CALL FOR PAPERS

“EcoGothic Asia: Nature, Asia, and the Gothic Imagination”

Guest Editor: Associate Professor Li-hsin Hsu

Since the emergence of modernity, the perceived eastern emphasis on the harmony between humanity and nature has been profoundly challenged and reshaped by the process of industrialization. Asia as a geo-poetic imaginary and a geo-political locus of both utopic imagination and dystopic anxiety in literature – both non-Asian and Asian – magnifies, problematizes, or sometimes accelerates such a disquieting and polarized projection. The “EcoGothic”, as an interdisciplinary approach that investigates the intersection between the ecological and the Gothic imagination, provides a useful epistemological and methodological tool to rethink how aesthetics, philosophical thoughts and social-cultural or environmental discourses in (or about) the Asian / Pacific region complicate our understanding of human-nonhuman interactions.

We invite submissions for a special issue of SARE to explore the enmeshed human-nonhuman relationship by examining the interconnectedness between the natural, the supernatural or the unnatural, the diseased,  (dis)possessed and contagious bodies – human or nonhuman – the haunted as well as haunting landscapes, and the terrifying or monstrous flora and fauna in literature in or about Asia. We ask how the EcoGothic imagination in (or about) Asia conceptualizes or addresses the notion of human-nature co-existence or the precarious state of human-nonhuman (dis)harmony. How does reading literatures of ecological crises, disasters, or extinctions help us reimagine Asia as a heterogeneous geography, both symbolically and in reality? In an age of the Anthropocene, how are our perceptions of human-nonhuman interactions redefined by the COVID-19 pandemic or other environmental/ecological crises? How does local knowledge address global issues in the environmental humanities from or about this region?

Submissions might consider how recent theories of ecologies, technologies, philosophies or sociologies might renew our ways of reading literature about human-nonhuman interactions in our time. Papers might also consider how the notion of Asia is represented or reconfigured in relation to contemporary events or interdisciplinary approaches and narratives, or how reading environmental works, both Asian and non-Asian, might assist our understanding of the EcoGothic as a multifaceted concept in refreshing directions.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Asia and the (un)natural / supernatural

Transcultural / Transpacific Gothic

The Gothic and Orientalism

Gothic gardens and tropical wildlife

Volcanic islands and vengeful oceans

Aliens, monsters, or ghosts / spirits in an Asian context

The inhuman, transhuman, anti-human, more-than-human / posthuman

Apocalyptic / dystopic imagination and the (non)Asian other

Deserted rural areas and haunted urban landscapes

Indigeneity and environmental injustice

Invasive species and regional Gothic

Disorder / excess / transgression in nature

Diseases and extinction

Bodily contagion and dis / trans-figuration

Migration, displacement and (im)mobility

Fear of the nonhuman world and / or the wilderness

Ecological crises and race / gender / class (in)equality

Strange natures and queer ecologies

This SARE special issue invites papers, of between 5000 and 7000 words, that address, but need not be limited to, the above questions.

Abstracts of 200 words (maximum), along with a 50-word author bio, are to be emailed to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my, with a copy to the Guest Editor at johsu@mail2.nccu.tw, by 15 November 2021.

Decisions will be sent out by 30 November 2021.

The deadline for the submission of full papers is 1 March 2022.  Submissions should be in English and uploaded to the SARE website through the “Make a Submission” portal at https://sare.um.edu.my.

Further submission guidelines can be found on our website.

Publication date: July 2022

If you have any questions related to the special issue, please direct your inquiries to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my.