NEWS / CALL FOR PAPERS
IACLALS ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2021 (Online)
MARCH 18-20, 2021
CALL FOR PAPERS
MARCH 18-20, 2021
CALL FOR PAPERS
Utopias and Dystopias in Our Times
With the Covid-19 pandemic slowly gripping the world in 2020, people, families, organizations, institutions, economies and nations have been jolted out of routine complacency. Multidimensional vulnerabilities and fragilities have been revealed. Amidst drastic changes in everyday life and sociability, scholars and thinkers across different fields have viewed the pandemic as an epoch-making event with the capacity to change the world for both the better and the worse.
Opinions vary between predicting the rise of global cooperation to exacerbating hyper-nationalist antagonisms; more collaborations and solidarities to growing segregation and polarization; the rise of biopower/biopolitics to the threat of armed warfare; enhanced ecological consciousness to greater anthropocentrism; the rise of posthumanism as well as hyper-individualism; economic ruin alongside audacious profiteering and so on. Growing concerns are also being expressed about science denial and circulation of unreliable information; the proliferation of automation, robotics, AI, and the online world; prolonged lockdowns and work-from-home drastically altering the dynamics of employment, aggravating unemployment, domestic violence, and impact on mental health. An inversion of Western-postcolonial/elite-subaltern stereotypes on the source of pestilence and disease is also taking place.
During this unsettling period of introspection and reflection, the literary terrain has also undergone changes. Surveys across the world indicate substantial increase in reading times and habits alongside renewed prognosis about literature as therapy. A steady flow of genre fictions like lockdown literature, pandemic literature and medical fictions are underway. Poetry has experienced a resurgence. Digital platforms for publication and dissemination of art and literature have proliferated, as have fierce debates about open and paid access and digital divides. The GPT-3 autoregressive language model for producing human-like texts by Artificial Intelligence has created an additional stir. The digital ecology of teaching, learning and research is felt to be asocial and anti-social, while the possibility of breathing the same air, touching the same resource or sharing the same space is also generating anxieties.
It is only apt that in such times, when a new normal is fast taking over, we revisit literary utopias and dystopias. At their simplest, utopias are imaginary places or societies that are ideal or prefect, and dystopias are imaginary terrains of destruction, dehumanization, suffering or injustice. While these forms are repositories of hope and despair, they are also crucially, imaginary, unreal and unrealizable. The coinage of the word utopia is attributed to the publication of Thomas More’s Latin satire, Utopia, in 1516, as an ancient Greek combination of utopia as well as eutopia, no-place as well as good-place; while the earliest usage of dystopia is traced to 1747 to Henry Lewis Younge’s poetic work, Utopia: or, Apollo’s Golden Days, appearing as “dustopia” or bad- or unlucky-place before being popularly attributed to John Stuart Mill in 1868. Jeremy Bentham also employed the term cacotopia in 1818 in contrast to utopia, for a bad or wicked government.
Scholars like Lyman Tower Sargent have categorized utopias into three types: “the literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory” (2010, 41); while others like Frederic Jameson have emphasized that the “destiny” of “Utopia has always been a political issue” (2005, xi). Despite the modern origins of the two words, their antecedents have also been traced to ancient myths, epics and religions in both the Western as well as non-Western worlds. Notable utopian writings extend from Plato’s Republic, Bacon’s New Atlantis, H.G. Well’s A Modern Utopia, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed to Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, while dystopian works range from Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s Ninety Eighty Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement, to Prayag Akbar’s Leila.
By now, a wide array of utopian and dystopian literary types or sub-genres are recognized and theorized: political, statist, corporate, ecological (ecotopia), economic, scientific, nuclear, epidemiological, feminist, racial, religious, sexual, psychological, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, indigenous, colonial, postcolonial, philosophical, global, extraterrestrial and cosmological. Both utopias and dystopias have been understood and discussed as speculative fiction. Similarities and distinctions have also been drawn with science fiction and fantasy. Both are also associated with certain periodicity and historicity, with utopias prevailing more during the Enlightenment era till the nineteenth century with a brief surge during the 1960s and 70s; and dystopias associated more with the twentieth century and later.
Lately, distinctions have been drawn between dystopias and anti-utopias, the latter being interpreted primarily as critiques of utopias (Krishna Kumar, 1987). Greater emphasis has also been placed on understanding the ambiguities and ambivalences of utopias. Fredric Jameson goes as far as to argue that for any contemporary utopian project “anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy” (2005, xvi). In 2011, Margaret Atwood has coined a new term, “Ustopia,” explaining it as, “a world I made up by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other” (‘the road to Ustopia,’ The Guardian). In an increasingly polarized world, there is also discussion about my utopia being your dystopia and vice-versa.
So, what is the scope and significance of utopian or dystopian literary imagination in our times? Does the context of the pandemic provide a ripe ground for such leaps of imagination? This conference calls for papers on any of the following or related themes:
Mohd Asaduddin
Chair, IACLALS
With the Covid-19 pandemic slowly gripping the world in 2020, people, families, organizations, institutions, economies and nations have been jolted out of routine complacency. Multidimensional vulnerabilities and fragilities have been revealed. Amidst drastic changes in everyday life and sociability, scholars and thinkers across different fields have viewed the pandemic as an epoch-making event with the capacity to change the world for both the better and the worse.
Opinions vary between predicting the rise of global cooperation to exacerbating hyper-nationalist antagonisms; more collaborations and solidarities to growing segregation and polarization; the rise of biopower/biopolitics to the threat of armed warfare; enhanced ecological consciousness to greater anthropocentrism; the rise of posthumanism as well as hyper-individualism; economic ruin alongside audacious profiteering and so on. Growing concerns are also being expressed about science denial and circulation of unreliable information; the proliferation of automation, robotics, AI, and the online world; prolonged lockdowns and work-from-home drastically altering the dynamics of employment, aggravating unemployment, domestic violence, and impact on mental health. An inversion of Western-postcolonial/elite-subaltern stereotypes on the source of pestilence and disease is also taking place.
During this unsettling period of introspection and reflection, the literary terrain has also undergone changes. Surveys across the world indicate substantial increase in reading times and habits alongside renewed prognosis about literature as therapy. A steady flow of genre fictions like lockdown literature, pandemic literature and medical fictions are underway. Poetry has experienced a resurgence. Digital platforms for publication and dissemination of art and literature have proliferated, as have fierce debates about open and paid access and digital divides. The GPT-3 autoregressive language model for producing human-like texts by Artificial Intelligence has created an additional stir. The digital ecology of teaching, learning and research is felt to be asocial and anti-social, while the possibility of breathing the same air, touching the same resource or sharing the same space is also generating anxieties.
It is only apt that in such times, when a new normal is fast taking over, we revisit literary utopias and dystopias. At their simplest, utopias are imaginary places or societies that are ideal or prefect, and dystopias are imaginary terrains of destruction, dehumanization, suffering or injustice. While these forms are repositories of hope and despair, they are also crucially, imaginary, unreal and unrealizable. The coinage of the word utopia is attributed to the publication of Thomas More’s Latin satire, Utopia, in 1516, as an ancient Greek combination of utopia as well as eutopia, no-place as well as good-place; while the earliest usage of dystopia is traced to 1747 to Henry Lewis Younge’s poetic work, Utopia: or, Apollo’s Golden Days, appearing as “dustopia” or bad- or unlucky-place before being popularly attributed to John Stuart Mill in 1868. Jeremy Bentham also employed the term cacotopia in 1818 in contrast to utopia, for a bad or wicked government.
Scholars like Lyman Tower Sargent have categorized utopias into three types: “the literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory” (2010, 41); while others like Frederic Jameson have emphasized that the “destiny” of “Utopia has always been a political issue” (2005, xi). Despite the modern origins of the two words, their antecedents have also been traced to ancient myths, epics and religions in both the Western as well as non-Western worlds. Notable utopian writings extend from Plato’s Republic, Bacon’s New Atlantis, H.G. Well’s A Modern Utopia, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed to Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, while dystopian works range from Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s Ninety Eighty Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement, to Prayag Akbar’s Leila.
By now, a wide array of utopian and dystopian literary types or sub-genres are recognized and theorized: political, statist, corporate, ecological (ecotopia), economic, scientific, nuclear, epidemiological, feminist, racial, religious, sexual, psychological, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, indigenous, colonial, postcolonial, philosophical, global, extraterrestrial and cosmological. Both utopias and dystopias have been understood and discussed as speculative fiction. Similarities and distinctions have also been drawn with science fiction and fantasy. Both are also associated with certain periodicity and historicity, with utopias prevailing more during the Enlightenment era till the nineteenth century with a brief surge during the 1960s and 70s; and dystopias associated more with the twentieth century and later.
Lately, distinctions have been drawn between dystopias and anti-utopias, the latter being interpreted primarily as critiques of utopias (Krishna Kumar, 1987). Greater emphasis has also been placed on understanding the ambiguities and ambivalences of utopias. Fredric Jameson goes as far as to argue that for any contemporary utopian project “anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy” (2005, xvi). In 2011, Margaret Atwood has coined a new term, “Ustopia,” explaining it as, “a world I made up by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other” (‘the road to Ustopia,’ The Guardian). In an increasingly polarized world, there is also discussion about my utopia being your dystopia and vice-versa.
So, what is the scope and significance of utopian or dystopian literary imagination in our times? Does the context of the pandemic provide a ripe ground for such leaps of imagination? This conference calls for papers on any of the following or related themes:
- Theorizing Utopias and Dystopias
- Utopia, Dystopia and World Literature
- Colonial or Postcolonial Utopias and Dystopias
- Ecotopias
- Utopias, Dystopias and Feminism
- Dystopia and Utopias of AI, robotics, cyborgs and social media
- Political and Ideological utopias and dystopias
- Postmodern Utopias and Dystopias
- Globalization and utopian/dystopian fiction and culture
- Pandemic and utopian/dystopian imagination
- Indian or South Asian utopias and dystopias
- Utopias/Dystopias vis-à-vis speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy.
- The conference is open only to members of IACLALS (please visit https://www.iaclals.com/membership.html to know how to become a member).
- DEADLINE CLOSED.
- If you wish to be considered for the CD Narasimhaiah Prize for the Best Paper presented at the conference, please submit complete papers latest by February 8, 2021. Kindly indicate ‘Submission for CDN Prize’ in the subject line of the email. All others should also submit their papers by February 8, 2021 in no more than 3500-4000 words.
- Please note that presenters shall have fifteen minutes to read their papers.
- Registration to be completed by January 15, 2021 (details will be sent along with acceptances).
- IACLALS also announces the next edition of the Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize for the Best Paper published in the previous block of two years (2019-20) by a member of the IACLALS. Please submit your published paper with all details to iaclalsconferences@gmail.com by December 31, 2020. You must have been a member of IACLALS when you published the paper. Past winners of the Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize can submit entries for the prize only after the completion of three years from the year they received the award. Papers submitted for the award earlier cannot be submitted again. Please indicate ‘Submission for MM Prize’ in the subject line of the email.
Mohd Asaduddin
Chair, IACLALS
