MAGINATIVE KIN-MAKING. Narrating alternative forms of kinship in survival literature and fiction
Call for issue 16 spring 2025: IMAGINATIVE KIN-MAKING. Narrating alternative forms of kinship in survival literature and fiction. Guest editors: Rossella Ciocca and Marta Cariello.
Deadline for article submission: October 15th, 2024
Deadline for submitting final accepted articles: December 15th, 2024
In Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice (2018), Donna Haraway engaged in the thorny question of survival for a planet already fast travelling towards its demographic and environmental collapse. She addressed the question from a critical post-human and post-anthropocentric, inter-species stance, affirming the need to reintroduce the practice of caring for the earth at every scale, and to fight against the current mass extinction of species, from the complex perspective of both ‘the Born and the Disappeared’. She meant, by this, to maintain the (apparently opposed) necessities of guaranteeing reproductive justice and safety for peoples subjected to genocides, forced sterilizations and missing generations, and of finding ways to reverse the general population growth. Since the intersection between reproduction justice and environmental concerns is intimately connected to the human capacity to reverse spoliative policies of natural resources and habitats, in a pro-active sense, the feminist philosopher posed the personal and theoretical question of how to lighten our species footprint by creating innovative and enduring relationships without necessarily ‘making more babies’.
Taking the cue from this need to engage scary demographic perspectives, we’d like to explore narrations in which the idea of survival is connected to post-human entanglements and new forms of ‘becoming-with’, of ‘symbiotic assemblages’, or, also, of making kin, making new families as something other/more than entities tied by genealogy or biological bonds, together with the possibilities of lateral, transversal and exogenous adoption practices. We are especially interested in inviting submissions tackling the role of these alter-families and alter-communities in coping with forced migrancy, ethnic or racial cleansing and climate change induced crises. Proposals are welcome from a number of different genre languages which include, but are not limited to, novels, poetry, drama, personal essays, memoirs, film, tv series, and other storytelling practices.
Some References
Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway (eds), Making Kin Not Population, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.
Donna J. Haraway, The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm, 2003.
Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, Linda M. Hess (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Kübra Baysal (ed.), Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021.
Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Lidia Curti (a cura di), Femminismi futuri. Teorie/Poetiche/Fabulazioni, Roma, Iacobelli, 2019.
Marco Malvestio, Raccontare la fine del mondo: Fantascienza e Antropocene, Milano, Nottetempo, 2021.
María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Rob Nixon, Slow violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2011.
Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (eds.), Posthuman Ecologies. Complexity and Process after Deleuze, New York, London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Essi Varis (eds.), Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture, New York, Routledge, 2019.
Sara Upstone and Peter Ely (eds.), Community in Contemporary British Fiction. From Blair to Brexit, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Susan Watkins, Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Please send your proposals for articles (500 words), reviews, interviews or creative interventions (previously unpublished) to Rossella Ciocca (rciocca@unior.it) and Marta Cariello (marta.cariello@unicampania.it) by May 31st, 2024.
Acceptance of proposals will be notified by June 15th, 2024.
Deadline for article submission: October 15th, 2024.
Deadline for submitting final accepted articles: December 15th, 2024.
Marta Cariello