Charles Tung co-organizes seminar, presents papers

Charles Tung, associate professor of English, co-organized a seminar, “Inside Junkyard Ecologies and the Archives of the Present,” at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present conference at the University of Maryland, College Park, Oct 10-12. In his paper, “The Great Digital Garbage Patch, Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, and the Fantasy of Survival,” he examined contemporary fiction’s interest in the Digital Dark Age, toxic platforms, and the hazardous materiality of communication hardware.

At the Modernist Studies Association annual conference in Toronto, Oct 17-20, he delivered a paper on the “Ethnofuturist Archives” roundtable entitled “Ethnofuturism: Racial Fastforward,” which examined transracial fantasies in Altered Carbon and “post-racial” SF, the future of race as data, and “ethnicity recognition” algorithms.

Tung also was invited to give a plenary lecture, “Going Sideways:  John Wick, Time Traveler,” at the World(s) of John Wick conference, Nov. 7-9, at Indiana University, Bloomington, a meeting organized around a planned volume in IUP’s series on fan culture and cultural theory. Tung’s lecture focused on anachronistic communication and storage media at the heart of the larger financial and administrative totality of the underworld in the films, and explored the relation of speeds and channels of transmission to the production of worlds shot through with bits and pieces of different times.