Afropantheology with Joshua Uchenna Omenga.
Caribbean pantheology with Tonya Liburd, E. G Condé & Fabrice Guerrier
Indopantheology with Rimi B Chatterjee & Maryanne Mohanraj
Arabian Pantheology
Slavic Pantheology
What is Pantheology as related to stories and used here, as a sub-genre/philosophy?
It’s a way of thinking about stories, that aims to solve the existing problem of categorization, in genre fiction and beyond, and that the term fantasy is plagued with.
Think about this. You head into a book store, and go to the fantasy section. What do you find? Books by bestselling authors, usually from a certain demographic. The names that have come to define a genre that is much broader than that definition indicates.
The fantasy genre meanwhile is very diverse and often based on the spiritual beliefs and cultures of many peoples. That culture and spirituality is often cloaked and dismissed under the term fantasy.
But what if we had pantheologies instead of just fantasy? What if we had Afropantheology, Jewish pantheology, Caribbean pantheology, Indopantheology, Slavic pantheology, Indegenous pantheology, Aboriginal pantheology, Roman pantheology, Greek pantheology, Norse pantheology, pantheology, Latinx pantheology, etc.
What if we had a genre that acknowledged the cultures and spiritual beliefs of these peoples whose stories are mined to make up what we call fantasy? What if we had genres that acknowledged them for what they were, and gave room for them to stand definitively as what they were.
What if we could alter the way we look at borders, and cultures and spirituality, and religion, and stories, and knowledge, altogether. By redrawing literary borders. By creating something different, more inclusive than what we had before.
You could then walk into a book store and find the works under the exact labels of what they were, and no names driven by the effects of hyper capitalism crowding them out. This is a project that aims to drive stories of various peoples of the world, to shine as what they are, that celebrates culture and spirituality and bodies of knowledge.
So explore with the Pantheologist/OD Ekpeki Presents, The Pantheologies. Proudly highlighting the first of them, which gave birth to this entire cluster of projects, the precursor of many more to come, as life and storytelling itself emerged from the African continent, Afropantheology.
OD Ekpeki Presents – Pantheology imprint of the World Fantasy award winning, Hugo, Locus, British Fantasy award nominated Jembefola Press. OD Ekpeki Presents plays the crucial role in this project, of being the first Pantheology publishing imprint. It published in collaboration with Caezik Books, The World Fantasy award winning, Locus, Hugo and British Fantasy award nominated Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction volume 1 and the forthcoming volume 2, as well as the forthcoming debut collection of Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga’s, with a Publishers Weekly starred review, ‘Between Dystopias: The Road To Afropantheology.’ It will publish or co-publish the line of Pantheology works envisaged under this project.
If you are an editor or publisher interested in collaborating on one of the projects envisaged under this movement, please feel free to contact the publisher of OD Ekpeki Presents.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki 