Call for Contributors
Making Kin in the Swarm: Lived and Interlaced Agency in Global Speculative Fiction (preliminary), to be co-edited by Xinmin Liu (Washington State U) and Hua Li (Montana State U)
With a creatively misleading title The World Without Us, Allan Weisman’s book retrogressively exposes humans’ failures and errors that once led the Earth in a downward spiral to the inevitable demise ending a reign of corrosive, toxic and self-destructive domination. Weisman’s extrapolative imaginary sheds fresh light on one pivotal obligation of the eco-themed speculative writings. To humanists and scientists alike, the causes of the disastrous future are front and center to our own times! They engulf and menace us in such urgent and palpable ways, i.e., our lived and interlocked agency through our choice of habitat, career and professional paths, and daily life habits in connection to the on-going ecological crises! Given this trend of “global swarming” (Andy Clark), it compels us to first scrutinize our complicity in tolerating abusive high-tech application to endanger the natural lifeworld, which in turn makes it urgent for us all to get involved in causes of environmental activism here and now. It also inspires us to direct our common interest to intersected areas between “hard science” and humanistic values, where our synergized inquiry can enable us to bring our fresh insights and shared wisdom to impact the discussion of various issues in environmental humanities. Contributors are encouraged to take speculative fiction as their primary objects of analysis and draw upon a historical and/or transnational perspective on themes including, but not limited to:
- When both of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs and the Chthulucene underscore the degree to which are always already posthuman or more than human in contemporary time, she calls for “staying with the trouble of living” and “making kin” is a response to both the discourses of Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Humanity should not only make kin with various species in the ecological environment, but also make kin with all in the human world who are different from us culturally, ethnically, and ideologically. We will relate our analyses of various posthuman episodes in science fiction narratives to the theoretical discussions of posthumanism by such theorists as Donna Haraway, Stefan Herbrechter, and Neil Badmington in order to demonstrate these narratives have shed new light on these theorists’ discussions by emphasizing the persistent existence of humanistic values in a posthuman era and the co-existence of humanity and other species in the Chthulucene.
- Resonating with theorists like Byung-Chul Han and Andy Clark, we realize that living “in the swarm” of high-tech modality and function need not render us helpless, robotic and docile. We thus propose that it be efficient and proactive to explore human plasticity, negotiability and adaptability in sync with our elemental environ to seek for common grounds in order to fathom and counter the adversities of “Global Swarming” (Clark). We attempt to observe and discuss how human-nonhuman interaction and affiliation are validated by the elemental sources and especially as to how they can be restored and renewed to continue resisting the empire (of the simulated high-tech world) while living in the empire (Han). We believe that for speculative fiction to be ethically aspiring, socially responsible, and ecologically significant, writers and artists need to be more urgent and impactful in their approaches to grapple with environmental issues based on their lived agency of their professional choices and daily life habits. We encourage writings that grapple with issues of “soulless high-tech,” “the Invasive vs. the Indigenous” species debate, etc., in pursuit of sustainable prospects for a commonwealth of species with humans as one of the many.
- In response to Lakoff/Johnson’s statement that “human reason is animal reason,” we hasten to add that vision gives us the primary cognitive venue through which human reason gets vitally effective thanks to elemental reason–by virtue of our bodily existence through sensory interaction and corporeal affiliation with the elements of the Planet Earth. In the light of this, we discuss in what ways this synergetic bond has been diffused, neutralized or abandoned in favor of the disembodied modes of conceptualization with both techno-science and humanism on one hand. On the other, we explore the lived agency that has stubbornly persisted chiefly by virtue of integrated sensory interaction, such as Yi-fu Tuan’s synesthesia, and has fended off the invasive encroachments made by image-making industry under the guise of “virtual reality.” We thus welcome contributions that detect and dissect such willful disregard of elemental determinants of embodied human perception as well as conduct critical appraisals of the primacy of vision as the major cognitive project of Western modernity.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a one-paragraph bio to Xinmin Liu (xinmin.liu@wsu.edu) and/or Hua Li (huali@montana.edu) by 12/01/2023. Complete articles should be 7,000-10,000 words in length including notes and bibliography, and will be due on 5/01/2024.
A working bibliography:
Haraway, Donna J. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–107.
—. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. London: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Han Byung-Chul. Digital Prospects in the Swarm. Transl. Erik Butler, Cambridge MA: The MIT University Press, 2017.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to the Western Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999.