Call for Papers — Volume 2 (Numbers 3 and 4): Movement
Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 September 2016
To be published March and September 2018, in print and online, by NUS Press
One of the great storied spaces of our modern period can be located in the travelling of ideas, (art) objects and humans around the world. These movements are spurred on by ever dynamic and variegated social forces — they are made mobile through notions of exchange, relation, plunder, migration, exile, reconstitution, transfer, refuge, entanglement.
Human interactions on such a global scale are central to the ideas, aesthetic objects, cultural production and labour of our times. These have been and continue to be informed by a displacement of culture and context. Perhaps, one needs to acknowledge their co-extensive localities, in ways that go beyond privileging the place or context of origin as authentic. Movement, in this sense, is significant to the making and unmaking of any fixed local, national, regional and international domains.
This Call for Papers for a double-issue of SOUTHEAST OF NOW: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia considers culture as constitutive of multiple and overlapping encounters underwritten by complex structures of connections, against claims of essentialism.
How do artists, art historians, curators, writers and others think about movement in relation to different scales of time? What do they reveal about the histories of art, aesthetics and the social when these histories can no longer be understood as a unidirectional form of cultural transfer? What does a more complex mental picture look like when we consider the restless movement of people and things in many and all directions? In what ways was the world configured through the coordinate of the Southeast?
Topics that we’re interested to consider in Volume 2 (Numbers 3 and 4) include:
- Research on the histories of objects, aesthetic frameworks and theories, artistic infrastructures, traveling artists, performances, exhibitions and interactions between Southeast Asia and different groups or territories across the world.
- The implication of the movement of ideas, such as different contexts of how texts are being read and translated, to the constructions of art discourse and how this is taught, learned and disseminated.
- Migration of gender, class, ethnicity, trope, form, style, modes of thought in artistic and art historical practice.
- The gendered nature of various forms of movement; also the otherwise politically conditioned degrees of access inherent in various forms of movement.
- Artist-diaspora as a figure: the making and unmaking of an artistic practice and identity.
- The structures of local, national, regional and international: how links, networks and connections shaped specific modern and contemporary art ecologies.
- Historiographical and theoretical frameworks in the writing of modern and contemporary art: the relationship between Area Studies and Art History, as well as other disciplines such as Anthropology and Geography, in modelling and mapping the concept of movement, including temporality in relation to movement.
We invite contributions in the forms listed below. Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted to [email protected] by 1 September 2016. Accepted proposals will be notified by 30 September 2016. Submissions of full paper will be due 15 March 2017 and will be sent for double-blind peer review by two experts in the field.
We accept:
- SHORT RESPONSES (1,200 – 2,500 words) including artists’ pages
- ARTICLES (5,000 – 8000 words, including footnotes)
- REVIEWS (1,000 – 3,000 words) of publications, exhibitions, conferences and other projects
- Other formats or lengths upon discussion with the editorial collective.
Download a pdf version of the Call for Papers.
Image: Micronesian Marshall Islands Navigational Stick Chart, late 19th century.
Image credit: ICA Commission on Map Design