The Fantastical Constellations After Magical Realism research  group (formerly known as Post-Magical Realist Worlds) of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA) invites submissions to our sessions in the upcoming CCLA 2025 Conference taking place June 7-9, 2025 at Trent University, Peterborough/Nogojiwanong, Ontario and online.  

The conference, entitled “Comparative Literature Off-Kilter,” considers “our often off-kilter positionality in (and out of) academia,” and the precarity of the balancing act of comparison. We are asked to conceive the conference “as a playground on which marginal practices, thoughts, works and formats can form revolutionary friendships.”

 The Fantastical Constellations Working Group proposes entering this conversation with (1) a round table discussion, and (2) a panel, that together tie into the notion of being “off-kilter,” which we see as an upturning of expected norms, blurring of borderlines, and breaking the boundaries of genres; in other words, being off-kilter in our practice as a lens for a world off-kilter. The ongoing debate over genrefication to which magical realism and other fantastical modes of writing and storytelling are subjected, and their capacity to crash the genres, make our research group well positioned to play in this playground. 

1.     Round Table Discussion

We invite submissions to our round table discussion, and are interested in all forms of representation in contemporary literature, cinema, media, and the arts, including popular culture.

Topic: Fantastical and post magical realism after the Anthropocene.

How can, and how do, (post)magical realism and the fantastical function as an ecocritical tool to dismantle the human/non-human binary; to disrupt time and space? How do the Anthropocene and ecocriticism factor into fantastical or magical realist creative practices (writing, film, and so on)? In Climate and Crises, Ben Holgate contends that “magical realism enables writers to portray alternative intellectual paradigms, ontologies and epistemologies that typically contest the scientific rationalism derived from the European Enlightenment, and the exploitation of natural resources associated with both capitalism and imperialism.” The overlap between magical realism and environmental literature, he says, offers “a shared biocentric perspective that focuses on the inter-connectedness of all things in the universe, and, frequently, a critique of postcolonial legacies in formerly colonised territories.” Magical realist techniques, he argues, have the potentiality to blur the species boundaries (human, animal and non-human). In (post)magical realism and fantastical narratives generally does this blurring of boundaries then provide hope for building interspecies solidarities and avoiding anthropomorphisations?

There are many similarly specific possible questions to ask during the round table, but our leading Round Table Question is: Considering concepts of magical realism as explored by Holgate: indeterminacies, instabilities, ambiguities; interconnectedness of all existing things; counter dominant ontologies and epistemologies (Maufort); socio-ecological entanglements, and environmentally oriented fantasy, do Anthropocene literature and the fantastical offer off-kilter solutions and hopeful visions for the future?

To participate in the round table discussion, please submit a 200-250 word abstract for your five-minute manifesto statement as response to the question (as a MS Word attachment) to the Program Chair, Dr. Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard (jeannemathieulessard@gmail.com) by December 15, 2024 (with an annotation “Fantastical Constellations After Magical Realism Round Table”). Please mention whether you can participate in person or online.

 With inquiries, please write to: Dr. Jill Planche, jillplanche@gmail.com or Dr. Agata Mergler, agatamer@yorku.ca

 2.     Panel Session

We invite submissions to our panel session and are interested in discussions of all forms of representation in contemporary literature, cinema, media, and the arts, including popular culture.

Topic: ‘Minor literature’ as a tool in fantastical literature

Deleuze and Guattari’s term “minor literature” draws on Kafka’s use of the German language for writing his works while living in Prague, Czech Republic – fusions of realism and surrealism that are political and subversive. Reflecting this sense of “going against the grain,” Deleuze and Guattari conceive minor literature has three characteristics: “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (2003, p. 18). The concept of minor literature “brings to the fore other related terms and concepts such as endangered language, language minority, marginalized language, minorized language, native language, non-territorial language, indigenous language, or even social movements” (Babaei). Can the notion of minor literature and the plethora of terms developed from it, like minor media, minor art practices, minor cultural practices etc. eschew the tension in the “constant movement” of comparison suggested by the conference topic, instead offering constant movement in its more positive sense as a relational process of continual differentiation?

 Panel Session Questions might include:

• magical realism, the fantastic, minor language
• fantastical and minor literature, minor film, and minor art practice (Deleuze and Guattari)
• indeterminacies, instabilities, ambiguities (Holgate)
• minoritarian ontology of generative and relational processes
• interconnectedness of all existing things
• counter dominant ontologies and epistemologies (Maufort)
• emergent modalities of hybrid transnational subjectivity
• critique of the minor literature terminology use in magical and (post)magical realism scholarship
• reshaping physical, social and psychological spaces inscribed by legacies of colonial capitalism.

Please submit 200-250 word abstracts for 15-20 minute presentations as MS Word attachments to the Program Chair, Dr. Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard (jeannemathieulessard@gmail.com) by December 15, 2024 (with an annotation “Fantastical Constellations After Magical Realism Panel Session”). Please mention whether you can participate in person or online.

 With inquiries, please write to: Dr. Jill Planche, jillplanche@gmail.com or Dr. Agata Mergler, agatamer@yorku.ca

Works Cited:

Babaei, Mehdi. “Minor literature and the language of the minorities.” Belonging, Identity, Language, Diversity Research Group (BILD), 2 Mar 2020. https://bild-lida.ca/blog/uncategorized/minor-literature-and-the-language-of-the-minorities-by-mehdi-babaei/

Deleuze, Giles and Fèlix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by D. Polan. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Holgate, Ben. Climate and Crises; Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse. Routledge, 2019.

Maufort, Jessica. Book Review of Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse. EcoZon@, volume 11, number 1, 2020. https://doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2020.11.1.3265