27 Jul CfP: JASAL special issue
CfP: JASAL special issue: Exchange and Imagination: Research on Chinese and Australian Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction—an expansive generic category encompassing science fiction, fantasy,
utopia/dystopia, alternate history, and all forms of alternative reality narratives—has gained
unprecedented academic attention and cultural influence worldwide in recent years. Once
dismissed as marginal “genre literature,” speculative fiction has emerged as a vital intellectual and
aesthetic field for exploring technological transformations, ecological crises, identity formations,
colonial legacies, and competing visions of the future.
Situated within the Asia-Pacific region, China and Australia offer particularly productive sites
for examining these shifting imaginaries. Both countries have experienced profound
transformations in their global and regional positioning in the twenty-first century, and speculative
fiction has become an important medium through which they negotiate changing notions of
identity, belonging, and futurity. Chinese science fiction has increasingly engaged with questions
of modernization, globalization, technological development, and humanity’s planetary destiny,
while Australian speculative fiction has developed distinctive responses to settler colonial
histories, environmental vulnerability, and shifting relations between local and global imaginaries.
At the same time, Chinese Australian diasporic writers employ speculative forms to revisit
memories of China, negotiate transnational identities, and imagine alternative futures that
complicate conventional national boundaries.
Beyond their differences, Chinese and Australian speculative traditions reveal shared concerns
that transcend national frameworks, particularly around artificial intelligence, climate change,
resource politics, posthuman ethics, and the future of human civilization. Their encounters open
new possibilities for understanding how speculative fiction participates in the repositioning of
China and Australia within a rapidly changing Asia-Pacific and global landscape. Therefore, we
invite papers which seeks to examine historical exchanges, reception dynamics, and theoretical
cross-fertilization between Chinese and Australian speculative fiction. It aims not only to fill a
generic gap in Chinese-Australian comparative literary studies but also to offer a unique “Asia-
Pacific” perspective to global speculative fiction research.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
1. Comparative studies of speculative narratives
2. The reception of Australian speculative fiction in Chinese scholarship
3. Theoretical constructions and critical practices concerning Chinese speculative fiction in
Australian context
4. Two-way interactions between Chinese and Australian speculative fiction: translation,
adaptation, dialogue, and re-reading
5. Theoretical dialogues between Chinese and Australian speculative fiction: techno-
Orientalism, the Global South, and decolonial imagination
6. Diasporic and transnational imaginaries
7. The role of speculative fiction in reimagining visions of national and regional identity.
The special issue will be co-edited by Dr. Beibei Chen (East China Normal University) and
Dr. Lyu Guangzhao (Fudan University).
Please send paper title, a 300-word abstract, five keywords, and a CV, to Beibei Chen
([email protected]) and Lyu Guangzhao ([email protected]), under the subject
heading “Exchange and Imagination 2026” by Sep 30, 2026 and authors whose abstracts are
selected for inclusion will be expected to submit complete manuscripts by a specified deadline
after the abstract notification.