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Potternism

There was for a time (it is always only for a time) a funny meme which skewered the ubiquity of Harry Potter references among a certain cohort of society, sometimes identified generationally as millennials, other times identified by political affiliation, as liberals. (Neither of these identifications in truth map very well, incidentally.)

The meme responded to such referencing by demanding that the referencer “READ ANOTHER BOOK.” It’s funny, or at least it was way back when, not because it suggested that referencers had only read Harry Potter and nothing else. In terms of quotation and convoluted metaphors and linkages, both the Collected Shakespeare and the Bible have generated many single-book citers in their time.

No, it’s funny because, unlike Shakespeare or the Bible, the limited remit of a children’s book series about a schoolboy wizard has to undergo often significant semantic stretching to accommodate some of the parallels that were suggested. It’s never ideal to explain jokes, so let me illustrate:

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Generally these parallels are political. And in fairness, the Potterverse is not without its own politicking, from the formal politics of the Ministry of Magic, the geopolitics of ‘Fantastic Beasts…’, and the fascist implications of Voldemort rule, to personal politics like Dumbledore’s closeted queerness or the construction of non-nuclear families. The books at times were very long. They’re not entirely without content, even political content.

But the parallels became so common, so ubiquitous on social media, and also to be honest, at times so risible, that even the esteemed Washington Post felt obliged to add its weight to the ‘read another book’ school of thought.

It was perhaps inevitable, given that the graduate student essay has now become almost as common a mode of expression for some of the Harry Potter generation as a half-thought out tweet, that eventually this mode of analysing world events through the prism of Harry Potter fandom would emerge.

It has not disappointed, I would argue. The one that led me down this particular line of pondering was entitled “Wizards First: The Muggle and Mudblood Crisis Reflecting the Rohingya Crisis”. I may not be alone in questioning the taste, if not the sincerity, of such an extended parallel. It comes from a sub-genre of Potter-political academic analysis of which the exemplary is surely “Voldemort Politics“.

But it’s not just misplaced political analogies. The Potterverse can be applied to almost anything else. From here to Potternity, in fact. Hence we also have such wide-ranging, free-wheeling extended comparatives as “Home Depot, Hogwarts & Excess Deaths at the CDC“, “Hogwarts House Rules & the Cathedral Choir of Mexico City”, “Can Muggles be Autistic?“, “Vipers, Muggles, and The Evolution of Jazz“, “Sequence Rule Compliance: Separating the Wizards from the Muggles“, “How Muggles fix broken arms?“, and my personal favourite, “Deauville Doomsday and Voldemort in Ireland“, which of course relates Voldemort to the Irish banking crisis of 2007.

And this is before you get to even the outer fringes of where Harry Potter references might actually be deemed attenuated but possibly okay, such as “Fibonacci in Hogwarts?“, or “Hogwarts torts“, or “Surveillance in Hogwarts: Dumbledore’s Balancing Act Between Managerialism and Anarchism“. (Which itself is the penumbra to the bullseye, literary criticism about the books themselves and their associated cultural artefacts and societal impact.)

In short, this is such a prevalent mode of cultural analysis, that I am somewhat surprised that Potter as Critical Lens does not yet have a name. In which spirit of helpfulness, I propose – Potternism.

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Religious Futurisms collection CFP

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a forthcoming collection of essays on the broad topic of Religious Futurisms, to be edited by Sumeyra Buran Utku and Jim Clarke.

Information and updates on this project may be found here on Facebook.

Religious Futurisms derives its intellectual inspiration from the emergence of Afrofuturism and other Alternative Futurisms as ideological and analytical frameworks in recent years. Religious Futurisms can manifest as ideology, criticality, prophecy, futurology, philosophy or artistic practice. They may be discerned in a wide range of forms, ranging from speculative theology to performative videogame interaction to abstract or polysemous imagery in visual art.

Fundamentally global and interdisciplinary in nature, Religious Futurisms encompass not only attempts within theology to reframe and examine faith-based futures, but also the lengthy tradition of revelatory knowledge forms as theme and mode within speculative fiction and other texts and formats of speculative artistic expression, such as film, television, music, gaming, comics, graphic novels, visual and conceptual art, theatre and poetry.

Faith-related themes and narratives have proliferated in speculative fiction since its earliest manifestations, and feature heavily in some of SF’s most popular and influential texts, such as Dune, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. However, Marxist and materialist modes of academic critical analysis have tended to shy away from addressing Religious Futurisms. This volume of essays seeks to address that gap in scholarship.

In this first attempt to codify and taxonomise the various strands and manifestations of Religious Futurism, the editors invite abstracts for essays which address any of the following topics:

  • Futurological approaches to existing terrestrial religions in artistic expression.
  • Futuristic approaches to theology.
  • The depiction of religion or faith in speculative artforms.
  • The intersection of Religious Futurism with other Futurisms, such as Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Chicanofuturism and so on.
  • The intersection of Religious Futurism with other emancipatory ideological modes of analysis, such as gender studies, queer studies, critical race theory, disability studies, etc.
  • Religious futurism and utopia or dystopia.
  • Posthumanism or Transhumanism and Religious Futurism.
  • Cyberpunk and Religious Futurism.
  • Islamofuturisms, Sufi Futurism, and their relationships with Gulf Futurisms.
  • Judeofuturisms.
  • Futurisms of Christianity.
  • Futurisms of religions of sub-continental origin – Hindufuturism, Buddhist futurism, Sikh futurism, etc.
  • Religious Sinofuturism and other East Asian religious futurisms, such as Taoist Futurism and Confucian Futurism.
  • Religious Futurism in Techno-Orientalism.
  • Indigenous belief futurisms and Shamanic futurisms.
  • Mystical, Esoteric and Mythic Futurisms which relate to religious belief.
  • The depiction, reception, repurposing or Alienating (attributing to aliens) of antiquated or ancient faith systems (Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Nordic, Greco-Roman, Animist, etc) in futuristic cultural works.
  • Invented religions and theology in speculative fiction and speculative artforms.
  • The development of real-world faith practices out of speculative fiction and other speculative artistic genres, for example Jediism.
  • Conceptualisations of Alien or Artificial Intelligence revelatory practices, faiths and religions.
  • Messianics, Apocalypse, Rapture, Chiliasm, Millenarism, or other faith future endpoints in speculative artforms and fiction.
  • Speculative religious cosmology and cosmogony.
  • Speculative exegetical forms, such as Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, or Erich Von Däniken’s paleo-contact Biblical hypotheses.
  • Conversion, proselytising and dogma in religious futurisms.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a 100 word bio and affiliation by December 1st 2021. We aim to inform successful contributors by January 31st 2022, and completed drafts of 5,000 – 7,500 words will be required by May 31st 2022.

Abstracts should be emailed to: religiousfuturisms@gmail.com.

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Academic Conference Appearances are like Late Night Buses

In that they offer uncomfortable seating and there’s usually some guy ranting incoherently while everyone else avoids eye contact.

Also, you wait ages for one and then a whole bunch arrive at once.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, relating primarily to parenthood, emigration and writing commitments, I’d not actually been to a conference in over a year, until I was invited to take part in this excellent one-day event on Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation. It was my first conference held in Cyberspace, so I finally got to experience the Zoom fatigue everyone else has been complaining about for 18 months.

Speaking on Nadsat in translation alongside Benet Vincent.

Anyhow, it was an excellent, eclectic and engaging experience, for which I must thank the organisers at Cappadocia University. And it has spurred me into action to do a few more. Often, one thing which precluded attending conferences was the same reason which rendered them appealing – that you had to visit a different location. The upside to Zoom-fatigue conferencing is the same as the downside – it can and will be done from one’s back bedroom. So, newly emboldened, I’ve re-engaged on the conference circuit and have a few abstracts accepted already for the forthcoming year, primarily on religious futurism topics.

Next up is an especially busy conference, as I’ll be presenting not one but two papers in two days. I’d link to SFRA 2021, except you have to be a member and pay to attend. If that is you, then please pop in to listen to my papers. I hope you find them interesting.

I’ve already mentioned the first paper here, which will examine Israel in Alt-History. The other relates to my long-running SF and Buddhism project and takes us up to the Sixties:

There is, of course, four days worth of exceptional SF research, not to mention roundtables, keynotes and discussion. If you’re not an SFRA member, you should definitely consider joining and (virtually) coming along to the conference. There are too many papers I’m looking forward to hearing (childminding permitting) but most of all I’m excited about my fellow panel members. I’m on two amazing panels, one on Israel and Palestine in SF and one on religious futurisms.

We might even have a little announcement to make too. More of that after the event.

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The Chymical Wedding of Samuel Beckett

There is to be an odd little celebration this month, in Folkestone of all places, to commemorate its visitation by, and subsequent nuptials therein of, Samuel Beckett.

Beckett married his long-term partner, as we now know due to a series of excellent biographies, in curious circumstances. He was embroiled in a serious relationship with a BBC producer at the time.

Samuel Beckett with his wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil. | Samuel beckett, Playwright, Samuel
Beckett with Mme Beckett

Ostensibly, marrying Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in March 1961 was intended to achieve the aim of ensuring her inheritance of his copyrights. As it happened, she ended up dying about six months before him, in 1989.

The curiosity pertains to Beckett’s decision to marry after nearly three decades of relationship, at the very moment when he was most involved in a separate relationship with an entirely different woman.

The organisers of the festival in Folkestone aim to give voice to those surrounding the events of the marriage, including the perspective of a journalist thrown off the scent, and a witness to the wedding itself.

It’s fun, original and embedded theatre, doing what theatre can do best, which is dramatise our stories back to ourselves. Samuel Beckett’s mysterious marriage took place in Folkestone, and it is great that they can now include this odd intrusion from the world of absurdist theatre and continenal intellectuals as one of their own stories, for it is that too.

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A Fantastikal Voyage

It’s been out a little while already, but I only just got around to checking out the latest edition of Fantastika journal.

Fantastika Issues – FANTASTIKA JOURNAL

It’s especially gratifying to see oneself mentioned, not only in Chiara Crosignani’s conference report about “Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them”, from Genzano a couple of years ago, but also in Derek Thiess’s imaginative and very current article about preppers and the apocalypse.

As always, there’s a bumper smorgasbord of non-realist writing to be enjoyed, from the Gothic to SF, from Britain’s haunted forests to Stanislaw Lem. Over 280 pages in fact!

I’m personally saving up, like a child hoarding his easter egg, their review of the Korean SF anthology Readymade Bodhisattva for after I finish reading the collection.

Fantastika is always an excellent read, and in these days of outrageous access charges for academic research, it’s delightfully free to read.

So go read it!

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The Grapes of Wolf

When it comes to lost works of literature, John Steinbeck’s unpublished werewolf mystery amounts to five words I never imagined I’d ever write in that order together.

Werewolves and Wildness: The Open Graves, Open Minds special issue of Gothic Studies - Edinburgh University Press Blog

Okay, it perhaps might not carry the same cultural weight as rediscovering Aristotle’s volume on comedy, or Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ early poetry, or James Joyce’s lost stageplay.

But in terms of sheer unexpectedness, it’s on a par with hearing of the existence of Ernest Hemingway’s secret gay erotica, Franz Kafka’s rediscovered techno thriller, or Sylvia Plath’s long forgotten shopping and fucking chicklit.

Actually, it’s even less likely than all of those. But, we are assured, nevertheless, it exists.

Publish it now, dammit!

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Tiktoking about invented languages

Our invented languages blog/project got a shout out today from Grammar Girl on Tiktok, which I have to say is new for us.

@therealgrammargirl

Clockwork Orange. #edutok #literature #language #fyp #foryou #learnontiktok #wotd #learntoday #wordoftheday #nadsat #ela

♬ original sound – Grammar Girl: English Is Fun

Such is the proliferation of social media platforms nowadays that I kind of gave up some time ago trying to keep up. I don’t do Twitter, or Insta or Tiktok. I’m on Facebook largely out of habit and because it’s where I can find a lot of the people I often need to find relatively quickly.

I’d love to say I got burnt by Bebo or something, but really it’s just a combination of laziness, and a desire for order. It’s also one of the reasons why I’ve finally (after a decade of owning the domain) launched this site.

I can tell by the stats that having one’s own webpage, especially as an academic, is probably not the most effective outreach methodology. But it suits me, as it gives me a degree of control, and allows me to archive things.

Am I a luddite? Perhaps (definitely in many ways, only perhaps in this though.)

Therefore I have great respect for those, like Grammar Girl, who have embraced the changes and the platforms and found successful ways to communicate with new audiences.

And I have great gratitude when such people share the love with those of us who don’t have their magical powers.

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Sokal Squared come out fighting

The so-called ‘Sokal Squared’ collective who effectively trolled a series of journals a few years back with spoof articles intended to satirise the methodologies, findings and content of social science journals, have been defending their work.

By way of aide-memoire for anyone who doesn’t recall the ‘Grievance Studies’ debacle, in 2017 and 2018, three academics submitted a range of papers for submission to academic journals primarily dedicated to topics such as cultural, queer, race, sexuality and fat studies. The academics – Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose – contended that the level of scholarly standards in these journals, and indeed in those fields, was low and eroding the reputation of academia generally.

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Lindsay and Pluckrose, chuckling over the content of one of their bogus articles

When some of their articles were published, they went public to condemn what they saw as poor academic standards in these fields, and critique what they termed the prioritisation of ‘social grievances’ over rigorous academic scholarship. Their contention was that certain fields were underpinned by the assumption of certain grievances, and the scholarship which took place within those fields amended and adapted theories and findings to reinforce those grievances.

The reaction was varied; they received praise from some quarters, including some of the journal editors themselves, but they were also on the receiving end of serious criticism for what many perceived as unethical behaviour. After the debacle reached the pages of the New York Times, Boghossian was even investigated by his own employer in relation to academic ethics.

This current paper, some years on, in the journal Sociological Methods and Research, suggests that the Sokal Squared authors are still not happy about how their experiment was received. In response to a journal article supporting them last year, they have come out with this latest attempt to explain their methods and motives. I expect likewise that there are many people working in those particular academic disciplines who remain unhappy with the ‘Grievance Studies’ papers experiment in the first place.

Mostly, I’m noting this because I cited most of these papers in one of my own, an article which also aimed to highlight what I perceived as a shoddy corner of academia engaged in dubious practices, which could best be highlighted by actually engaging with the process of submitting a paper.

My target was, I think, much less ambiguous than that of Boghossian et. al. I took aim at the predatory open access journals which have sprung up in recent years, looking to prey on primarily emerging academics and academics from developing nations by charging sky-high article processing fees. In order to highlight that my article was a hoax, I cited not only the Grievance Studies articles which had made it into print, but also Sokal himself, the granddaddy of the practice, whose 1996 spoof of postmodern cultural studies led ultimately to a book, and an argument with Jacques Derrida.

I think I was able to categorically demonstrate the shoddy and debased academic practices, if you can even call them that, of these journals. I’m not entirely convinced that the Sokal Squared team made their case as definitively, but in this latest article, they do manage to convince that theirs was a serious attempt to expose what they felt was of serious concern.

In short, it wasn’t a hoax, folks.

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Another Israel is Possible

Once again serious trouble and violence has erupted between Israel and Palestinians. Elswhere there is no end of discussion and commentariat media and social media prepared to offer their speculations and insights into why this is currently occurring.

Also prevalent are the ideas many people have about how to resolve this seemingly intractable problem. Two-state solutions, Eretz Israel solutions, walls… all these and more are being argued across the web.

I’m not intending to replicate any of that. Instead I will simply offer a solution that would work and yet at the same time will never take place, except of course, in another timeline, where it already has.

Next month at the SFRA 2021 conference, I’ll be talking about the Jewish states that Zionism pursued and failed to implement, for one reason or another, and how that has manifested in alt-history literature.

For now, though, all I can do is offer you the frontispiece from my talk: