The Virtual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (VICFA)
October 9-12, 2024
"Pantheology in World-Building and Magic Systems"
VICFA 3 will explore the possibilities of deism, the metaphysical, and the historical structures of Pantheology that give the Fantastic its soul. In thinking of the fantastic, the term fantasy often crops up. But the world-building and magic systems that make it up are often built on the backs of diverse, real-world deism, religions and cultures that are cloaked, lost, and dismissed when loaded into the term fantasy.
This system of calling spirito-cultural narratives fantasy has at times been a historical tool of colonization when the flavors of these cultures and their religions are lost beneath the veil of fantasy. For example, when we walk into bookstores, overly broad categorization often centers and highlights only those works written by major figures instead of recognizing less well-known creatives who also work within these component deistic paradigms.
So, what if we acknowledge these sources, the deistic and cultural reservoirs from which they stem, and name them for what they are: pantheologies - Afropantheology, Jewish pantheology, Arabian pantheology, Slavic pantheology, South Asian pantheology, Caribbean pantheology, and many others, allowing works to be seen for what they are, centering their sources, enhancing and decolonizing literature in the process? What are the various religions, cultures—the pantheologies—that feed our favorite worlds and speculative works? How do they affect the way we look at genre, categorization, borders, politics, culture, and knowledge, as a whole? How does pantheology, which often deals with origins, blend with and tie into futurisms, as part of the same, as when Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Arthur C. Clark posit magic, alternative history and science to coalesce into cosmology?
Proposals are welcome on any topics related to the study of the broadly-understood fantastic.
