Deadline: Friday, October 13, 2023
Contact: Allison Mackey
Email: dramackey@gmail.com
CFP: Special Issue of Interconnections: journal of posthumanism
A growing body of contemporary fiction and film, along with more political and practical networks, such as zines, conferences, and writing collectives, engage with fungal discourses to think about the porous and permeable limits of bodies, to reconsider our relationship with space, time, death and decay, and to imagine novel ways of perceiving, living, and resisting power. What is perhaps most attractive to this novel spatial concurrence of politics, ontologies, and knowledge lies in the fungi’s liminal position as neither animal nor vegetal but intimately connected to both biologically and evolutionarily. This bifurcated and ambivalent perspective modeled by fungal entanglements suggests unsettling and symbiotic relationships where an objectified environment subsumed by a masterful Anthropos is abandoned for the sake of an intra-active becoming (as Karen Barad suggests). Indeed, mycelial networks propose relational fruiting bodies, and more importantly, they show the possibility of a resilient relationality that refutes simple linear causal agencies.
Interest in fungal networks is not new yet whether we encounter them in HBO’s recent video game adaptation of The Last of Us, in the zines of Spore Liberation Front, or in the fungal faces of Xiaojing Yan, we notice mycelial ontologies’ demand to be more visible in their dismantling of our current approaches towards being in the world and becoming with it. Hence, we perceive a more urgent and imminent investment in fungi and mycelium via their ontological and political potential. We call this new appeal a fungal turn. This new interest is not limited to literature, film, and aesthetic objects: for example, The Radical Mycology convergence has been organized every year since 2011, where participants celebrate mushrooms and mycelium in their political, ethical, and intersecting contexts. Similarly, Mushroom Writing School is a type of writing collective that emphasizes mycelial creative writing networks.
When Anna Tsing traced the multilayered material relations of matsutake mushrooms, she declared the end of the hegemony of the Christian Western man’s perspective and asserted that “the time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles. Without Man and Nature, all creatures come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the structures of parochially imagined rationality” (vii). Yet, one major challenge to engaging with the liminal and multilayered perspectives that fungal networks offer is imagining the radical ontologies that they provide outside of rational frameworks. As Merlin Sheldrake asks in Entangled Life: “Is it possible for humans, with our animal brains and bodies and language, to learn to understand such different organisms? How might we find ourselves changed in the process?” (29) What would it mean to actually pay attention to the fungal—not just mushrooms themselves as visible, fruiting bodies, but also complex, interspecies mycorrhizal networks—beyond the figurative, as a material model that can potentially challenge humanist frameworks? For example, Eugenia Bone notes paying attention to the fungal teaches us that “everything that lives is plural.” (283). In this sense, as radically ecological entities, fungi embody the fundamental reality of ecological interconnectedness, collaboration, and interspecies entanglement. Serpil Oppermann’s notion of “compost poiesis” reconciles a “continuous decomposition and recomposition” that “veers us away from anthropocentricity by transforming sites of decay into vibrant sites of fecund imagination” (136-137).
This CFP proposes to think of fungal spaces and bodies as sites of real connections between art and sciences, as sites of plurality and resilience in literature, film, art, and media. Beyond taking the fungi as a metaphor, how can we also attend to the working of these fungal worlds, in their refusal to disappear and ability to thrive under dire circumstances–regenerating life from death and decay––in their potential to undo our taken for granted anthropocentric ontologies and epistemologies?
We invite papers on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
Fungal spatiality, environments
Concepts of fungal contamination, resistance, and resilience
Queer spatiality, queer and weird becoming in speculative literature and media
Excesses of space and body/porosity/merging/co-constitution/ contamination/concorporation
Fungal approaches to the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, etc.
Fungal representation in bio-art, visual media, and literature
Ecocritical resistances and resilience in literature and media through fungi
Neoliberal appropriations of fungal and posthumanist discourses surrounding multiplicity and their critique
Material approaches to fungal and mycelial networks
Economies of fungi/ fungal economies and critique in and around its real relations of productions/ distribution and exchange
Onto-epistemic decompositions and recompositions via fungi
Creative works on fungi, fungal networks and entanglements including original artworks, performative pieces, poems, and other arts.
Please send 600- 900 word chapter proposals along with a working title, bibliography, and your short bio to fungalturn@gmail.com by Friday, October 13, 2023 (full papers will be due by Friday, January 12, 2024).
For questions and inquiries please reach out to the guest editors, Dr. Elif Sendur elifsendur@gmail.com or Dr. Allison Mackey dramackey@gmail.com
Bibliography
Barad, Karen. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke university Press, 2007.
Bone, Eugenia. Mycophilia: Revelations from the weird world of mushrooms. Rodale Books, 2011.
https://www.corporealwriting.com/mushroom
Oppermann, Serpil. “Compost” Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Eds. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell Duckert. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life : How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, Random House Publishing Group, 2020.
Spore Liberation Front. “Radical Mycology: an SLF Primer” .ed1. 2009. https://we.riseup.net/assets/287443/radical+mycology.pdf
https://radicalmycologyconvergence.com
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “The Mushroom at the End of the World.” The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Posted on August 18, 2023
