CFP: Asian Gothic
CFP: Asian Gothic (Abstract due by 15 October 2021)
Co-Editors: Dr Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) and Dr Li-hsin Hsu (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)
The Gothic as an aesthetic mode has been translated into Chinese either as “gede” (哥德) or as “zhiyi” (志異) in Taiwan in the past decades. The former version, with its direct translation from the sound, indicates its western and thus foreign origin. The latter one, alternatively, domesticates the notion by adopting a pre-existent Chinese term and subsuming it into the Chinese classical tradition of tales about strange or abnormal, and mostly supernatural, occurring. Either way, the diverging approaches towards the translation of the concept of the Gothic highlights its complexity, heterogeneity and elasticity as a transnational literary term.
Asian cinemas and literatures began to capture the attention of Gothic scholars in the late 1990s. Yet when Henry J. Hughes made his case in 2000 for the acknowledgment of Japanese Gothic as a coherent literary tradition and called for the recognition of ‘transcultural’ Gothic, few people rushed to explore this unchartered Gothic territory. Much has changed in the last twenty years. The ongoing decentralisation of Gothic studies and de-westernisation of its methodologies has opened up new possibilities for including cultural productions from diverse geographical locations.Therefore, the appearance of Asia in the broader discussions on the Gothic is not an oddity anymore. The willingness to accept Asian Gothic as a legitimate category has rapidly increased with most edited collections and companions now carrying at least one chapter discussing Asian texts and contexts. Major academic publishers have similarly started commissioning collections and manuscripts on regional variations of Asian Gothic. The ensuing discussion has been insightful for both the Gothic community and area scholars, although, needless to say, many topics still remain unexplored.
With this in mind, we invite contributions to a special issue on Asian Gothic, scheduled to be published in December 2022. We seek essays of 6000-10000 words that would broaden our understanding of the Gothic in Asia. Rather than considering the Gothic as a fixed western-centric genre or a rigidly defined aesthetical category, we propose to address it as a larger umbrella term: a conceptual framework through which distinctive local cultural practices, historical formulations, national and regional traumas, anxieties, collective violent histories and diverse belief systems are expressed. Whether understood as a localised version of international Gothic or part of a larger category of “globalgothic”, Asian Gothic can thus be read as a distinctive aesthetical and narrative practice, where conventional gothic tropes and imagery (monsters, ghosts, haunting, obscurity, darkness, madness etc.) are assessed anew, and where global forms get consumed, appropriated, translated, transformed, and, even, resisted.
Possible topics for this special issue may include but are not limited to:
· Gothic themes in Asian literature, film and television, or gothic interpretations of above
· Gothic and Asian popular culture (manga, comics, anime, games, fashion, subcultures etc.)
· Haunting memories, wars, trauma, terrorism, history and historiography
· Gothic myths and their contemporary adaptations
· Gothic folklore: local gods, demons and spirits; folk narratives and their contemporary reworking
· Gothic and folk horror
· Religion(s) and the Gothic
· Local and regional Gothic and horror
· Asian adaptations of western Gothic texts, (Postcolonial) rewriting of the Gothic canon
· Asian Gothic as part of “globalgothic”
· Animistic practices and the concept of “living Gothic”
· Western appropriation and adaptations of Asian Gothic literatures, movies and arts
· Genealogy of Gothic in an Asian context
· Gothic and gender / class / race
· Inter-Asian adaptations of Gothic films, literatures and arts
Please email an abstract of 200-300 words, along with a 100-word bio, to the co-editors Katarzyna Ancuta (kancuta@gmail.com) and Li-hsin Hsu (johsu@mail2.nccu.tw) by 15 October 2021. The notification of the results will be sent out by 31 October 2021.
The deadline for the submission of your full paper is 20 February 2022. Please follow the submission guidelines detailed on The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture website (https://www.wreview.org/index.php/submission-guidelines.html), and submit your articles online. The papers will then be subject to the normal double-blind peer-reviewing procedure that The Wenshan Review uses to evaluate all submissions.
The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, founded in 1995, is an open-access peer-reviewed journal of literary and cultural studies, and one of the most reputable academic journals in Taiwan. It offers a unique space to bring together scholar from around the world to address important issues and debates in a wide range of research areas. It is currently indexed in: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI); SCOPUS; EBSCOhost; MLA International Bibliography; Taiwan Humanities Citation Index (THCI).
We welcome informal enquiries, and proposals for co-authored contributions. Please contact the co-editors: Katarzyna Ancuta (kancuta@gmail.com) and Li-hsin Hsu (johsu@mail2.nccu.tw).
Katarzyna Ancuta is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary Gothic/Horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. She is the author of Where Angels Fear to Hover: Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror (Peter Lang, 2005) and her more recent publications include contributions to B-Movie Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Twenty-first-century Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Gothic and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and The New Urban Gothic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She also co-edited three special journal issues on Thai (Horror Studies, 2014) and Southeast Asian (Plaridel, 2015) horror film, and Tropical Gothic (eTropic, 2019), a collection on Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (I.B. Tauris, 2018) and South Asian Gothic(University of Wales Press, forthcoming in 2021). She is currently co-editing a collection on Southeast Asian Gothic.
Li-hsin Hsu is an Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include Emily Dickinson studies, Romanticism, Transatlantic studies, Transpacific studies, Orientalism, and Ecocriticism. She has published in a number of international journals, such as the Emily Dickinson Journal, Symbiosis,Cowrie, and Romanticism. She has co-edited journal issues on transculture related topics, including a special issue on “Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations: 1776 to the Present” for The Wenshan Review (June 2018), and a special issue on “International Dickinson: Scholarship in English Translation” for The Emily Dickinson Journal (Fall 2020). She has also contributed to a number of edited volumes on orientalism and EcoGothic related topics, such as Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750-1918 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class, Empire (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in 2021).
