Upcoming issue of Paradoxa: “Global Weirding”

Editors: Andy Hageman (hagean03@luther.edu) and Gerry Canavan (gerry.canavan@marquette.edu)

The editors of this special issue of Paradoxa on “Global Weirding” invite contributions that explore the aesthetic, political, ethical, and existential potentials that arise when weird ecological patterns or events converge with weird speculative literature. Jeff Vandermeer’s acclaimed 2014 Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) cracked open the space for thinking the weird and the ecological together—for experimenting with radical new ways of representing massive and mind-bending things like global warming, geological time, the Anthropocene, the life and afterlife of infrastructures, and so on. This issue invites further analyses of this eco-literary link we’re calling “Global Weirding”—mirroring the term proposed by some climate scientists to register that global warming does not simply mean higher temperatures but a global planetary ecology transformed in radical and sometimes highly unexpected ways.

Essays might range through the strange catalog of weird fiction to illuminate those elements that offer alternative perspectives on and/or representations of ecological ethics, thought, aesthetics. China Mieville’s Bas-Lag, for example, offers a trove of beautiful-awful engagements with environmental catastrophes and interspecies struggles to exist and coexist. Or, amidst this H.P. Lovecraft resurgence, through new criticism and literary grapplings with his racism, it is time to return to the mountains of madness to see what Cthulhu and Lovecraft’s geology and geologists in those stories can offer to the still-forming concept of the Anthropocene. The editors are eager to consider submissions that deal with concepts originating from across the fantasy, horror, New Weird, and speculative and science fiction genres, in prose, art, film and television, comic, video game, or other media forms.

An additional note on contributions: we welcome contributions that focus on indigenous and non-Western speculative fictions. We recognize that these texts may deploy myths, narratives, and cognitive frames that are not in themselves “weird,” but might be characterized as such by Eurocentric ways of thinking—and we encourage authors to consider using this issue as a forum for working through the dynamics of genres moving amongst cultures, as well as for excavating the fundamental “weirdness” of Western and post-Enlightenment habits of thought.

Proposals and/or inquiries should be directed to Andy Hageman (hagean03@luther.edu) and Gerry Canavan (gerry.canavan@marquette.edu). We are happy to consider not only traditional academic essays of approximately 7000-10000 words but also shorter essays (3000-7000), interviews, and other nontraditional projects.

Proposals are due April 15, 2016. Invited contributors will be notified by May 15, and the full submission is due in July 2016. This issue is slated for a December 2016 publication date, following peer review, so prompt completion of the submission and subsequent response to editorial feedback is imperative.