Guest Editors: Nathanael O'Reilly and Jean-François Vernay
Nathanael O'Reilly and Jean-François Vernay invite contributions for a special issue of Antipodes devoted to international perspectives on fear and protection in Australian culture, focusing primarily on literature, film, visual arts, literary theory, psychoanalytic approaches and philosophy.
The special issue of Antipodes will be published in December 2009.
Antipodes, edited in New York by Nicholas Birns, has published work by Australia's leading writers, poets and critics, including Tim Winton, A.D. Hope, Thea Astley, Les Murray, Thomas Keneally, Janette Turner Hospital, Peter Carey, Dorothy Porter, Elizabeth Jolley, John Kinsella, David Malouf and Frank Moorhouse. Antipodes is a highly-respected peer-reviewed journal (C1 in Australian parlance) indexed in both the MLA International Bibliography and in AUSTLIT.
Contributors may wish to consider the following possible topics, which we’ve provisionally divided into three spatial zones of fearfulness, or explore challenging new ones.
National and International Fears
- Pluralism and multiculturalism fears
- Population and natural resources fears
- Law and authority
- Civil unrest, violence, riots
- Terrorism and counter-terrorism
- Xenophobia, past and present
- Invasion narratives
- Immigration: refugees, asylum seekers, detention centres and fear
- Science and technology fears
- Complacency warnings versus ‘Relaxed and comfortable’ lifestyle
Culture, Local, Regional and State-level Fears
- Fear and spirituality
- Fear and collective identity
- Fear and indigenous issues
- Fear and critical whiteness studies
- Fear in city, inner-urban and suburban environments
- Fear in regional and country Australia
- Fear in and of the natural environment
- Fear in cinema and literature: the thriller, the horror genre, disaster movies, speculative fiction, dystopias, post-nuclear and post-millennium themes
- Fear and language, communications, media
- Affluence, employment and fear of material loss
- Fear and performance
- Fear and fashion
Individual and Personal Space Fears
- The threatened body
- Selfhood, identity, representation
- Fear and desire
- Family and domestic fears
- Homophobia in a heterocentric society
- The paranoid mind
- Psychoanalytic fears
- Self-protectiveness, exposure anxiety
The suggested length for essays is 4,000 words. Essays should be suitable for an interdisciplinary and international readership. All submissions will be double-blind-refereed by an international panel of distinguished scholars and members of Antipodes’ editorial board. Essays must conform to MLA style. Please refer to the sixth edition of the MLA Handbook.
You may submit your enquiry, expression of interest or finished essay to Nathanael O’Reilly at Nathanael_o@earthlink.net or Jean-François Vernay at vernayj@yahoo.com.
Deadline for final submissions: February 1, 2008.
Bionotes:
Nathanael O'Reilly was born in Warrnambool, Victoria and attended Monash University and the University of Ballarat before leaving Australia to work overseas. He is completing a Ph.D. in Literature at Western Michigan University; his dissertation examines suburbia in contemporary Australian fiction. His articles, interviews, reviews and poetry are published in North American, European, Asian and Australasian journals. Nathanael is the Secretary, Newsletter Editor and Webmaster for the American Association of Australian Literary Studies.
Born in New Caledonia, Jean-François Vernay was educated at the Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie and at the Université Toulouse-Le Mirail, from which he holds a Ph.D. As Founding Editor of Correspondances Océaniennes, a Nouméa-based postcolonial journal focussing on Oceanic cultures, he has been editing articles on postcolonial societies for five years, while regularly publishing articles in refereed journals and collections. His latest publications are a monograph entitled Water From the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch (New York: Cambria Press, 2007), an article on Koch in Antipodes (June 2007) and on grunge fiction in AUMLA (June 2007).
