On the Edge: Hungarian SFF and Hungarofuturism
Special Issue of SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 4, Fall 2021
Edited by Vera Benczik and Beata Gubacsi
Background
The SFRA Review’s Fall 2021 issue is dedicated to explore Hungarian SFF and Hungarofuturism, responding to emerging and intersecting trends in global SFF scholarship. The “science fictionalisation” of communicating global challenges, highlighting economic inequalities, political imbalances and racial biases, necessitate the proper representation and amplification of “local”, marginalised voices. The efforts of decolonising popular culture inherently result in a proliferation of “futurisms” and a greater attention to non-Anglo-American SFF. While Hungarian culture has a rich fantastic tradition in the arts, and there has been a recent, considerable growth of Hungarian SFF scholarship, engaging with climate crisis, economic and political breakdown, it is still on the peripheries of mainstream critical discourse. The themes and scope of the special issue are partially inspired by Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z. Nemes’ coinage “Hungarofuturism” originating from their satiric 2017 Manifesto:
Hungarofuturism (HUF) is a mythofiction and aesthetic strategy designed to condition cultural memory. […] The goal of HUF is the transformation of imagination in both a spatial and a temporal sense. This can be achieved through the creative rechannelling of narratives of origin and a restoration of hope in futures past, or even speculative utopian futures that never have been or never will be.
Translation by Adam Lovász
Consequently, the purpose of the special issue is to explore the strange horizons (pun intended) and variety of Hungarian SFF across genres and media, navigating how the fantastic intrusion impacts national identity of a culture self-defined by crisis, facilitates dealing with past traumas, and negotiates perspectives of the future. In order to accurately represent the extent of current research into the fantastic in Hungarian popular culture, the SFRA Review special issue is open to scholars working in the fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and their different subgenres and cross-hatches, colleagues working in Humanities and Social Sciences as well as Science and Technology. We are inviting abstracts relating but not limited to the following areas and topics:
- Art and art history
- Alternate histories and time travel
- Anthropocene and climate anxieties
- Comics and graphic novels
- Cultural identity
- Diaspora
- Film and television
- Folklore, myths and mythmaking
- Gaming and digital narratives
- Geography, topography, maps
- Heritage and museum studies
- Medicine and healthcare
- Media and meme culture
- Politics and Political ideologies
- Socialism and the Cold War
- Publishing SFF – history and ideology
- Posthumanism
- Roma SFF – representation and perspectives
- Trauma and cultural memory
- Translation studies
- Teaching and Education
Submissions
Please send your abstracts (250-300 words) describing your provisional 3000-4000-word English-language paper accompanied by a brief bionote (50-100 words) to hunsff.specialissue@gmail.com by 31 March 2021. Authors will be notified within a week and first drafts of selected papers (prepared in MLA style with a Works Cited in MLA 8th edition) will be expected by 30 July 2021. If you have any queries regarding the project, editors Dr Vera Benczik (ELTE) and Beata Gubacsi (University of Liverpool) are happy to provide further information.
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