GOTHIC MIGRATIONS

"Gothic Migrations" will concern the origins, transits, and transformations of global gothic in its various modes and cultural manifestations.

Since its inception, Gothic has been associated with mobility. The gothic has always involved translation, adaptation, travel, diaspora, migration and their variations in the lost son or daughter, the absent father, the escaped slave or criminal, the disappeared family member, the alien, underground networks, cross border movements of cults, banditti, terrorist and other conspiratorial webs. These themes have engaged gothic works and their criticism for some time and their significance is growing in a new global economy of the gothic. As a result, the areas of gothic study have become increasingly wide ranging and now contest any singular root and any singular route of such migration. Under the theme of roots we consider the patterns of place and stability, cultural centres, home, mother or father country, belonging, neighbourhood, any ancient locus, developed systems of privilege and aristocracy, or stable gender, sexual norm, or class patterns. We also include under roots, their underlying negations in the unheimlich, the underprivileged, the criminal, the decentred, the escaped, the alien, the other, rejected sexualities, or the hybrid. Under the theme of migrations, we consider the diasporic energies of the gothic, the migratory traces of vampires, wanderers, ghosts, demons, revenants, zombies, soucouyants, other supernatural tourists, phantasmal terrorists and gothic escapees of all kinds. The conference will thus focus on the international circulation of literary, filmic, dramatic and digital Gothic, and the establishment of new and old Gothic traditions across the globe that are in search of, or have found, new homes.

Please include your contact information, institutional affiliation and a brief biography with your abstract submission at the following website:

http://www.sfu.ca/iga2015

SUGGESTED PAPERS AND PANELS

Papers and panels could consider, but are by no means limited to the following headings:

How does the Gothic migrate?
How might we speak of a global Gothic when one considers the logistics of time and travel?
Generic routes/roots of the Gothic: novel to play, poetry to novel, novel to digitial game, novel to film, etc
Gothic Time and Time-travel
Trans-continental routes of the Gothic
Migratory routes of vampires, zombies, and Gothic wanderers more generally
The worldy unheimlich
Routes with no destination
Circuits of gothic exchange
Invasive Gothic
Reverse Colonisations
Supernatural Currencies
Home and Away
Gothic Cultural Machines
Global Gothic Crime
Tropical Gothic/Temperate Gothic
World Literary Gothic
Drugs, Machines, and Global Vampires
Gothic tourism
Lines of flight
Gothic Cultural Trauma
Networked Gothic and digital diasporas
Gothic maps and itineraries
Global Gothic, nationalism and cultural imperialism
Local to glocal Gothics
Gothic Wars