Breaking the Narrative: Creating Inclusive Space in Adaptations (ASAP/16 Annual Conference)
Houston, Texas
Organization: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present ASAP
Event: ASAP/16 Annual Conference
Breaking the Narrative: Creating Inclusive Space in Adaptations
Organization: ASAP/16 (The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present)
Deadline for Papers: March 14, 2025
We invite papers for a proposed panel “Breaking the Narrative: Creating Inclusive Space in Adaptations”, in ASAP/16: Worldmaking/Worldbreaking for its 16th annual conference to be held at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, Texas on Wednesday, October 22 - Saturday, October 25, 2025.
When the world feels as though it is breaking, the creation of community becomes all the more important. It is also nothing new. There is the historic creation of queer spaces as an oasis within heteronormative, and at times conservative-authoritarian, cultures that allow people to express themselves when they otherwise could not. Furthermore, one need look no further than Houston, the most diverse city in the United States, to see that the creation of cultural enclaves consists of literally building one’s culture into the bedrock of their adopted country–worldbuilding. These are acts of adaptation. Worldbreaking, too, is productive and an opportunity for creativity that was largely necessary to bring about modernity.
In adaptation, world-building and world-breaking can be used for resistance, subversion, and creation alike. Especially in today’s tumultuous sociopolitical landscape, the dichotomy of world-breaking and world-building has become increasingly evident as we navigate the challenges of a rapidly changing world. By embracing the complexities of deconstruction and reconstruction, adaptations can become powerful tools for social commentary, cultural critique, and empathy-building. This panel seeks to explore how adaptations can subvert, challenge, and reimagine existing narratives to create inclusive environments for alterity, either in ways of being or thinking. Adaptation takes the old and makes it new, rethinks what is into what could be, or further explores the possibilities of a world as created.
We encourage potential panelists to draw on examples from literature, film, television, and other media to illustrate the potential of worldbuilding/breaking in creating spaces for community, play, exploration, and expression culturally and narratively.
Topics of interest can include, but are not limited to:
How adaptations create spaces for exploring fluid identities and nonconformity through the breaking of binary worlds.
Challenging the dominant narrative through using adaptation as a tool for political and social resistance
Breaking the fourth-wall through deconstructing adaptation itself as a form of inclusivity
Intersectionality in adaptations through amplifying voices that are often excluded from mainstream narratives
The role of worldbuilding in creating inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ characters and audiences
Adaptation and Alterity
Disruption/Subversion
Challenging Power
Queer Spaces/Safe Spaces
Cultural Enclaves
Alternatives to Heteronormativity
Abstracts should be no more than 250 words in total with a brief (250 word max) biography. All abstracts should clearly address the panel’s theme of worldmaking/worldbreaking in adaptations. All abstracts due by Friday, March 14th, to Zhuwen Zang (zhuwen.zhang.318@gmail.com) and Justin Rogers (ridetheskies@tamu.edu).
Zhuwen Zhang and Justin Rogers are PhD Candidates at Texas A&M University. They are also instructors of English at the University of Houston-Downtown and Tarleton State University respectively.
ASAP/16: Worldmaking/Worldbreaking
Description:
“You won’t break my soul,” Houston native Beyoncé protested in the lead single from her 2022 commemoration of the Black and queer origins of dance music. And yet the future tense of that declaration suggests how staying unbroken is a constant labor of vigilance. In the chronic catastrophes of the present, what resources does art provide for worlds that are sustainable and endurable? Amidst entrenching nationalisms, what models in the contemporary archive could we find for what Adom Getachew calls “worldmaking after empire”? And when everything is breaking, how do we also hold onto a queer impulse to shatter more: to break the structures that break?
Deadline for Submissions: March 14, 2025
Zhuwen Zang
