CFP: ACLA 2018 Seminar, "Blade Runner International"

CFP: Seminar "Blade Runner International." Annual convention of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Los Angeles, March 29-April 1, 2018.

https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting

Thirty-five years ago, Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982) brought Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) to the big screen and in the process introduced a groundbreaking visual language for science fiction film in its creation of a dystopian future Los Angeles. As ACLA prepares to convene in Los Angeles, just one year shy of the setting of Scott’s film, this seminar is interested in exploring Blade Runner’s influence on cultural production around the globe. To what extent has the film’s “retro-fitted” aesthetic shaped the visual language of the international iterations of science fiction sub-genres such as cyberpunk and steampunk? How has its representation of human and robot relations intervened in subsequent explorations of – and scholarship about – the post-human? What connections might we draw between Blade Runner’s portrayal of the future and more recent representations of dystopian futures and/or urban spaces? How have re-workings of some of Blade Runner’s tropes in literature and film from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and non-Anglophone Europe in turn reshaped our current understanding of the original film? We welcome papers from diverse historical, ethno-national, and social contexts that examine and/or engage with a range of media (film, literature, animé, video-games, etc.).

We invite you to contact us or to submit an abstract to the ACLA website by September 21.

Emily Maguire (Northwestern University), e-maguire@northwestern.edu, and Antonio Cordoba (Manhattan College), antoniocordoba@gmail.com.