FEMSPEC: Speculative Black Women (7/30/03; journal issue)

Call for Papers
"Speculative Black Women: Magic, Fantasy, and the Supernatural"

FEMSPEC, an "interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to critical and creative works in the realms of SF, fantasy, magical realism, myth, folklore and other supernatural genres" is now accepting submissions for a special issue on Black women's speculative fiction. In this special issue we will offer a range of critical approaches to black women's speculative fiction, film, other art forms, and black feminist theory. We envision the special issue exploring a variety of writers, filmmakers, and other artists. We also expect that critical essays will either take on a black feminist/womanist analysis or provide a strong gender critique.

Possible topics may engage, although are not limited to: Matriarchies and Patriarchies of the Future; Black feminist (re)visions of the world; black witches; obeah women, root workers, and conjure women; gender dynamics; representations of black womanhood; rethinking (her) story through fantasy; and black women in Caribbean, African-American, or African folklore.

Possible essays might question: what it means for black women to create speculative visions of the world; how do speculative creations draw on black women's actual positions in the "real" world as women who experience varying degrees of sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia; how do current black women speculate, (re)write, (re)visit, and (re)envision history in ways that connect them to black women's legacies of struggle; why now-when black women have always emphasized speculation in their creative works-why is there now a surge of interest in their works; and why, as we move forward into the twenty-first century, is there a surge in fantastic representations of black womanhood? Contributions focusing on the works of Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, Tina McElroy-Ansa, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Jewelle Gomez, Julie Dash, and Kasi Lemmons are particularly welcome. We also solicit original fiction, poetry and artwork concerning the subject of this special issue. We are seeking critical articles, reviews, artwork, poetry and fiction. Critical articles should be 15 pages (MLA format), and short fiction should be no more than 15 pages. Book reviews should follow the FEMSPEC guidelines, which are available at http://www.csuohio.edu/femspec. For further information or queries, please contact the special issue guest editors:

Yolanda Hood (yhood@unca.edu) and Gwendolyn D. Pough (pough002@umn.edu). Submissions marked "Speculative Black Women: Magic, Fantasy, and the Supernatural" should be sent to:

FEMSPEC
Caddo Gap Press
3145 Geary Boulevard
PMB 275
San Francisco, CA 94118

Please submit four copies on which your name, address, and contact points do not appear so that the submission may be read blind. All submissions should conform to MLA standards, as found in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Fifth Edition (1999). MLA guidelines can also be found on-line at: www.mla.org. Your submission should be accompanied by a separate covering title page that includes author's name, title, genre, address, phone, FAX and email. Any submission that does not come in with sufficient copies will not be sent through the review process at our expense.

Submission Deadline: July 30, 2003