CFP "TROPICAL GOTHIC ECOLOGICA"

2026-04-24

CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue. Deadline: 30 October 2026 ‘TROPICAL GOTHIC ECOLOGICA’

The Gothic is undergoing a resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears produced by globalization, the neoliberal order, AI technologies, outbreaks of war, post-truth, and environmental catastrophe—tropes of ‘the gothic’ resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown and call up repressed truths.

Gothic Studies has always been in relation with ecologies. In Western temperate traditions, the Gothic is associated with fog, bleak landscapes, cryo-horror, howling wolves, and stone castles crumbling atop craggy mountains. In contrast, Tropical Gothic imagery may invoke humid forests entwined with snakes, savannah-concealed tigers, the luxurious and relentless growth of plants, decaying plantation mansions, or islands under a relentless sun surrounded by shark-filled seas.

This call for a Tropical Gothic emphasis on ecology invites considerations of climate and geology, plants and animals, land and water. It calls up landscapes from vast monocultural plantations to the claustrophobic entanglement of urban jungles. We are interested in how such tropical ecologies recast the horror and monstrosity present in local cultural imaginaries read from legends and popular myths, colonial memories and historical documentation—and how these are expressed through film, architecture, literature, art, and ethnography­­—the humanities and social sciences.

Tropical Gothic tropes draw from local narratives and representations to unveil the hauntings of violence rooted in socioeconomic, political, racial, and sexual oppression left behind by colonial economies, indentured labour, slavery, and their links to the present neocolonial and neoliberal capitalist production. “Tropical Gothic Ecologica” also aligns with the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, and related theories.

Tropical Gothic may call on theories from tropicality, rhizomatics, plant humanities, animal studies, orientalism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonialism. It may engage subgenres like Imperial Gothic or Tropical Gothic regional studies such as Asian Gothic, Latin American Gothic, African Gothic, and Southern Gothic.

CFP Tropical Gothic Ecologica

Reflecting the diversity of the tropics, this CFP is open to interdisciplinary practices as well as critical perspectives on established disciplinary approaches. It invites papers that consider the ecological interface between, for example, nature and culture; humans and animals; indigeneity and colonialism; science and literature; technology and poetics; histories and futures; reality and fiction; mythologies and realities; spirits and humans; natural and social sciences; or the mundane and the sacred.

The special issue invites a wide range of articles and creative works from scholars who engage Tropical Gothic with a strong emphasis on various forms of Ecologica from tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean Islands, Tropical East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, tropical North Australia, Melanesia and the Pacific Ocean Islands, Hawai’i, and the American South.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

  • Submissions close October 30, 2026 (full paper)
  • Publication date: March-April 2027
  • Submissions must conform to the eTropic eTropic StyleSheet &Template
  • Research article submissions should be 6000-8000 words
  • Literary, creative works and photographic essays 4000-5000 words
  • Titles should be concise and clear (maximum 2 lines at 16 point Georgia font bold)
  • Include a 100-200-word abstract of the article or creative work + 5 keyword phrases
  • Creative works should include an Author Statement at the end of the essay
  • 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 author(s), institution(s), country, and Orcid ID (https://orcid.org/)
  • Author copy:  provide a 150-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 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 Tropical Gothic
  • Tropical Gothic https://journals.jcu.edu.au/index.php/etropic/issue/view/192
  • eTropic Call for Papers https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/announcement
  • For enquiries, or for pitching your ideas or abstracts, please email the Editor-in-Chief

Special Issue Editors: Katarzyna Ancuta, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand; Amit R. Baishya, University of Oklahoma, USA; Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA; Anita Lundberg, James Cook University, Australia.

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.