[ecrea] cfp: Nature strikes back

Call for papers:

Nature strikes back! Genres of revenge in the anthropocene


Special issue of "Australian Humanities Review", due for publication 2014

Edited by Dr Catherine Simpson and Dr Nicole Matthews





Cli-fi (or climate fiction) has recently emerged as a new subgenre 
describing tales of imminent disaster as a consequence of anthropogenic 
climate change. If Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring invoked nature 
extinguished, passive or defeated, these narratives of environmental 
change present an unexpectedly feral, unpredictable world where an 
aggressive nature runs rampant. In this special issue we hope to 
excavate the resources of popular genres for talking about risk, 
causality and the unintended consequences of human action.



This issue will interrogate the ways we narrate non-human agency. How do 
these stories revisit the spectacle and power of the sublime? Can 
popular culture help us re-imagine environments, objects and non-human 
animals in a time of rapid ecological change? What is the affective 
potentiality of narratives of hubris, revenge and fear? And how are 
whiteness, colonial politics of ‘natives’ and ‘non-natives’, and border 
policing restaged across these diverse and composite bodies? We invite 
theoretically, empirically and/or textually grounded articles and 
welcome articles that locate Australia in comparative or international 
contexts.



Topics might include:

· Comedy, tragedy, farce? Genres of revenge and reaction

· You couldn’t make it up: fiction, non-fiction and environmental horror

· Animals: dangerous, vulnerable, feral, vengeful?

· Storying the human biome

· New formations of the disaster movie: back to the 1970s?

· Zombies, whiteness and climate disaster

· Actor-network theory and pulp fictions

· Climate change war stories

· The non-human point of view in documentary

· Cycles of destruction: reassuring mythologies of ecological renewal?

· Gaia and global catastrophe

· Frightening the children: apocalyptic children’s tales



Papers should be 5-7,000 words in length and should be in MLA format 
(the AHR styleguide is here: 
http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/about.html#submission ) . All 
papers will be subject to peer review and will be published at the 
discretion of the AHR editors.



Articles should be sent to (Nicole.Matthews /at/ mq.edu.au) with the subject 
line “Nature Strikes Back” by March 8, 2014.




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