[Commlist] CfP: Asian Futurisms - Linking Asia's Digital Imagination to the World

*Asian Futurisms - Linking Asia's Digital Imagination to the World*

**

*11-13 November 2021, Zhuhai, China*

*--***

Over the last decade new futurisms have sprung up in a number of guises. 
Almost all of these go back to Marinetti's Futurism as a foil, 
developing local versions of the belief that a better future is possible 
through (digital) machines. However, this is also where the relationship 
to Marinetti's ends. If he and many in his group worshipped the power of 
(war) machineries, the new futurisms take social and cultural change 
through digital means as their focus.

Most prominent among these new futurisms is Afrofuturism, but 
Sinofuturism (or Red Futurism) is quickly catching up; other Futurisms 
include Latinx futurism, Nipponfuturism and Gulf Futurism (Frangos, 
2017). All these have at least three important common goals. First, 
there is the attempt of decentering of European/Western attempts of 
defining reality for all individuals and nations. “In the West and 
elsewhere, the European, in the midst of other peoples, has often 
propounded an exclusive view of reality; the exclusivity of this view 
creates a fundamental human crisis.” In some cases, it has created 
cultures arrayed against each other or even against themselves. 
Afrocentricity’s response certainly is not to impose its own 
particularity as a universal, as Eurocentricity has often done. Already 
in 1998, Asante rightfully claimed that listening to the voice of the 
subaltern “is one way of creating a saner society and one model for a 
more humane world.” Secondly, there is the attempt to "distort and 
undermine modernity’s signature narrative of development and progress, 
holding up a mirror to its history of broken promises and thereby 
challenging its imagined foreclosure of possible futures, […] the 
project of interrogating the failure of the utopian promises of 
modernity on both personal and collective registers." (Frangos, 2017). 
This would also include the challenging of urban centres via rural 
futurisms (Culp, 2018). Lastly, there are the attempts of presenting 
concurring models for the future, including AI and post-human projects, 
as viewed through the lens of divergent and cultural media.

Techno-orientalism appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990, spurred on 
by the success Japanese technology began to have in the west, indicating 
a shift in the geopolitical realities. Films, Manga and books such as 
/Akira, Ghost in the Shell/, /The Three Body Problem,/ /Battle Angel 
Alita/, and many others ushered in a new apparently superior oriental 
understanding and application of technology. If before, the future had 
been made in the USA or Europe, its production had now shifted eastward. 
As Zhang (2017) relates, "the exterior scenes in Spike Jonze’s 2013 
sci-fi rom-com, /Her/, were filmed in Shanghai’s Pudong district, 
setting Joaquin Phoenix’s high-waisted trousers against the archetypal 
Chinese metropolis cast as a future Los Angeles. More pithily, a 
character in Rian Johnson’s thriller /Looper/ (2012) advises: ‘I’m from 
the future: go to China.’” This point is made even more succinctly by 
Lawrence Lek in his 2016 film /Sinofuturism/: "Sinofuturism is an 
invisible movement. A spectre already embedded into a trillion 
industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled 
narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple 
overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes. 
Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or 
authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. 
It is a science fiction that already exists.” And when it comes to 
issues of gender, Lu Yang’s/Delusional Mandala, /reintroduces art moving 
image creation as the catalyst for futurist’s aesthetic and imagination.

Last but not least, the philosopher Yuk Hui has recently been 
propounding his world view as “Chinese cosmotechnics”, thereby 
decentering western attempts of claiming sovereignty of technology and 
proposing a /technodiversity/ to re-think modern technology by inventing 
new directions and new frameworks.

It is the aim of this conference to investigate these science-fictional 
techno-oriental tropes and broadly focus on the following questions:

  * How to assess the fall-out of a hyper-globalised world, including
    epidemics?
  * How to explore race as a technology?
  * How to think through future bodies and embodiment in a post-human
    environment?
  * How to reclaim the pride of one’s heritage?
  * How to investigate how utopic and dystopic futurisms can engage and
    deliver diversity?
  * How to decentre Western discourses of the future?
  * How to view the present from the future?
  * How to explore the sharing of a common future (imagination)?
  * How to help create alternate spaces beyond national borders and
    urban spaces?
  * How to imagine future genders along decolonial lines (e.g. Zairong
    Xiang and Lu Yang?)
  * How to think /technodiversity/ through art as a form of knowledge
    production?
  * How to re- think futurisms in the context of climate change?
  * How to re- think science fiction as a form of knowledge production?
  * How to re- think futurisms in the context of Artificial Intelligence
    (AI), quantum computing or blockchain technology??

*Venue: *

**

*Beijing Normal University-Hong-Kong Baptist University-United 
International College, Zhuhai, Guangdong, PRC.*

**

UIC is located in the warm winter holiday region of southern Guangdong’s 
Great Bay Area, one of the most dynamic regions in the world and a 
stone’s throw away from Hong Kong, Guangzhou, the futuristic Shenzhen 
and Macau!

/Zhuhai/is a coastal city in Guangdong 
<https://wikitravel.org/en/Guangdong> Province, China 
<https://wikitravel.org/en/China>. Its name means /Pearl Sea/ stemming 
from Zhuhai's location where the Pearl River flows into the South Sea. 
It is a very popular tourist destination and nicknamed /The Hundred 
Island City/, was voted “The Happiest City in China” and is an 
ecotourism destination with clean air. It is unique in mainland China as 
an at times pulsating, at times very serene holiday destination.

**

*Timeline, submission procedures and publication: *

**

*Submission of Abstracts*

	

*15 August 2021 *

*Notification of Abstract Acceptance*

	

*1 September 2021*

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to Luciano Zubillaga 
*((luczubi /at/ uic.edu.cn) <mailto:(luczubi /at/ uic.edu.cn)>)*or

Charlie Reis (*(charlie.reis /at/ xjtlu.edu.cn) 
<mailto:(charlie.reis /at/ xjtlu.edu.cn)>)**.*

**

Conference presentations will be collected in the conference 
proceedings. The best contributions will be considered for the 
indexed/IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies/and a book publication.**

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