Casting Lots: Transnational Crime Fictions and Haunted Modernities

Edited by Colette Guldimann, Kirsten Saxton, Chantal Tom

Narratives of crime are always formally and theoretically motivated by place: that which is in and out of place, questions of genre placement, placing blame, and of course, the complex instantiations of place and landscape. Informed by the spatial turn and critical race and gender theory, this collection explores the twinned titular concepts of the ‘haunt’ and the ‘lot’ and their evocations of place/space and meaning in these narratives: the haunt as a quotidian location and a spectral verb, the lot as a collection or group, fate or chance, and a spatial property. 

We are interested in essays that use these concepts to consider crime fiction from a trans-temporal, trans-spatial, and transmedial position. We define transmediality broadly, including: periodicals, novels, short stories, fanfiction, film, television, podcasts, comics, songs, operas, reenactments, docudramas, podcasts, radio shows, theater/plays, puppet shows, web serials, video games, and more.

We are particularly interested in collaborating with scholars whose work is informed by postcoloniality, affect theory, disability theory and mad studies, queer theory, theories of place and space, ecotheory, and new formalism.

Possible lines of inquiry could include:

• How does crime fiction, broadly defined, reinforce, reflect, and/or trouble constructions of place and space? In what ways does that invite or displace reconsideration of a bounded past and present? 
• How do place and modernity shape particular crime fictions or crime fiction traditions? 
• How does the colonial haunt (post)colonial crime fictions? 
• What role does capital play in shaping and haunting the lots of characters and spaces? 
• How are unofficial transnational adaptations haunted by authority as they are also fugitive appropriations/replacements? 
• What are some of the ways crime fiction moves out of place to haunt new literary and media spaces across generic and national borders? 
• How has the place/lot of crime fiction been haunted by capital and literary conceptions of value and the market? 

Keywords: 

• Bounded landscapes
• Climate disaster
• Empty lots, gentrification, squatting, real estate
• Global migration
• Hauntology
• Heritage
• Home, shelter, house
• Houses, rooms, buildings, developments
• Infrastructure, architecture, and transportation
• Landscapes of the future and the past
• Lots, allotments
• Maps
• Micro landscapes
• Mobility, stasis
• (Post)colonial, (Post)apartheid
• Queer geographies
• Slippage
• Social and spatial place
• Subterranean spaces
• The Translocal, Transurban, and Transnational
• Urban geographies
• Vacancy, vagrancy

Individual paper proposals should be titled “YOURNAMEABSTRACT” and consist of an abstract (200-250 words), brief biography (50-100 words), and contact information in a single Word file. Please submit your abstract to CastingLotsSubmissions@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Casting Lots Submission’ by January 15, 2024.