Rebooting World SF

In its journals and on its syllabi, the field of science fiction studies becomes ever more international in its scope – but significant challenges persist in the way the US academy approaches texts from outside the US and the UK. How have we settled on the singularized category of “world sf” as a concept that encompasses the futurological imaginings of billions of human beings across countless cultural, historical, and environmental contexts? How, for that matter, did “world” ever come to signify “the opposite of American” in the first place? How can we resist the vicious hierarchies that are implicit in this division of the world into such uneven halves? How can our work better appreciate the specific histories and contexts that have gone into the creation and evolution of local science fiction traditions, and how can it better reflect the truly planetary nature of sf? This seminar thus invites presentations of all kinds that take up new approaches to teaching, researching, and otherwise navigating the vast field of texts that are currently commonly grouped under the umbrella term “world sf.” Participants might take up questions of selection, canonization, and tokenization; strategies for managing the uneven availability and distribution of global texts, especially literature in translation; strategies for engaging texts from non-US and -UK contexts in ways that do not replicate imperial hierarchies or Westcentrism, and that do not flatten vast panoplies of cultures and traditions into racialized homogenous mega-regions; proposals for new terminology, theorizations, and proposed periodizations / regionalizations / historicizations; explorations of core texts, methods, and thinkers that can help us to problematize the category of “world sf” in generative ways; and much more. The organizers are also interested in submissions that rethink colonial genre boundaries such as science fiction vs. fantasy/folk lore/fairy tale/myth, as well as submissions that can help us reconceptualize the broad potential of sf by drawing on non-Western and non-hegemonic approaches to cognition, science, ethics, community values, and spiritual traditions.