SFF2024-Keynotes

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Keynotes

Keynote speakers and addresses

Daniele Barbieri

A Glass Darkly. Science Fiction and the Image


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The boundaries between Science Fiction and Fantasy are blurred, as they both descend from the magical fairy tale and the epic. Scientific progress (or the catastrophes that can result from it) has a role in SF that is not so different from that of magic in F and in fairy tales - and is nevertheless at the heart of its discourse, even defining the genre, through its specific form of spectacle. Since the spectacular nature of technology and its consequences is at the center of SF discourse, narratives through images (comics and cinema) receive particular importance. The role of illustration in traditional SF is already important, but comics, from Flash Gordon to Arzach and beyond, have made visual spectacle the crucial element of their discourse, promoting levels of immersion higher than those of the novel. We will explore some ways in which comics operate along these lines, and some in which they explicitly reject or reduce them; it will also be interesting to observe some differences between the immersive modes set by comics compared to those of SF cinema. 

Daniele Barbieri, semiologist, works on comics and visual communication, but also on poetry and music. He teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, the ISIA in Urbino, the University of San Marino. He is among the leading scholars of comics in Italy.


Among his books: Valvoforme valvocolori (Idea Books 1990, French transl. Imschoot 1991), I linguaggi del fumetto (Bompiani 1991, Spanish transl. Paidós 1993, Portuguese transl. Peirópolis 2017), Questioni di ritmo. L’analisi tensiva dei testi televisivi (Eri/Rai 1996), Nel corso del testo. Una teoria della tensione e del ritmo (Bompiani 2004), Tensioni, interpretazione, protonarratività (edited by, monographic issue of VS, 98-99, 2004), La linea inquieta. Emozioni e ironia nel fumetto (edited by, Meltemi 2005), L’ascolto musicale. Condotte, pratiche, grammatiche (co-edited by, Libreria Musicale Italiana 2008), Breve storia della letteratura a fumetti (Carocci 2009, new ed. 2014), Il pensiero disegnato. Saggi sulla letteratura a fumetti europea (Coniglio 2010), Guardare e leggere. La comunicazione visiva dalla pittura alla tipografia (Carocci 2011), Il linguaggio della poesia (Bompiani 2011, partial Croatian transl. FFPress 2022), Maestri del fumetto (Tunuè 2012), Semiotica del fumetto (Carocci 2017, Greek transl. Jemma Press 2023), Letteratura a fumetti? Le impreviste avventure del racconto (ComicOut 2019), Testo e processo. Pratica di analisi e teoria di una semiotica processuale (Esculapio 2020).

 

Scott Bukatman

“Help Me to Enter Your World!”: Serendipity, Wonder, and a Cool Picture by Jack Kirby


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The comic book image, a densely packed double-page spread by Jack Kirby, churns with the roiling, sublime energies of a seething sunscape, a spaceship, and, somehow, a man in a bed. Vibrant, dancing flames fairly leap from the page. In the background, cosmic forces kirby-krackle. A hand cradles the man’s cranium, strange technology protruding from its fingers. A word balloon contains the man’s imploring plea: Help me to enter your world!

 

I encountered this picture, from Machine Man #3 (1978), by accident, without recognizing it (beyond its evident Kirby-ness); this uncertainty made it fresh. Do I need to know what’s happening? As it is, it stimulates wonder, and wonder, after all, emerges from incomplete knowledge and the destabilizing encounter with the unfamiliar — explanation risks robbing the image of its wonder, even as science fiction is often defined by the sense of wonder it engenders. The man, a hospital patient, is channeling the pilot of the spaceship who, it turns out, can come to Earth via a “trans-dimensional space-time bridge.” The alien in this picture wants to enter our world, while on the other side, my desire is to imaginatively enter and explore this world of Jack Kirby’s.

 

Artworks (and not just science fiction artworks) build worlds, and the world in this picture, the world that is this picture, opens onto worlds of possibility. My talk will consider the serendipity with which I encountered the image, the wonder it arouses, and the different worlds it presents: the worlds birthed from the head of Jack Kirby; the world(s) depicted; the reader’s world, infected and affected by Kirby’s creation; and mine, where I set myself the task of navigating all these myriad worlds.

Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. His research has explored how popular media mediates between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience through the proliferation of alternative bodies in comedy, animation, musicals, and superhero media. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke University Press, 1993), one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute (1997; anniversary edition 2012); and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Duke University Press, 2003). The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (University of California Press, 2012), celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the unruly life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema.


His most recent work includes Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins (University of California, 2016) shows how an engagement with Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics is also a highly aestheticized encounter with the medium of comics and the materiality of the book, and explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader’s imagination to inhabit. Black Panther, part of the 21st Century Film Essentials series (University of Texas Press, 2022), explores aspects of the 2018 Ryan Coogler film, including the history of Black superheroes, Black Panther's black body, the Wakandan dream, and the controversies around the Killmonger character. Bukatman considers how the movie offers a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital cultural questions.



Bukatman has also published essays in abundance, which have been published in various anthologies and such journals as October, Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, Science Fiction Studies, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

 

Joanna Davis-McElligatt

The Flying Africans: Fugitivity and Resistance in Black Comics


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The legend of The Flying African in the folklore of the Black Diaspora is inherently speculative: in the story, a certain number of Africans, upon arriving on the shores of the Americas, step off the boat and immediately fly away across the ocean back home. The particulars vary, depending on where you are coming from—Cuba, Jamaica, South Carolina. Flight is sometimes considered to be an ancestral trait, an individual or collective ability, made possible with the aid of salt, or by growing wings, at times, or by transforming into a buzzard. At its root, scholars have understood the legend as an allegorical or metaphorical longing for escape, for a desire to enter into the conditions of fugitivity, to bring about the conditions of freedom, and to reverse the violence of the Middle Passage. As a literary trope, the figure of the fugitive, as Saidiya Hartman has argued, “dream[s] of an elsewhere,” and characterized by their “ongoing struggle to escape.” As a Black speculative technology, the myth of the Flying African anticipates fugitivity of all sorts—flights of fancy, movements of the mind, transfigurations of the body and spirit, escapes and altered states.

 

In this talk I offer a reading of a cluster of Black superheroes—Storm, Nubia, Icon, and Black Panther—alongside readings of John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March trilogy, Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, and Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith’s Wash Day Diaries in order to demonstrate how Black comics continue to respond to, reshape, and reimagine the Flying African as a visual-narrative mode of resistance to white supremacy, racial capitalism and penal colonialism, and the death-logics of the antiblack state. I suggest that the figure, trope, allegory, and legend of the Flying African in Black comics anticipates (and at times fulfills) desires for the freedom of unfettered movement, frames the politics of fugitivity and resistance as a radical spectacular praxis, and offers new ways of thinking through—and making possible—Black futures.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of North Texas, where is she also Affiliate Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies. She is at work on her first monograph, entitled Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora, a critical exploration of the Black extraterrestrial alien as figure and metaphor for diasporic belonging in speculative media created by Black artists and visionaries.

 

She is the co-editor of five volumes: Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (UP of Mississippi 2022), BOOM! Splat!: Comics and Violence (UP of Mississippi 2024), bell hooks' Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, under contract), and Afrosouthernfuturism (in progress).

 

Her work on comics has appeared in The Comics Journal, Snapshots: Teaching Love and Rockets (forthcoming), The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel (Cambridge UP 2023), Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults (U of Mississippi P, 2017), and The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (U of Mississippi P 2010). Her book on the history and importance of Nubia, Wonder Woman's twin sister, is under contract with University Press of Mississippi. Her comics and illustrations appear in Little Village Magazine and Black Punk Now (Soft Skull Press 2024), and Educating for Social Justice: Field Notes from Rural Communities (Brill/Sense 2020).

 

She is currently serving as the President of the Comics Studies Society (comicsstudies.org).

 

Paweł Frelik

Everything is Illuminated: Science Fiction’s “Minor” Visualities and the Shape of Things to Come



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It is perfectly understandable that, when applied to science fiction (but also other allied genres of the fantastic), the adjectives “graphic” and “visual” immediately collocate with comics, film, television, and – more recently – video games. All four have played a major role in sf’s mainstream recognition in the last few decades and, at the same time, represent hundreds, if not thousands, of fantastic texts (pun intended). But the media listed above are hardly the only visual realms of the genre. In fact, the list of sf’s visual forms is much longer and includes game-like interactive environments; short film and its ecology of media such as music video, commercial, VFX reels, and game engine demos; digital graphics and illustration; maps; cybertexts (Twine, Twittertexts, apps); GIFs; neon, laser and light installations and performances; stage design; designs for unbuilt architectures; and software assets.

 

Although seemingly fleeting when compared to the narrative-centric media, these visual media play a major role in science fiction’s cultural work and offer authentic aesthetic delight. In my talk I would thus like to do two things. First, I will position science fiction’s “minor” visual media in a broader context of contemporary cultures of speculation, illuminating their cultural impact that is much bigger than their ephemerality might at first suggest. Second, I will look at three selected case studies from three such media and discuss the ways in which they engage issues and problems that the genre’s major media seem to have a monopoly on thanks to their narrative complexity.

Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Leader of Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His past appointments include University of California, Riverside; Florida Atlantic University; and Oregon State University.

 

His teaching and research revolve around cultures of speculation, science fiction, video games, and fantastic audiovisualities. He has published widely in these fields, serves on the boards of Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and is the co-editor of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. His current projects include two books – on science fiction video games for Routledge and on the Mass Effect franchise for University of Minnesota Press – and chapters on visionary architectures and NASA photography as science fiction.

 

In the past, he was President of the Science Fiction Research Association, the first in the organization's history from outside North America. In 2017, he was the first non-Anglophone recipient of the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service presented for outstanding service to the field of science fiction studies and in 2023 he received SFRA’s Innovative Research Award.

 

He currently serves as President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

 

Noriko Hiraishi

Girls, Space, and Science Fiction Comics: Their Potential to Challenge Gender Issues


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What kind of image does sci-fi comics project? Until recently, comics have been considered a masculine domain in many comic book-oriented regions, and the same is true in the world of sci-fi fiction. When the British comics magazine 2000AD ran an all-female sci-fi special in 2018, The Guardian reported it as follows: “The future's female? 2000AD's all-women special: A new sci-fi edition has been written and drawn entirely by women, which the comic hopes will put an end to its boy's club reputation.”

 

At the same time, however, science fiction comics have gained female readers. One reason for this is that in sci-fi comics, which are set in a technologically advanced future, women often play a larger role than they do in the real world. In this paper, I would like to consider the possibility of sci-fi comics contributing to the empowerment of women by taking Japanese manga as an example and analyzing how sci-fi comics have depicted gender.

 

Osamu Tezuka, who is often referred to as the "God of Manga" in Japan and who laid the foundation for Japanese-style story manga, was an early publisher of sci-fi works set in outer space, such as Lost World (1948), and his Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), which began serial publication in 1952, became a legendary piece of robot manga that gained great popularity. From there, artists such as Mitsuteru Yokoyama, Shotaro Ishinomori, Go Nagai, and Leiji Matsumoto produced masterpieces of science fiction manga for boys, including so-called "media-mix" works, through the 1970s. Meanwhile, from the late 1970s, female artists such as Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya produced many important works in the shōjo manga genre. It is worth noting that the works of female artists expressed discomfort and resistance to the gender norms of Japanese society at the time, especially by setting their works in outer space. This paper will review the history of Japanese sci-fi manga, especially the characteristics of space sci-fi works from a gender perspective, and identify the challenges to the norms made by female artists from Hagio and Takemiya in the 1970s to Yumiko Shirai in the 2010s. It also reports the current situation in other regions, such as Southeast Asia.

Noriko Hiraishi is Professor of comparative literature at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo. Through her analysis of European fin-de-siècle literature and modern Japanese literature, she continues to be interested in modernization, exoticism, and female representations, considering graphic narratives to be a very important genre of material for examining these issues. She is also currently engaged in research on contemporary Japanese literature and culture, focusing on aspects of intercultural dialogue. Her publications on comics include “Japan in European Shōjo Manga: The Cases of Yonen Buzz and Pink Diary” (2011, in Japanese), “The Poetic Imagination of Shōjo Manga: Ray Bradbury through Moto Hagio’s Eyes” (2015), “Japanese sound-symbolic words in global contexts: from translation to hybridization” (2022), and “Manga and Fukushima:Subjectivity/Objectivity and Political Messages” (2022).

 

Ana Merino

Between Science Fiction and Fantasy: Spanish Voices and Their Creative Power


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This presentation will analyze the creative power and evolution of different Spanish voices and the way they articulate the concept of science fiction and fantasy from the late 60s to recent dates. Compares influences and transformations, and the impact of their own socio-political context and the evolution of their work. It will start with Carlos Gimenez “Dani Futuro” series and the arrival of science fiction in late Francoism and during the Spanish Transition, the redefinition and appropriation of the classics of fantasy on Max with the series “Peter Pank” on the 80s, and the provocative work of Miguel Angel Martin with “Brian the Brian” on the 90s. The concept of the graphic novel with new proposals such as David Rubín/Marcos Prior “Gran Hotel Abismo” (2016) and the empowerment of new feminine voices such as Ana Galvañ, Laura Pérez and Sonica Pulido that bring a new approach to fantasy. 

Ana Merino is an award-winning writer and The Director of the Cátedra Planeta of Literature and Society at the University International of Valencia in Spain, is a Full Professor of Spanish Creative Writer and a Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. Winner of the 2020 Nadal Award for her novel “El mapa de los afectos”, she also published the novel “Amigo”. In 2011 she creates the Spanish MFA program at the University of Iowa and was its director until December 2018. She has published ten books of poems, two of which, “Preparativos para un viaje” and “Juegos de niños”, won the Adonais Prize in 1994 and the Fray Luis de Leoìn Prize in 2003. She is also author of two youth novels one of fantasy and other of science fiction, “El hombre de los dos corazones” (2009) and “Planeta Lasvi” (2024), a children album, and four plays, including “Amor muy fraìgil” (2013), which was staged in several Swiss theaters in 2012 and 2013 and “La Redención” at Iowa City in 2017. Merino has won the Diario de Avisos prize for her short articles on comics for the literary magazine Leer. She had collaborated with opinion articles for El País and has won an Accésit of the Carmen de Burgos Award for one of her journalistic pieces. Merino has also written extensive criticism on comics and graphic novels. She has two academic books El cómic hispánico (2003) and Diez ensayos para pensar el cómic (2017), a monograph on Chris Ware (2006) and the catalogue Fantagraphics creadores del canon (2003). She has been invited as visiting Professor to Dartmouth College (Summer 2023), the University of Zurich (Spring 2019) and the University of San Gallen (Fall 2012). Merino has curated six comic book exhibitions and edited several volumes. She was a member of the ICAF (International Comic Arts Forum) Executive Committee from 2001–2011, Directors Board founder member at The Center for Cartoon Studies from 2004–2014, and Co-Director of the University of Iowa 2022-2023 Mellon Swayer Seminar “Racial Reckoning through Comics”.

 

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