The apocalyptic

Special Issue editors: Lou Cornum, Suzette Mayr, and Maureen Moynagh

The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2019. Please consult canlit.ca/submissions for instructions on how to submit via Open Journal Systems. All papers submitted will undergo a formal peer review process through Canadian Literature. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 8^th ed.). Word length for articles is 6,500-7,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited. All correspondence will go through the CanLit office.

Vancouver, located on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Watuth, and Stó:l? First Nations, is an important urban nexus of art, literature, activism, and other forms of social and political organizing and expression within Canada. While its diversity has led to the emergence of well-developed cultural and political communities, writers and artists in Vancouver have also originated new and innovative collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. Sometimes this transdisciplinary work has been inspired by political causes, such as the environmentalist resistance to pipelines and old-growth logging or the Indigenous-led challenges to the effects of settler-colonialism (including land rights, discussions of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Idle No More, ReMatriate, Red Power, and more) or the ongoing fights against neoliberalism and gentrification (especially of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside). Sometimes this transdisciplinary work has been inspired by aesthetic initiatives, such as the McLuhan-inspired intermedia work (of the Western Front) in the 1960s and 1970s, or the experiments with interdisciplinary Surrealism in the 1970s and 1980s, or the fusion of various visual arts and literary communities across the past century. Authors and artists in the 1960s wrote about Vancouver as a marginal community, outside of the glare of international attention. Today, though, Vancouver’s situation on the west coast as a vibrant hub in a trans-Pacific network of overlapping business and cultural industries demands a reconceptualization of the city that reflects its overwhelming connectedness. For better and for worse, the city has become a cultural capital. Papers are encouraged to address any combination of the arts, literatures, and politics of Vancouver, and the interconnections these have with other scales of engagement, including the national and planetary issues in which Vancouver participates.

Gregg Simpson, “Jou Jouka” (1973). Used with permission.

This special issue invites essays that examine the representation of Vancouver in art and literature, that consider individual authors and artists, that explore the state of aesthetic communities (visual, literary, architectural, filmic, etc.) in the city, or that address the confluence of politics and aesthetics. We are particularly interested in papers that explore links between art and resistance, art and the archive and collective/institutional memory, art in the neoliberal gentrification of the city and housing crises, and art and settler-colonial histories and decolonization efforts. We are also interested in papers that consider avant-garde groups and affiliations (such as TISH, the hippy and Beat poets of the 60s and 70s, Press Gang, the Vancouver School of photo-conceptualists, and the Kootenay School of Writing, amongst others), contemporary urban space, the politics of architecture, micro-literary histories, and transnational or transborder considerations. Canadian Literature publishes essays on fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drama, and inter-genre collaborations.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow the bibliographic format of the MLA Handbook, 8th ed. Articles should be between 6,000 and 7,000 words, including endnotes and works cited. Submissions should be uploaded to Canadian Literature’s online submissions system (OJS) by the deadline of August 31, 2017. See our submission guidelines for details.  Expected publication date of the issue is fall 2018.

Guest editors of this issue will be Gregory Betts, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, and Andrew McEwan.

In the last two decades, ecocriticism has become thoroughly established in Canadian literary studies. Environmental approaches to Canadian literature have transformed conventional ideas of nature and natural aesthetics; reshaped understandings of places, regions, animals, and labour; and imbued scholarship and teaching with political urgency. What in the 1990s was a new and insurrectionary critical development has become a profusion of conferences, articles, and books about Canadian environmental writing. Some twenty-five years after the term “ecocriticism” first appeared in this journal, and one hundred issues after Laurie Ricou’s “So Big About Green” editorial, the field is institutionally robust, eclectic in subject and method, and theoretically sophisticated—but also due for critical re-examination. Ongoing public controversies over tankers and hydroelectric dams, the continuing infringement of Indigenous sovereignty, the economic and political sway of the Alberta oil sands, and the increasing effects of anthropogenic climate change make a reconsideration of ecocriticism all the more pressing. Studies as different from each other as Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007) and Jedediah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015) have attempted to dispense with inherited environmental ideologies in favour of critical, political, and aesthetic categories more appropriate to a radically changing biosphere. Where, then, is Canadian environmental literature after nature? And where are Canadian literary studies after ecocriticism?

This special issue invites essays that examine the state of ecocriticism in the Canadian context, that take original environmental approaches to Canadian writing, that explore creative responses to environmental destruction and growth, and that consider the functions of literature and criticism in the neoliberal Anthropocene. How do we imagine environmental aesthetics today and for the future? What do nature writers of the past, as well as the present, have to tell us in the time of pipelines, protests, and protection of the land? We are especially interested in essays that suggest new paradigms for understanding the shape and politics of “nature” in the literatures of Canada. Comparative, multilingual, and transnational approaches, or other modes that emphasize the plurality of ecologies and natures in Canada, are particularly welcome. Articles that do more than examine a single text in light of environmental theories are encouraged. We publish essays on fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drama, and inter-genre collaborations. Contributors are invited to imagine new modes of ecocritical inquiry and to examine Indigenous ecologies and the decolonizing possibilities of environmental criticism. Studies of environmental literature from all historical periods are welcome.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow the bibliographic format of the MLA Handbook, 7th ed. Articles should be between 6,000 and 7,000 words, including endnotes and works cited. Submissions should be uploaded to Canadian Literature’s online submissions system (OJS) by the deadline of April 15, 2017. See our submission guidelines for details.

This issue will be edited by Nicholas Bradley and Laura Moss.

Questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit(at)ubc.ca.

Deadline extended to June 30, 2016 from March 15, 2016

This special issue of Canadian Literature was inspired by the inaugural gathering of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA), entitled “The Arts of Community,” which was held at Six Nations of the Grand River in October 2015. Seeking to catalyze and continue the conversations developed at that event, Canadian Literature invites submissions that explore new ways of thinking about Indigenous literary arts and community engagement.

We invite submissions by scholars, knowledge-keepers, artists, and community members that consider questions pertaining to community and Indigenous literature. We welcome academic papers, as well as creative critical pieces in alternative formats, for potential inclusion in a print issue of the journal and/or an affiliated online resource hub at canlit.ca. We are particularly interested in work that pursues strategies for moving beyond academic lip-service regarding “community consultation,” which too often replicates colonial power structures, and instead discusses methods of building relationships among scholars, artists, educational institutions, and Indigenous communities and nations based on reciprocity and respect. We therefore solicit submissions that engage with Indigenous literary arts to consider how research can become more accountable to the interests, concerns, and intellectual pursuits of Indigenous communities. Imagining literary creativity expansively, we welcome work that engages with literature, film, theatre, storytelling, song, hip hop, and other forms of narrative expression.

While open to all submissions dealing with Indigenous literary arts, we encourage work that engages with the following topics:

• the reciprocal influences of the arts on the meaning of “community” and of communities on the meaning of “art”
• the role of narrative arts in depicting, defining, addressing, and creating Indigenous communities
• the role of Indigenous communities in refining, expanding, and challenging understandings of art
• the responsibilities of artists and/or scholars to the communities of which they are part and to the communities addressed by and in their work
• the ethics of mobilizing and/or demobilizing community-specific Indigenous knowledge in scholarship or art
• the capacity of methodologies and practices prioritized in Indigenous literary studies to serve the needs of Indigenous communities

Given the significance of place to Indigenous understandings of community, and in acknowledgement of the territories in which the inaugural gathering of ILSA was held, we also invite work dealing with Haudenosaunee narrative arts, the literary history (and future) of Six Nations, and the legacy of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake.

The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2016. All papers submitted will undergo a formal peer review process through Canadian Literature. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 7th ed.) Maximum word length for articles is 6500 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.