[Commlist] CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia

Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies

We invite papers on the role of nostalgia as a structure of feeling that 
animates speculative, utopian, and (post)apocalyptic texts across media. 
Although there has been increasing critical attention to the role of 
memory in these genres, nostalgia is a neglected topic. We seek papers 
that explore nostalgia as affect and motif in the genre, following 
Jameson's description of sf as a mode of "apprehending the future as 
history" (1982), while discussing seemingly future-oriented texts such 
William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner 
(1982). Nostalgia had already been consolidated within mainstream 
popular culture via George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) which 
self-consciously harkened back to earlier eras, texts and subgenres, 
from the space operas of E.E. Doc Smith to the film serials of the 
1930s, from Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956) to Frank Herbert's 
Dune (1965). In contemporary media, Star Wars itself is now one among 
many rebooted titles, as mainstream science fiction reanimates its own 
popular history. As Judith Berman argues in "Science Fiction without the 
Future" (2001), even the stories of Golden Age pulp sf were less about 
the future than "full of nostalgia, regret, fear of aging and death." 
The genre has frequently been preoccupied with the past as it imagines 
the future even in cinema, evident in films such as Code 46 
(Winterbottom 2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry 
2004) which are driven by almost futile search for the lost object. 
Further connections may be detected between nostalgia and gernes such as 
utopia and dystopia. If utopianism produces future-orientated discourses 
that seek to transform the present into an idealised future, nostalgia 
might be described as inverted utopianism that generates an ameliorated, 
utopianized recollection of the past, as is evident in 
nineteenth-century utopias, such William Morris's News from Nowhere 
(1890) whose post-apocalyptic future betrays a yearning for a 
pre-industrial, pastoral era. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001) Svetlana 
Boym contends that nostalgia can function as as a critical form of 
remembering that is not bound to a single version of the past, enabling 
texts to revisit the past to animate different realities and futures, a 
technique central to works such as Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1974) 
and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1974). Classical 
dystopias, on the other hand, such as Eugene Zamyatin's We (1920-21) and 
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) often look to the past as a 
time of more authentic existence, a motif that continues in recent 
television series such as The Walking Dead (2010-) and The Handmaid's 
Tale (2017-), especially in their use of flashback sequences.
              Most recently, we have seen widescale interest in sf that 
nostalgically engages with the 1980s, often through allusions to sf of 
that era. Netflix has been a major agent in this trend, exemplified by 
the phenomenal success of Stranger Things (2016-), whose 1980s setting 
is also contemporary with Jameson's theorization of sf and history. 
Other Netflix projects indicate an ongoing interest in nostalgia and 
this particular decade, such as the German series Dark (2017-), which 
uses time travel and alternative histories to evoke the 1980s as a 
consequential turning point in history, or the "San Junipero" episode of 
Black Mirror (2011-), whose recreation of the 1980s in an online virtual 
afterlife is often described as the only optimistic episode of the 
series. This recent cycle of sf might be thought of as second-order 
nostalgia, that is, texts that encourage young audiences to feel 
nostalgia about a period they did not live through, one they experienced 
only via media made at this time. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's 
theorization of "post-memory," we suggest the term "post-nostalgia" as a 
way to conceptualize the affective and thematic preoccupations of such work.
              We invite submissions that explore these complex 
intersections of nostalgia and sf. We are interested in papers that 
revisit the dominant perception of nostalgia as a conservative affective 
response to a contemporary sense of crisis, and we especially welcome 
those that explore reflective, critical, or transformative examples of 
nostalgia that enables a dialectic relationship to the past. We 
encourage papers that explore how and why nostalgia has resurfaced in 
genres of the speculative at this particular historical moment. We 
welcome submissions that explore science fiction in any medium.
Indicative yet not exhaustive possible topics include:

*       sf, nostalgia and cognitive estrangement

*       sf, nostalgia and temporality

*       sf, nostalgia and media archaeology

*       nostalgia, utopia, dystopia

*       reflective nostalgia

*       post-nostalgia

*       nostalgia and (post-)apocalypse

*       identity, nostalgia and counter-memory in (literary, film, 
television) genre fictions

*       steampunk, nostalgia and media archaeology

*       commodifying nostalgia and the screen industries: rebooting, 
franchising, cross-marketing

*       nostalgia, sf audiences and fandom

This special issue will be guest edited by Aris Mousoutzanis 
((A.Mousoutzanis /at/ brighton.ac.uk)<mailto:(A.Mousoutzanis /at/ brighton.ac.uk)>) 
and Yugin Teo ((yteo /at/ bournemouth.ac.uk)<mailto:(yteo /at/ bournemouth.ac.uk)>). 
Please send abstracts of 300-400 words by December 31, 2019 to both 
editors. After an initial review of proposals, selected essays will be 
invited to submit full drafts (6,000-7,000 words) due in May 2020. The 
issue will be published March 2021


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