Call for Papers

Contemporaries at Post45 

The Art of Drag (Racing): Reading The Fast and the Furious

Despite its outsized popular impact – which spans 20 years, 9 films, a chart-topping song and several viral memes – The Fast Saga remains under-studied. This call for papers invites sustained inquiry into these films for a collection in Post45’s Contemporaries forum, seeking to understand the implications of this series in and on the cultural imagination, especially given the questions posed by its notable divergence from the action film genre.

What do these films accomplish when they promote the non-nuclear family over an individualist hero? Or when they revolve around one of the most diverse casts in Hollywood rather than centering white protagonists? Or when they foster a collective mourning ritual that transcends their fictional universe?

How do these films interact with our ideas of futurity with their ventures into space itself, as in F9? Or with our ideas of technology, with their constant capacity to defy the limits of the physical world? Or with our ideas of the force of law – whether that is the law of nature, of the state or of narrative itself?

In a series in which any number of gravity- and death-defying dramatics are a matter of course and a few car junkies become the world’s only hope against an endless supply of well-resourced terrorists, we see a territory for scholarship defined by possibility, where interpretations might move in any number of directions and meaning might be shifting as quickly as Dom shifts gears. We welcome articles on topics including: 

-       Questions of Genre

-       Portrayals of Masculinity and/or Femininity

-       Analysis of Race

-       Grief/Mourning/Loss/Death

-       Afrofuturism and/or Afropessimism

-       Cyborgs and Hybrids

-       The State and its Others

Please submit 300 word abstracts to Guest Editor Maggie Boyd at mlboyd@bu.edu by 12/31/21.

About Contemporaries at Post45

https://post45.org/contemporaries/

Contemporaries provides a forum for writers to converse with one another more directly and informally than in traditional academic publications, and it seeks to reinvigorate the erstwhile convention of academic critics not only describing past traditions but also actively intervening in current tastes.  

These curated conversations, or “clusters,” of pieces between 2000-3000 words range from sets of relatively autonomous short essays on a common theme such as a contemporary cultural artifact, text, or idea that inspires widespread fascination, curiosity, perplexity and feeling, to extended epistolary exchanges.