Call for Papers TROPICAL FUTURISMS (full paper submission 1 Oct, 2024)
Special Issue Theme: Tropical Futurisms
This special issue invites scholarly and artistic reflections on speculations about the im/possible and un/desirable future(s) of the tropics. We encourage inquiries on future tropical scenarios, social or ecological, utopian or dystopian, embodied or mediated, among local or global diasporic communities.
Tropical Futurisms situate the reading of futures in the shared yet multiple modalities of this geographical zone, acknowledging the social and political complexities, technological engagements, multispecies vitalities, and cosmological plurality within these regions. A glimpse into one of the many possible imaginaries of tropical futurism rooted in local creative practices has been provided by Alex Quicho (2022). Similarly, our call emphasizes the diversity that comes from thinking about futures by positioning them back in concrete thermal, ecological experiences in these times of escalating climate crisis (Lundberg, Vital & Das, 2021).
We seek to gather perspectives from tropical areas, open to their multiplicity and yet firmly rejecting a reading of the tropics as the alterity of extraction or desires under the limited colonial imagination of its heat, humidity, and fecundity (Arnold, 2005; Soluri, Leal & Pádua, 2018). To these voyeuristic imperatives, we juxtapose the activist, multimedia, technological practices emerging from tropical spaces that take on the task of conceiving futures beyond plantation systems, and formulate new visions of tropical ecologies.
We seek solidarity in the tropics via imagining the future together in plural forms (Chattopadhyay, 2021). For us, this praxis of tropical futurisms encompasses envisioning decolonial tropics not only by archiving the past-future but also rebuilding worlds, including Indigenous and multispecies knowledge and experience that is conventionally not seen as belonging to the future. Considering the vibrancy of Indigenous, Afro, African, Asian, Pacific and Latin American futurisms, we are also interested in the ways they intersect in the tropics creating new rich and complex forms of theorizing and storytelling for this particular geography where settler, Indigenous, and diasporic cultures coexist.
Our call encourages contributors from various disciplines including: literature, media studies, history, anthropology, human geography, political ecology, art, architecture, design, urban planning, meteorology, and STS, among others. We look forward to seeing how contributions to this issue respond, expand, or challenge the ideas of Tropical Futurisms. We especially welcome topics such as:
- Future scenarios and speculations in tropical contexts
- Postcolonial reckoning and decolonial projects
- Environmental justice and activism
- Tropical Indigenous cosmologies
- Tropical sensorial experiences and technoscience
- Artistic and creative practices
- Aesthetics of the tropics in utopian or dystopian narratives
- Tropics as global future
- Technological imaginaries
- Multispecies world-building
- Future relations and entanglements
- Chronotropics of mixed temporalities
- Futuring gender and ecologies
- Conversations between tropical regions
- Transformation in local scenarios
The Tropics
We invite a wide range of articles and creative works from researchers who engage with the tropical regions of the world: tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean Islands, tropical Asia, the north of Australia, the Pacific, Hawai’i and the American South.
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the Tropics. ISSN:1448-2940, free open access; indexed in Scopus, Google Scholar, Ulrich's, DOAJ; archived in Pandora, Sherpa/Romeo; uses DOIs and Crossref; ranked Scimago Q1.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
- Submissions close October 1, 2024 (full paper)
- Publication date: March 2023
- Submissions must conform to the eTropic Style Sheet & Layout
- Research article submissions should be about 6000-8000 words
- Literary, creative works and photographic essays about 4000-5000 words
- Titles should be concise and clear (maximum 2 lines at 16 point font)
- Include a 100-200-word abstract of the article or creative work + 5 keywords
- Submissions should be uploaded to eTropic online journal site
- Submit 2 copies of your work: copy 1 with full author details; copy 2 anonymized
- Author copy: name of authors, institutions, country, and Orcid ID (https://orcid.org/)
- Author copy: provide a 100-word biographical note for each author (at the end of the article)
- Precisely follow APA (edition 7) for in-text citations and reference list
- Contributions should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file (.docx)
- All images must be used with permission and referenced
- Suitable papers will be double-anonymous peer reviewed
- Authors should consult eTropic archives to familiarize themselves with tropicality
- eTropic website https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/index
- eTropic Call for Papers https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/announcement
- For enquiries, or for pitching your ideas or abstracts, please email the editor
Special Issue Editors: Ysabel Muñoz, environmental storytelling and activism, Caribbean (Norwegian University of Science and Technology); Jueling Hu, eco-media and Sinophone sci-fi, Borneo (University of Fribourg & University of Amsterdam); Nsah Mala, environmental humanities and activism, ecocriticism and ecopoetics, sustainability science, foresight and futures thinking, Congo Basin (University of Cologne and BRIDGES Coalition); Anita Lundberg, ethnographic material poetics, & STS, Maritime Southeast Asia (James Cook University, Australia & Singapore).
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