Please join us on March 13-16, 2019, for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts #40 in its theme of “Politics and Conflicts.”  

Through Oct. 31, 2018, the International Fantastic Division of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts is soliciting proposals for ICFA 2019 papers, sessions, creative readings, and other panels about the GLOBAL FANTASTIC in any media and discipline. 

Our Division encourages international research and art about spiritual, fabulist, weird, and experimental manifestations of the non-real/surreal/transreal throughout the world. We research and create narratives on how such speculative or fantastic expressions can engage:

  • The global division of labor through the production of an international fantastic (for example, science-fiction animation made in one place but exported to another)
  • Native/Aboriginal/First Nations/Indigenous speculative fictions of the world
  • Diaspora, sojourners, and settlement: e.g., alien borders, migration, liminalities
  • Literatures in translation including those that offer fabulist creoles, pidgins, and dialects created by cultural authors and artists
  • (Post) colonialism and its monstrous/transgressive discontents
  • Globalectic narratives that illustrate social relations between international (imagined or imaginary) communities
  • Posthuman/dehumanized refugees; the estrangement of middle passages and immigrant detention centers
  • Folklores about/of transnational families and laborers, myths and legends about/of local businesses and regional industries
  • Fantastic literatures as cultural imperialism or as national literatures
  • Global circuits, time-space compression, and speculative financial flows in the international knowledge economy
  • Xenophobic superheroes; neo-Orientalism of the action genre’s War on Terror; Islamophobia and the fantasy narrative; and so on
  • Zombie capitalism and the necrocultural alienation of the overseas worker
  • Alternative or localized forms of sustainability, materiality, technological practice
  • Syncretized/creolized/hybridized spiritualities and magicks of the world
  • The imported (or exported) apocalypse
  • Millennial SF/fantasy/horror signaling the “digital divide” between regions, classes, countries
  • New international slaveries and speculative resistance
  • The Global North’s “dronification” of state violence and imperial military work
  • Continental, agricultural, island/insular, urban, and other SFnal ecologies
  • Community engagements with "globalized" science and technology

We accept academic proposals about worldwide decolonial, and indigenous texts by university and independent scholars; by translators, librarians, scientists, and other researchers; and by graduate students in all fields. For questions, contact the IF Division Head at [email protected]. Artists of fantastic works may submit proposals to the ICFA Creative Track of writing, music, theater, film, and poetry sessions, as well as for panels on topics of interest to creative professionals.  In March, we will meet at the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside to celebrate, debate, and deduce speculative fiction’s contributions to grasping the politics and conflicts of our past in their capacity to guide us toward more inclusive futures.

To submit proposals by 10/31, visit https://www.fantastic-arts.org/icfa-submissions/ and select the International Fantastic as the Division to which to forward your proposal.

For more on ICFA #40, see: https://www.fantastic-arts.org/annual-conference/. You can also contact the other IAFA Division Heads based on your subgenre/media of interest: https://www.fantastic-arts.org/about/governance/division-heads/.