(Organized by session day and time)
Wednesday, March 11 - All Sessions in Smith Hall
10:15 Session I – Fiction, Science, and Language
“Ferguson is the Future: Putting the
Sociological Imagination to Work through the Speculative Arts” (Ruha Benjamin) It is 2064: The eve
of the 50th anniversary of the Ferguson Uprising. The struggle has matured and
reshaped every facet of social life. But forgetfulness is endemic, so the
Risers, now in their seventies, are looking to pump energy in to the movement.
Among the new initiatives designed by the People’s Science Council in the
aftermath of Bloody November, is a bioReparations programme that allows victims
of police brutality to regenerate organs or limbs via stem cell
transplantation. Over twenty thousand individuals have benefited from such
procedures. Now a major new component of the programme will be unveiled for the
anniversary, simply called the reGeneration. But the largest biobank in the
country has been repeatedly hit by raiders intent on sabotaging the programme
and selling stem cells on the white market. Aiyana Jones and her team of
Keepers have to find a way to secure the cell depository and revitalize the
movement. This talk is an experiment in using fiction to know things differently. I
recently completed a book on contemporary stem cell research, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the
Stem Cell Frontier, and I was left with a burning question: If our bodies
can regenerate, why do we perceive our body politic as so utterly fixed? This
story is an attempt to perceive otherwise, to hold myself accountable to the
query I buried in People’s Science, and to craft a different social vision that
troubles present configurations of race, science, and subjectivity.
Ruha Benjamin is Assistant Professor of African American studies at Princeton University, specializing in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and biotechnology; race-ethnicity and gender; health and biopolitics. She is the author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013) and a number of other articles and book chapters that examine the tension between innovation and equity, science and citizenship, health and justice.
“Xenoneobiophobia” (Jeff Lee and Kathy Lee) Speculative fiction
has always been about the “What if?” Thus it crosses genres and remains
intriguingly hard to explain. It incorporates history, science fact and
fiction, Steampunk, horror, fantasy and time-travel, mixes and delivers a
complex cocktail of ideas that make us think. It examines the best of us and
the worst of us. Why? To make sure we don’t wander this path without thinking?
Or to turn the rock over and see what lives underneath? Octavia Butler deals
with social commentary and asks us the question “who are we really?” and “what
are we afraid of?” What does speculative fiction tell us about what we fear?
What do our fears tell us about ourselves? In this discussion we introduce
Xenoneobiophobia, the fear of new or alien biology as presented in Dawn, the first book of Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series. In this series,
most of mankind has been destroyed by nuclear war. Physically repulsive but
sexually seductive aliens rescued a few humans and the only way to reproduce is
to blend with the aliens producing children that are “other.” We examine
questions such as the science of the possible. What is the definition of being
human both physically and spiritually? And by being human, do we contain the
seeds to our inevitable destruction? We will discuss Oryx and Crake by
well-known author Margaret Atwood and hear from two new voices, Justina Robson
and Lauren Beukes. These authors bring warnings to us about a future where we
become the “other.”
Jeff Lee is a college Biology professor in the multicultural metropolis that is
Northeastern New Jersey. A child of LBJ’s Great Society, his love of reading
was kindled in his local library, one of many around the country built through
the generosity (?) of Steel Baron Andrew Carnegie. Through three degree
programs, five colleges, several Federal grant programs and a half century in
education, he has developed a holistic approach to teaching, learning and life.
A true child of the sixties and early seventies, he is also a plastic model
builder, ham radio operator, guitar player, toy train operator, amateur geologist,
museum junkie and national park enthusiast. For the last 32 years he has been
blessed to walk through this world with his co-presenter.
Kathy
Lee is an engineer by day and avid student of poetry, mysteries, thrillers,
graphic novels and science fiction by night. As an engineer, thinking about the
future is a requirement. Speculative Fiction represents the perfect
intersection of new ideas and their possibilities and consequences. Kathy is a
graduate of MIT and North Carolina State University. She studied chemistry,
engineering and poetry. She is a mother of 2 teens, one in college and one
almost ready. Currently she works as a researcher for an oil company. She is
also an avid student of American History. She has roots in the South and now
makes her home in New Jersey.
11:30 Session II – Utopic Dystopias as Social Protest
“‘The Comet’ by W.E.B. Du Bois:
post-apocalypse, speculation and proto-Afrofuturism” (Adriano Elia) W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920) is a groundbreaking example of
fiction that is simultaneously post-apocalyptic, speculative and
proto-Afrofuturist. In a dystopian early 20th-century New York, only a young
black man (Jim) and a rich young white woman (Julia) survive the deadly gases
of a comet. Du Bois uses this narrative device to speculate on whether racial
prejudices would be erased in a world with only two survivors. Formerly
discriminated in a white-led society, now Jim has become a sort of Adam, the
first of a new humanity where blacks and whites should have the same rights and
dignity. However, as a result of her white supremacist upbringing, Julia ends
up considering Jim as a dangerous alien rather than a potential savior. The
racist psyche persists even when races no longer exist. “The Comet” thus
functions as a fictional counterpart of the critical insights previously
introduced by Du Bois in The Souls of
Black Folk (1903) – double consciousness, the color line and the veil – and
foreshadows further critical issues and tropes that would be developed later,
namely Franz Fanon’s psychology of racism expressed in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Ralph Ellison’s metaphor of
‘invisibility’. Moreover, as a proto-Afrofuturist work of fiction, the story
prefigures the post-apocalyptic worlds of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E.
Butler and becomes a parable in which the supernatural element of the toxic
comet allows for interesting speculations on the alienation experienced by
people of African descent.
Adriano
Elia is Senior Lecturer in English at the Political Science Department of the
University of Rome, “Roma Tre.” He has participated in conferences in Italy and
abroad and his publications include essays on multiculturalism and contemporary
British fiction, Afrofuturism, and three volumes: Hanif Kureishi (2012), The
UK: Learning the Language, Studying the Culture (co-author, 2005), and Ut Pictura Poesis: Word-Image
Interrelationship and the Word-Painting Technique (2002).
“H.G. Wells’s In the Days of the Comet (1906): a precursor that helps explain why we love steampunk, why we love comets” (Iain Halliday) The paper uses this particular example of Wells’s utopian fiction, and his use of the English language in creating it, as a precursor of and inspiration for the contemporary steampunk phenomenon. Within the terms of the paper, In the Days of the Comet will be a launchpad towards future speculation. Wells was certainly among those writers who we can now describe as being exponents of speculative humanities, a writer who sought to look beyond his present to envisage futures that encompassed solutions to a variety of social and existential problems. Making reference to studies on Wells’s writing and providing examples of Wells’s influence on other artists throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, I hope to illustrate some of the processes by which Wells came to be an important general source of inspiration, as well as illustrating how this particular novel still resonates strongly with many artists and readers. As well as a conventional overview of the novel’s perceived significance for scholars and readers since its publication, the method adopted will also include some examples of my close reading of Wells’s text, supported by consideration of a contemporary (1906) Italian translation of the work.
Iain Halliday grew up in Scotland and England and studied at the University of Manchester, UK, before moving to Sicily in 1990. He currently works as Senior Researcher/Lecturer in English language and translation in the Department of Humanities of the University of Catania. Over the years he has also worked as a literary translator from Italian, translating works by Giovanni Verga, Valerio Massimo Manfredi and Claudio Magris among others, and has carried out research in the field of Translation Studies that led to the publication of Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: Theory and Praxis of Literary Translation (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009).
“Locating Flight to Canada in Afrofuturism” (George Mote) Since Mark Dery coined the term in 1993, Walter Mosley, Sheree R. Thomas, and Ytasha Womack have all sought to expand and explain the importance of “Afrofuturism” for African-American literature and speculative fiction. In a broad way, we might understand the term to encompass any work that, as Womack has it, compels people to “transform their [social] world and break free of their own set of limitations” while paying particular attention to African-American experiences. In other words, contemporary Afrofuturistic theory both excavates works from the past to highlight the history of African-American contributions to science- and speculative fiction and exposes the ways that these works operate in the present to create strategies for resisting social and personal limitations. In “Locating Flight to Canada in Afrofuturism” I argue for the importance of Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel Flight to Canada alongside canonical Afrofuturists like Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. Flight to Canada exists in an anachronistic world where jumbo jets and television sets are concurrent with the American Civil War and follows the journey of a fugitive-slave poet who uses his poetry to become “a national institution” (84). In this way, Flight to Canada engages the history of slave narratives that often procured white patronage to gain widespread distribution and contemporary celebrity culture to argue that slavery exists on a continuum with other forms of oppression like “cultural slavery” (67) and “slavery [as a] state of mind” (95). For Reed, the legal system of slavery has no neat end or neat beginning and I argue that Flight to Canada provides generative strategies for the edification of a readership that, Afrofuturistic artists and theorists would argue, must acknowledge and struggle against its own place on this continuum of subjugation.
George Mote is a teaching fellow and PhD candidate at Lehigh University studying post-1945 American fiction. He earned his MA from Lehigh in 2014, his BFA from Emerson College in 2008, and his AS from Gloucester County College in 2006. He lives in southern New Jersey with his wife and they are expecting their first child.
“H.G. Wells’s In the Days of the Comet (1906): a precursor that helps explain why we love steampunk, why we love comets” (Iain Halliday) The paper uses this particular example of Wells’s utopian fiction, and his use of the English language in creating it, as a precursor of and inspiration for the contemporary steampunk phenomenon. Within the terms of the paper, In the Days of the Comet will be a launchpad towards future speculation. Wells was certainly among those writers who we can now describe as being exponents of speculative humanities, a writer who sought to look beyond his present to envisage futures that encompassed solutions to a variety of social and existential problems. Making reference to studies on Wells’s writing and providing examples of Wells’s influence on other artists throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, I hope to illustrate some of the processes by which Wells came to be an important general source of inspiration, as well as illustrating how this particular novel still resonates strongly with many artists and readers. As well as a conventional overview of the novel’s perceived significance for scholars and readers since its publication, the method adopted will also include some examples of my close reading of Wells’s text, supported by consideration of a contemporary (1906) Italian translation of the work.
Iain Halliday grew up in Scotland and England and studied at the University of Manchester, UK, before moving to Sicily in 1990. He currently works as Senior Researcher/Lecturer in English language and translation in the Department of Humanities of the University of Catania. Over the years he has also worked as a literary translator from Italian, translating works by Giovanni Verga, Valerio Massimo Manfredi and Claudio Magris among others, and has carried out research in the field of Translation Studies that led to the publication of Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: Theory and Praxis of Literary Translation (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009).
“Locating Flight to Canada in Afrofuturism” (George Mote) Since Mark Dery coined the term in 1993, Walter Mosley, Sheree R. Thomas, and Ytasha Womack have all sought to expand and explain the importance of “Afrofuturism” for African-American literature and speculative fiction. In a broad way, we might understand the term to encompass any work that, as Womack has it, compels people to “transform their [social] world and break free of their own set of limitations” while paying particular attention to African-American experiences. In other words, contemporary Afrofuturistic theory both excavates works from the past to highlight the history of African-American contributions to science- and speculative fiction and exposes the ways that these works operate in the present to create strategies for resisting social and personal limitations. In “Locating Flight to Canada in Afrofuturism” I argue for the importance of Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel Flight to Canada alongside canonical Afrofuturists like Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. Flight to Canada exists in an anachronistic world where jumbo jets and television sets are concurrent with the American Civil War and follows the journey of a fugitive-slave poet who uses his poetry to become “a national institution” (84). In this way, Flight to Canada engages the history of slave narratives that often procured white patronage to gain widespread distribution and contemporary celebrity culture to argue that slavery exists on a continuum with other forms of oppression like “cultural slavery” (67) and “slavery [as a] state of mind” (95). For Reed, the legal system of slavery has no neat end or neat beginning and I argue that Flight to Canada provides generative strategies for the edification of a readership that, Afrofuturistic artists and theorists would argue, must acknowledge and struggle against its own place on this continuum of subjugation.
George Mote is a teaching fellow and PhD candidate at Lehigh University studying post-1945 American fiction. He earned his MA from Lehigh in 2014, his BFA from Emerson College in 2008, and his AS from Gloucester County College in 2006. He lives in southern New Jersey with his wife and they are expecting their first child.
1:00 Session III – Queering Boundaries in
Afrofuturism and Butler
“Speculative Queer Ecologies in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower” (Gregory “Luke” Chwala) Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic novel, Parable of the Sower, addresses ecological injustice in a racialized landscape of economic and gender inequality by subverting these negative dystopian triggers and creating a utopian queer vision of the future—an alternative, speculative reality. Parable of the Sower addresses global modernity and endangered ecosystems by offering a queer ecological solution to environmental crises created by economic globalization. Butler’s solution redefines family and community by constructing a colony comprised of a coalition of refugees from diverse racial and sexual backgrounds, a reclaiming of nature cultures by those isolated from rural environments, and non-traditional family groups, made up of the abandoned, orphaned, emancipated, and diverse people. Queer ecology stresses the importance of recognizing diverse sexualities and their importance to humanity, and equally import, it stresses the urgency that all living organisms and ecosystems must coevolve to maintain biodiversity. Patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalistic, racial hierarchies destroy the environment and create a dystopia in Parable of the Sower, while queer families sustain and respect diversity, coalition, and nature cultures in reconstructing a utopia. To develop this argument, I highlight the destructive influences of heteronormativity in the novel juxtaposed to reconstructive queer ecological approaches used to respond to the conflict generated by a nature/culture binary division. Butler’s novel offers an alternative reality as a solution to the environmental issues threatening our society—a unique, queer ecological, utopian futurity invested in collaboration and coalition.
Gregory “Luke” Chwala is a doctoral candidate and teacher’s associate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the Department of English Literature and Criticism. He is studying nineteenth-century British/Irish Gothic and Victorian literature and queer transatlantic cultural literature and theory with an emphasis on queer decolonial ecology. His dissertation, entitled “A Reexamination of Colonized Landscapes and Bodies: Reading Queer Ecology from the Imperial Gothic Novel to Contemporary Science Fiction,” utilizes queer ecology as a mode of reparative reading to analyze colonial-themed Gothic fictional representations of race, gender, and sexuality in supernatural literature from the late-nineteenth-century Imperial Gothic novels of H. Rider Haggard through the late-twentieth-century environmental science fiction of Octavia Butler. He holds an MA degree in English from Brooklyn College, an MA degree in Public Communications from Fordham University, and a BA degree in English from Concordia College. He also teaches for South University and Heald College.
“Shock to Your System: Queer Logics of Modernity and Mythology in the Black Superheroic” (Christian Keeve) Afrofuturism seeks to
rework notions of Futurity through Black cultural lenses, allowing Blackness to
position itself in constructed timelines and imagined spaces. This project
seeks to address how the Black body specifically functions as a site of
imaginative possibility, around and through which futurity is constructed and
deconstructed. To address the Afrofuturistic positioning of Black bodies,
Blackness must be placed into dialogue with the Android and the Superhero, an
intersection that is often regarded as an inherent self-contradiction and biological
impossibility. However, it is necessary to interrogate this intersection for
Black bodies to enter culturally realized future-scapes. In this project I
utilize an Afrofuturistic examination of Black Super-bodies that are bestowed
with electromagnetic power and technological enhancement, two forces that are
often deployed as complementary, if not mutually inextricable. A mixture of
visual analysis and cultural anthropology is used to examine iconic figures and
artifacts from the past half century, spanning comics, art, music, literature,
and film in both physical and digital spaces. The Electric and the
Technological are put into dialogue with these Black cultural and mythological
artifacts, and analyzed through a contextual framework surrounding the interrelation
of Queerness, Modernity, and Ecocriticism. The Black Super-body is framed as an
essential site for the construction of imagined futures, the complication of
narratives surrounding posthumanism, and the call for a critical examination of
Black imaginatory body politics.
“The Octavia E. Butler Papers” (Natalie Russell)
Natalie Russell is Assistant
Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA,
where the Octavia E. Butler papers are housed. She is the author of “Beyond
Category: Unpacking Octavia E. Butler,” and is planning a Butler exhibit for
2017.
2:25 Session IV – Gender, Fairy Tales,
and Matriarchal Myths
“Questioning the Binary: Monique Wittig’s Reimagining of Gendered Categories” (Viral Bhatt) This paper essentially handles Wittig’s notion of sexual identities and how she conceives of this idea through both fictive and theoretical writings. Professor Bhatt’s abstract is forthcoming.
Viral Bhatt is the Assistant Professor of French and Coordinator of French Studies at Essex County College. She recently received her PhD in French from the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Dr. Bhatt's dissertation, Nomadic Impulses, De-Centered Bodies: Female Agency and Corporeality in the Cinema of French and Francophone Women Directors (1962-2007), reflects and underscores the interdisciplinary nature of her academic training, teaching methodology, and scholarly interests.
“‘The nearest technically impossible thing’: classical receptions in Helen Oyeyemi” (Benjamin Eldon Stevens) In this paper I examine classical receptions in the novels of contemporary Nigerian-British author Helen Oyeyemi (b. 1984): The Icarus Girl (2005), The Opposite House (2007), White is for Witching (2009), Mr. Fox (2011), and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). As ‘retellings’ of fairy tales, the novels offer versions of ancient stories as part of showing how meaningful depiction of daily life requires combining ‘the realistic’ with ‘the fantastic’ or what is ‘literally untrue’ (Attebery). As one of Oyeyemi’s characters puts it, ‘technically impossible things are always trying so hard to happen to us, and [we] just [let] the nearest technically impossible thing happen’ (Boy, Snow, Bird). Classical receptions contribute to the expression of this experience insofar as reconstructing the past is epistemologically similar to imagining other worlds or speculating about the future, with readers required to posit interpretive paradigms that differ from their own lived experience. Like fantasy and fairy tales, ancient classics are ‘dependent on the dialectic between author and reader ... that is a fiction of consensual construction of belief’ (Mendlesohn). Oyeyemi’s novels may thus be read as approaching a wide range of stories as ‘texts which are enticingly incomplete: ... self-contained, syntagmatic structures of narrative for which the reader must always supply a missing paradigm’ (Rogers and Stevens). As such they serve as compelling examples of the potential for speculative fiction to depict daily life in ways that emphasize its inherent alterity, making possible--by engaging in--criticism and subversion of normative modes of storytelling and understanding.
“Questioning the Binary: Monique Wittig’s Reimagining of Gendered Categories” (Viral Bhatt) This paper essentially handles Wittig’s notion of sexual identities and how she conceives of this idea through both fictive and theoretical writings. Professor Bhatt’s abstract is forthcoming.
Viral Bhatt is the Assistant Professor of French and Coordinator of French Studies at Essex County College. She recently received her PhD in French from the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Dr. Bhatt's dissertation, Nomadic Impulses, De-Centered Bodies: Female Agency and Corporeality in the Cinema of French and Francophone Women Directors (1962-2007), reflects and underscores the interdisciplinary nature of her academic training, teaching methodology, and scholarly interests.
“‘The nearest technically impossible thing’: classical receptions in Helen Oyeyemi” (Benjamin Eldon Stevens) In this paper I examine classical receptions in the novels of contemporary Nigerian-British author Helen Oyeyemi (b. 1984): The Icarus Girl (2005), The Opposite House (2007), White is for Witching (2009), Mr. Fox (2011), and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). As ‘retellings’ of fairy tales, the novels offer versions of ancient stories as part of showing how meaningful depiction of daily life requires combining ‘the realistic’ with ‘the fantastic’ or what is ‘literally untrue’ (Attebery). As one of Oyeyemi’s characters puts it, ‘technically impossible things are always trying so hard to happen to us, and [we] just [let] the nearest technically impossible thing happen’ (Boy, Snow, Bird). Classical receptions contribute to the expression of this experience insofar as reconstructing the past is epistemologically similar to imagining other worlds or speculating about the future, with readers required to posit interpretive paradigms that differ from their own lived experience. Like fantasy and fairy tales, ancient classics are ‘dependent on the dialectic between author and reader ... that is a fiction of consensual construction of belief’ (Mendlesohn). Oyeyemi’s novels may thus be read as approaching a wide range of stories as ‘texts which are enticingly incomplete: ... self-contained, syntagmatic structures of narrative for which the reader must always supply a missing paradigm’ (Rogers and Stevens). As such they serve as compelling examples of the potential for speculative fiction to depict daily life in ways that emphasize its inherent alterity, making possible--by engaging in--criticism and subversion of normative modes of storytelling and understanding.
Benjamin
Eldon Stevens is the author of Silence in
Catullus [http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5039.htm] (University of Wisconsin
Press 2013) and co-editor of Classical
Traditions in Science Fiction [http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199988419.do]
(Oxford University Press 2015) and has published widely on Latin poetry;
linguistics; the history of the senses in culture; and classical traditions in
science fiction, fantasy, and comics. He has taught at Hollins University, the
University of Colorado at Boulder, and Bard College, including for the Bard
Prison Initiative; currently he is teaching at Bryn Mawr College. Outside of
academia, he works in a cappella as a clinician and vocal percussionist. You
can follow him on Academia.edu: http://brynmawr.academia.edu/BenjaminEldonStevens; Facebook: www.facebook.com/benjamineldonstevens; and Twitter: (@beldonstevens).
“Defamiliarizing the Black Matriarch in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood” (Bethany Jacobs) This paper argues that the trilogy Lilith’s Brood (1987-89) signifies on the Black Matriarch, a demonized trope of supposedly all-powerful black womanhood. While certain social historians trace this figure to slave times, the Black Matriarch remains a significant figure in the 1900s. Over the past century, white patriarchy, and even African American movements like Black Nationalism, has responded to shifting economies and ongoing oppression of black people by vilifying black women. They have blamed her, and her supposed matriarchal rule over the black family, for the societal effects of ongoing systemic white racism. This scenario finds its echo in Lilith’s Brood, whose black female protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, is a physically invulnerable black superwoman that humans blame for their enslavement to an alien race. Lilith’s superhuman strength, advanced intelligence, and position as a ward of the aliens, appears to promote a vision of the Black Matriarch superwoman. A closer exploration of Lilith’s circumstances among the aliens, however, reveals that no amount of physical strength can elide her complete lack of social autonomy. By drawing attention to the matriarchy myth, Butler demonstrates that appearances of power have not actually translated to black women’s social liberation in contemporary society. This is a profound intervention in black feminism, which has committed itself primarily to disproving the Myth of the Black Matriarch through evidence of black women’s social undervaluation. Butler’s tact, however, asserts that it makes no difference whether “black matriarchs” exist. If black women do not have literal systemic authority, no amount of individual strength will result in their social power and autonomy.
“Defamiliarizing the Black Matriarch in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood” (Bethany Jacobs) This paper argues that the trilogy Lilith’s Brood (1987-89) signifies on the Black Matriarch, a demonized trope of supposedly all-powerful black womanhood. While certain social historians trace this figure to slave times, the Black Matriarch remains a significant figure in the 1900s. Over the past century, white patriarchy, and even African American movements like Black Nationalism, has responded to shifting economies and ongoing oppression of black people by vilifying black women. They have blamed her, and her supposed matriarchal rule over the black family, for the societal effects of ongoing systemic white racism. This scenario finds its echo in Lilith’s Brood, whose black female protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, is a physically invulnerable black superwoman that humans blame for their enslavement to an alien race. Lilith’s superhuman strength, advanced intelligence, and position as a ward of the aliens, appears to promote a vision of the Black Matriarch superwoman. A closer exploration of Lilith’s circumstances among the aliens, however, reveals that no amount of physical strength can elide her complete lack of social autonomy. By drawing attention to the matriarchy myth, Butler demonstrates that appearances of power have not actually translated to black women’s social liberation in contemporary society. This is a profound intervention in black feminism, which has committed itself primarily to disproving the Myth of the Black Matriarch through evidence of black women’s social undervaluation. Butler’s tact, however, asserts that it makes no difference whether “black matriarchs” exist. If black women do not have literal systemic authority, no amount of individual strength will result in their social power and autonomy.
Bethany Jacobs is a postdoctoral fellow in English at the University of Oregon, where she teaches and researches multiethnic American literature, speculative fiction, critical race theory, and women's and gender studies. She is currently revising her book project, "Refusing Mothers: The Dystopic Maternal in Contemporary American Women's Literature. Dr/ Jacobs is scheduled to participate via SKYPE.
3:50 Session V – Signifying Horror and the Fantastic
“Discovering Reality through Body Disintegration in Recent Spanish Horror Cinema” (Diego Batista) Popular entertainment not only serves to provide a zeitgeist of the collective “mood” of a population, but can also aid to condition consumers toward a particular point of view and, however subtly, shift ideology. Lately, we have seen a significant spike in the number of horror movies produced in the United States. Such a prevalence of the genre is reminiscent of the “golden age” of terror in postwar Spain in the late sixties and early seventies. In more recent years, many Spanish auteurs have made use of the body in their works to criticize and expose the problems of a society in the process of economic, cultural and identity deterioration. This paper analyzes how by employing specific universal fears, movies such as Abre los Ojos (1997) by Alejandro Amenábar, Julia’s Eyes (2010) by Guillem Morales, and Painless (2012) by Juan Carlos Medina, among others, serve as the basis for the staging of an incomplete and confusing "reality" that leads the viewers to question their existence and begin a personal search within their surroundings. Perhaps conclusions can be drawn as to the type of ideological conditioning that is taking place among the target audience of this horror film explosion.
“Discovering Reality through Body Disintegration in Recent Spanish Horror Cinema” (Diego Batista) Popular entertainment not only serves to provide a zeitgeist of the collective “mood” of a population, but can also aid to condition consumers toward a particular point of view and, however subtly, shift ideology. Lately, we have seen a significant spike in the number of horror movies produced in the United States. Such a prevalence of the genre is reminiscent of the “golden age” of terror in postwar Spain in the late sixties and early seventies. In more recent years, many Spanish auteurs have made use of the body in their works to criticize and expose the problems of a society in the process of economic, cultural and identity deterioration. This paper analyzes how by employing specific universal fears, movies such as Abre los Ojos (1997) by Alejandro Amenábar, Julia’s Eyes (2010) by Guillem Morales, and Painless (2012) by Juan Carlos Medina, among others, serve as the basis for the staging of an incomplete and confusing "reality" that leads the viewers to question their existence and begin a personal search within their surroundings. Perhaps conclusions can be drawn as to the type of ideological conditioning that is taking place among the target audience of this horror film explosion.
Diego Batista was born in the Canary Islands, Spain three years before the end of Franco’s dictatorship. He came to the US to study Spanish at Brigham Young University in 1998. After graduating in 2001, he worked as a High School teacher in California for four years. At the same time, he completed his Masters in Spanish Literature and Linguistics from California State University, Fullerton in 2005 and his Secondary Spanish Teaching Credential at California State University, San Bernardino in the same year. He received a PhD in Spanish from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. He has been an Assistant Professor at Weber State University since 2011. His research interests include literature and cultural studies from and about the Canary Islands, as well as the literary and historical relationships between Spain and Latin America especially pertaining to marginal territories and transatlantic literature. Diego is married and has six children.
“The Invisible Universe and the White Fantastic Imagination” (M. Asli Dukan) Speculative Fiction
(SF), a term encompassing the genres of fantasy, horror and science fiction,
has since its origins been an expression of the white fantastic imagination. SF
in its prototypical forms coincided with the emergence of the ideology of white
supremacy and has systemically excluded authentic images of Black people in the
genres. These negative representations would develop in the nascent American SF
industry from the mid 1920’s and would continue unopposed until the early 60s.
The SF film industry, which emerged in 1902, would mirror these representations
and would innovate further with the Voodoo/Zombie and Blaxploitation era
genres. And today, with the dominance of corporate blockbusters, the white
fantastic imagination continues to inform all SF media. In the face of this
systematic exclusion, there has been a significant output of work by Black
creators inside and outside the world of SF. Utilizing the literary and
cinematic devices of the genre, these Black creators crafted stories of agency,
freedom, independence, and better futures. In addition, much of this
alternative work has coincided with the historical realities of the Black
struggle for equality in the U.S., and can be seen as a gauge of the sociopolitical
climate of the times. For example, during the nadir of race relations in the
late 19th century and during the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960’s, Black
SF writers emerged imagining better futures for Black people. This presentation
is based on the upcoming documentary, Invisible
Universe, by producer, writer and director, M. Asli Dukan.
M. Asli Dukan is a producer, director and
editor. Her media works have screened at the Blowin’ Up A Spot Film Festival
and the M.A.L.I. Women’s Film and Performing Arts Conference in Dallas and
Austin, Texas, OnyxCon and the Octavia E. Butler Celebration of the Fantastic
Arts in Atlanta, Georgia, Citivisions and the Imagenation Film & Music
Festival in New York City and the Black to the Future Science Fiction Festival
and the Langston Hughes Film Festival, both in Seattle, Washington. She has
received the Leeway Art and Change grant in 2014, the Kitchen Table Giving
Circle grant in 2012 and the Urban Artist Initiative/NYC grant in 2009. In
addition to being in post-production on the feature-length, black sci-fi
documentary, Invisible Universe, she
is in development on the feature-length anthology horror film, Skin Folk, based on the book by award
winning sci-fi writer, Nalo Hopkinson.
“Breaking and Entering: Thresholds, Keys, and Doors in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Patrizia Barroero) This talk will explore the symbolic representation of thresholds and portals among physical spaces as a relevant and supporting framework for the evolution of the characters in the novella. Physical entities in both the private and public domains will serve to create an argument directed to break down boundaries both in the physical and psychological reality of the main characters, The duality between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will be considered as reflective of multiple dichotomies, such as public and private, open and closed, subject and object, good and evil, and light and darkness. At the same time, it will also discuss the continuum generated by the demolition and subsequent blending of these oppositions and thus concrete and abstract boundaries in the story. The key of interpretation of the text will be thus based upon the development of the characters by focusing on their transition, evolution, and development through the dismantling and annihilation of these categories.
“Breaking and Entering: Thresholds, Keys, and Doors in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Patrizia Barroero) This talk will explore the symbolic representation of thresholds and portals among physical spaces as a relevant and supporting framework for the evolution of the characters in the novella. Physical entities in both the private and public domains will serve to create an argument directed to break down boundaries both in the physical and psychological reality of the main characters, The duality between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will be considered as reflective of multiple dichotomies, such as public and private, open and closed, subject and object, good and evil, and light and darkness. At the same time, it will also discuss the continuum generated by the demolition and subsequent blending of these oppositions and thus concrete and abstract boundaries in the story. The key of interpretation of the text will be thus based upon the development of the characters by focusing on their transition, evolution, and development through the dismantling and annihilation of these categories.
Patrizia Barroero, born in Italy and naturalized American, holds a Master of Arts in English Literature (Open University, UK) and a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics (Montclair University). She has worked as an adjunct ESL and English instructor at Hudson County Community College and Essex County College. Her major academic interests lie in Feminist and Queer theory,Science Fiction, Colonial and Postcolonial writing, Comparative Literature, Linguistic Anthroplogy, and Cognitive and Psycholinguistics. In particular, her research is mainly focused on existential issues and the study and dismantling of dualistic oppositions such as good and evil male and female, obedience and disobedience, right and wrong, rational behavior and primal instincts, darkness and light, life and death, and subjectivity and objectivity.
Thursday, March 12 - All Sessions in Smith Hall
10:15 Session I – The Cultural Work of the Subversive
Liam Drislane is a adjunct instructor who currently teaches classes at Essex County College and Fairleigh Dickinson University. His MA thesis addressed conventions of race in science fiction and the racial imaginations of Mary Shelley (as seen Frankenstein) and Octavia Butler. Liam's research interests include speculative fiction, feminist and gender criticism, and critical race theory. He is currently pursuing a Master's of Teaching at FDU.
“The Hobbit According to Beowulf” (Billy Tooma) The general consensus is that The Hobbit serves as the gateway to what became modern fantasy literature. However, what can't be ignored is the heavy influence and borrowing done by its author, J.R.R. Tolkien, as the epic Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, is concerned. Through a short series of comparisons, the paralleling adventures of Bilbo Baggins and Beowulf will be shown. Professor Tooma’s abstract is forthcoming.
Billy Tooma, author of the novel A Seemingly Unstoppable Dawn, is an Instructor of English Literature and Writing at Essex County College. He is currently finishing work on his documentary, Poetry of Witness, and earning a Doctor of Letters degree from Drew University.
11:30 Session II – Intersectionality in Butler
“Construct Identities: An Examination of Akin and Jodahs and
their Inevitable Betrayals in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis” (Erika Michelle Murdey) The collected Xenogenesis trilogy, later published
under the title, Lilith’s Brood,
focuses on a future in which aliens, known as the Oankali, save/colonize a humanity
on the brink of destruction. This places the remaining humans in a unique
position of oppression and reliance in the new postcolonial society. Nowhere in
the books is this struggle clearer than in the lives of two children, Akin and
Jodahs. These construct children (of human and Oankali parentage) demonstrate
the precarious place of children in a postcolonial society. While many essays
mention Akin and how his character may be interpreted, few mention Jodahs and
none examine these two characters together in an effort to explore the
impossible space occupied by children in a postcolonial society: the
inevitability of betrayals and the continual splitting of identity. This paper
looks at Akin and Jodahs in their dystopian postcolonial setting and discusses
how their actions throughout their respective narratives (ADULTHOOD RITES and
IMAGO) represent betrayals of both their Oankali parentage and their human
parentage, and the pervasive difficulties they encounter while forming their
identities and their place in the new Earth society.
Erika Michelle Murdey lives in Lansing,
Michigan. She holds a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Alma College and graduated
from Michigan State University with a Bachelor’s in English with a Creative
Writing focus. Currently she is in the Master of English Literature program at
Central Michigan University, where she is a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Her
focus at Central is largely on Speculative Fiction.
“I Have a Dream: Reading
Afrofuturist Utopia in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Book of Martha’” (Clayton Colmon) Afrofuturist authors
who create utopias often seek to (re)present a vision of the future that is
both tied to the black experience and unmoored from a debilitating past of
bondage, inequality, and socioeconomic indeterminacy. But not all authors
“believe” in the efficacy of such visions. Indeed, in an afterward to her short
story “The Book of Martha,” Octavia Butler admits “I don’t like most utopia
stories because I don’t believe them for a moment. It seems inevitable that my
utopia would be someone else’s hell” (214). Unfortunately, the myth of the
“happy slave” all but proves the historical validity of Butler’s fear. Still, “The
Book of Martha” is Butler’s bid for a viable utopia. Despite the relative
dearth of scholarship examining “The Book of Martha,” the short story
highlights the challenges of envisioning Afrofuturist utopia and questions the
dialogue between historical texts and contemporary readers. On its surface, the
narrative articulates Butler’s speculative vision of the utopic impulse, the
mutable nature of God, and the human capacity for growth beyond its
“destructive adolescence.” However, I argue that the short story offers much
more. To this end, my presentation addresses the following questions: what
social history does Butler communicate in the story? How does her conception of
utopia pull together elements of science fiction, fantasy, and biblical
narrative to explore the problems of human imperfection? What is the
significance of black female identity in the narrative? To what end does the
story position history as a collection of failed utopic visions?
Clayton
Colmon is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of
Delaware. His work on Octavia Butler is informed by his larger dissertation
project —Afrofuturist Visions: Black
Culture, Ideology, and the Utopic Impulse—which examines how writers and
musicians of color use technology—both real and imagined—to position themselves
in present and future social discourse. His research interests are located at
the intersection of Utopian Studies, African American Studies, Queer Studies,
and Gender studies.
“Disability in Octavia Butler's Kindred” (Sami Schalk) Disability Studies scholars have been critical of the way in which disability is often used and interpreted as a metaphor for trauma in literature, but recent scholarship insists that we also cannot dismiss outright all uses of metaphor, especially when such metaphors are connected to material issues of disability and impairment. In this presentation, I argue that in Octavia Butler's Kindred, disability is not singularly metaphoric, despite previous critical readings to the contrary, because in this speculative fictional context, the trauma of slavery is actually inflicted on a black body in the present. From the Prologue's promise of disability to disability as the impetus for time travel, from time travel itself to the Epilogue's representation of Dana as disabled and healing--disability structures Kindred as both a metaphor for the impact of historical racial oppression and as a reference to the inevitability of disability for black people, both enslaved and free, during the antebellum period. As a result, I read Kindred for both the metaphoric and material meanings of disability throughout. This representation of the relationship of disability and slavery expands the neo-slave narrative's ability to represent what was previously unable to be represented within the specific historical and pragmatic context of the traditional slave narrative while also challenging disability studies scholars to take seriously the use of metaphors of disability, particularly in literature by historically marginalized groups. It is only through a blended intellectual approach to Kindred which incorporates both critical race and disability literary theories that this non-realist representation of disability can be understood in its metaphoric and materal intersectional complexity.
Sami
Schalk is an Assistant Professor of English at University at Albany, SUNY. Her
research focuses on disability, race and gender in contemporary African
American fiction. In particular, Sami's current research project explores the
representation of disability in black women’s speculative fiction. Sami’s work
has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Disability
Studies Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature and Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.
“Highlighting the Pattern: Forming the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network @OebLegacy” (Moya Bailey) via
SKYPE
Moya Bailey is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and NU Lab for Digital Humanities at Northeastern University.
1:00 Session III – Creative Roundtable: Imagining
Speculative Humanities in Dance, Fiction, and Art
“The Exquisite Corpse Project” (Anna Muniz) You are invited to
the view the exhibit of 40 student works addressing “The Exquisite Corpse
Project,” located in the 2nd Floor Art Gallery. Here, the students of Drawing I
at Essex County College were prompted to create hybrids—surrealist combinations
of man and machine, man and animal. Inspired by a 19th century parlor game, the
project is meant to awaken the subconscious and bring to light our inner
selves.
Anna Muniz is currently a sixth year Adjunct Professor of Art with Essex
County College. She is currently partnered with Neighborhood Services at Newark
City Hall heading up their mural program for the Model Neighborhoods
Initiative. When not in Newark, she is part of the teaching staff at the
Wyckoff YMCA as an instructor of Paper Arts.
“Hax” (Ciera Adair) In this day and age
there is a disconnect between who we are and our past. The more bridges that
are burned the further we are from being able to draw upon the wisdom and
energy of our ancestors and ancestral lands. “Hax” is a dance/theater
performance about a young black girl in the year 3015 named Amethyst who is a
part of a group of gifted scholars who are isolated and used to solve
scientific, social and political issues for society. Since all of the books and
historical artifacts were left behind when the earth became inhospitable to
life and humans had to flee to space, the intergalactic government has full
control over education. All art and media is forbidden unless it goes through a
process of approval. Even Amethyst’s brain activity is constantly monitored and
any signs of rebellion or curiosity are suppressed by the program. One day a
glitch overrides the monitoring program and allows her to think freely without
being reprimanded. As she begins to use her brain power for her own recreation
she figures out to hack into the server and download all the confiscated art,
media and historical data into her memory and pieces together details about
past generations, who she Is and why that knowledge makes her a threat. This
piece explores the connection between art and identity and shows how one can
use it to explore different facets of self as well as foster a connection
between the present past and future.
Ciera
Adair is a multi-talented young artist hailing from Baltimore, Maryland who
fuses all her passions together to make eclectic pieces speaking on life, love,
heritage, and social justice. She started writing at a rather young age,
finding herself in gifted and talented programs throughout her educational
journey where her literary work flourished into poetry, short stories, and
journalism. Meanwhile, in her down time she taught herself many forms of dance
and performance art from observation and practice. As she got older she would
go on to teach herself different languages, study world cultures and explore
different forms of expression. Her art aims to provoke thought and open the
mind to different perspectives, often playing with unpopular viewpoints,
eccentric and theatrical expression and asking the age-old question, “What if?”
“Harry Potter Could’ve Saved
Michael Brown” (Cairo Amani) This
presentation explores the potential use of Speculative Fiction in academia to
teach the lessons we already learn through literary fiction. The divide between
POC media and literature and mainstream (Non POC) media and literature is
stark. I use articles, movies, published research papers, court cases, and the
work of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison to show how that divide is enforced in
everything we watch and read. I argue that the media we consume and the
fictional worlds we encounter effect how we function in the real world. I argue that oftentimes, Speculative Fiction
is a more engaging way to learn. For example, both Fledgling and Kindred spoke
about slavery, interracial relationships and ownership of the body—but Fledgling has vampires, making it
suddenly not as worthy for classroom curriculum. The presentation asks the
reader to consider how different our favorite stories would be without their
white main characters. And, if they agree that there is little to no change,
the reader is asked to imagine how a more diverse childhood consumption of
popular media could lead to more diverse friend groups, work spaces and
families. This resulting inclusivity would leave less room for the fear and
ignorance that lead to xenophobia, a driving force behind hate crimes. “Harry
Potter Could’ve Saved Michael Brown” began as a smaller project, an article
written for Black Girl Nerds, which
can be found here:http://blackgirlnerds.com/harry-potter-couldve-saved-michael-brown/
Cairo Amani is a QPOC speculative fiction activist. By day, they work for an educational Hip Hop company. By night, they write Science Fiction and Fantasy stories showcasing QPOC characters. Their fiction has been published in 3 Elements Review, The Finger Lit mag and Futurological press. They are a staff writer for Elixher Magazine and have also written for Autostraddle, Dropped Pebbles and the B Envelope. You may email Cairo at Cairoamani@gmail.com. They'd love to hear from you.
“Steampunk Mel and the Desire
for a Reimagined History” (Rebecca Williams) This discussion focuses on a larger
web-based bricolage titled The
Darkinboddy Chronicles, a fictional reimagining of Reconstruction-era
America as seen through the eyes of a six-year old black girl, a survivor of
the worst rioting in American history, the New York City Draft Riots of July
1863. In my research on the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum, the news
accounts and eyewitness testimony state that all 233 children escaped safely,
receiving shelter at a nearby police precinct before being taken to Blackwell’s
Island—a temporary refuge. However, in one account I read, the writer stated
that one child, a little black girl, had been found by the mob—she had been
hiding under a bed, but was dragged out and beaten to death. I have not been
able to find any other corroboration for this particular account, although I am
still searching. I view the writing and reimagining of this unknown child’s
life as a refusal to accept that she may have died in that awful conflagration.
This black child, whom I have named Melanie Darkinboddy, has a memoir, The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures
of Melanie Darkinboddy, an American Negro: A Tale of Race, Cookies, and Theft,
which is being published in episodic fashion on the web. “Sweeps,” a
stand-alone short story from the project, appeared in 2013 in the speculative
fiction anthology, Skyline Worlds:
Collected Stories (Osma Press). A second short story, a Steampunk adventure
titled “Some Place at the End of the World,” is forthcoming in Whispering Screams: Tales of Obsession.
Rebecca Williams is an Assistant Professor in the English Dept. at Essex County College, where she teaches American Literature, African American Literature, the History of Black Cinema, Creative Writing, and Composition. She is also a member of Essex County College’s Africana Studies Program Committee, is co-chair of the Micheaux/Washington Black Film Series, and serves as faculty co-advisor to the college’s Gay/Straight Alliance. Her two most recent papers were “Illustrating Prostitution in Antebellum New York: ‘Loathsome Spectacles,’” presented at the 2014 NeMLA Convention, and “Spectacle, Commodity, and Symbol of Resistance: Whose Black Body Is It, Anyway?” which was presented at the 2014 State of Black Writers Symposium at Essex County College. Her other academic interests include early American crime narratives, antebellum literature, African American modernism, popular culture, and memoir.
Rebecca Williams is an Assistant Professor in the English Dept. at Essex County College, where she teaches American Literature, African American Literature, the History of Black Cinema, Creative Writing, and Composition. She is also a member of Essex County College’s Africana Studies Program Committee, is co-chair of the Micheaux/Washington Black Film Series, and serves as faculty co-advisor to the college’s Gay/Straight Alliance. Her two most recent papers were “Illustrating Prostitution in Antebellum New York: ‘Loathsome Spectacles,’” presented at the 2014 NeMLA Convention, and “Spectacle, Commodity, and Symbol of Resistance: Whose Black Body Is It, Anyway?” which was presented at the 2014 State of Black Writers Symposium at Essex County College. Her other academic interests include early American crime narratives, antebellum literature, African American modernism, popular culture, and memoir.
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