The InVisible Culture journal: Call for Papers, deadline 15 March 2013

Ecologies

InVisible Culture, Issue 20

InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites papers that consider “ecologies” for Issue 20. We imagine ecologies primarily as organizational spectrums. Political philosopher Jane Bennett argues that attuning our critical sensibilities to the animism of images and objects might “induce a stronger ecological sense.” Similarly, art historian David Joselit suggests that relations between images amount to ecologies of form. Following such thinking, this call for papers signals a desire to flesh out the ecological metaphor vis-à-vis image relations. How do images generate connections? How does an ecological engagement with the visual world alter definitions of life? This issue theme explores the complex relations of nature and culture, image and thing, subject and object, rooted in liveliness.

Visual culture scholars have long asserted that things lead social lives, linking up and separating as they traverse networks. Yet notions of life – of objects and things, their power to define and destabilize us as subjects, as well as the liveliness of nature – animate networks, creating ecological systems of thingly relations. How can we understand the ‘ecological’ turn in contemporary visual culture not merely in relation to crisis and catastrophe, but as potentially generating new ways of thinking about the relationship between images and nature? More than conceiving ‘the ecological’ as exclusively biological or solely tied to the environmental movement, how can this term itself animate visual culture? Moving beyond an entrenched discourse of “media ecologies” in media studies, issue 20 seeks to explore the formation of ecologies in a way that is more attuned to the generative capabilities of images, networks, and things.

Topics could include:

thing theory and ecology; habitats and dwellings; seriality, collage, montage as ecological frameworks; translations between media; circulation and relationships between modes of image production; liveliness vs. the living; figures of the natural; posthumanism; thinking the organic outside of “the natural”; systems and network theory in relation to the ecological metaphor; the visual culture of science; organization and “the natural”; grids, archives, and morphologies

Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com by March 15^th, 2013 at 11:59pm EST. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.

Creative/Artistic WorksIn addition to written materials, Invisible Culture is for this issue accepting work done on other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute/ or contact: ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com

ReviewsInVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for reviews of book, exhibition, and film (600-1000 words). To submit a review proposal, please use the contact form on our website with the subject “Review Submission.”

BlogThe journal also invites post submissions to its blog feature, which will accommodate more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. For further details, please use the contact form on our website with the subject “Blog Submission.”

* InVisible Culture (An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture) is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to explorations of the material and political dimensions of cultural practices: the means by which cultural objects and communities are produced, the historical contexts in which they emerge, and the regimes of knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute. *

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Black Camera on Nollywood as a New Archive of Africa’s Worldliness, Deadline: 15 September 2012

CFP: Special Issue of Black Camera on Nollywood as a New Archive of Africa’s Worldliness

The cinema journal Black Camera invites submissions for a special
issue, or a section of a future issue, that will investigate
Nollywood, the Nigerian commercial movie industry, as a new archive of Africa’s worldliness. Inspired by the work of Achille Mbembe, this issue seeks to understand Nollywood as an everyday practice “through which Africans manage to recognize and maintain with the world an unprecedented familiarity” (Mbembe 2002). Nollywood’s significance, then, involves not only its staggering productivity and commercial success, but also encompasses its implicit challenge to dominant narratives that represent Africa as absolutely other or as defined by an essential difference.

We invite papers that put Nollywood in contact with current debates in film theory and world cinema studies, or that place Nollywood beside other transnational film and media industries so as to highlight its singularity and make visible a more variegated and complicated cultural ecology of globalization. We also welcome contributions that seek to understand Nollywood within the context of recent structural, technological, and ideological transformations associated with globalization and late capitalism and that explore Nollywood as shaped by its multiple circuits of consumption and production and by the global processes it participates in. We are interested in papers that attend to the aesthetics, stylistics, and imaginaries of Nollywood movies, with particular focus on the global popular and other discourses as reimagined and remixed by Nollywood.

Possible essay topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Nollywood as a minor transnational practice; Nollywood and regional media flows in West Africa; affiliations between Nollywood and Hollywood, Bollywood or other commercial industries; Nollywood and the African diaspora; the transnational flow of Nollywood aesthetics; the New Nollywood; Nollywood and the “Worlding” of Africa; the Afropolis and Nollywood; video technology and Nollywood; Nollywood and transnational screening circuits; Nollywood co-productions;  Nollywood in South Africa; Nollywood in East Africa; cosmopolitan subjectivities and Nollywood; Nollywood and the governmentalities of neo-liberalism; the uneasy interaction of Nollywood and international film festivals.

In addition to essays, interviews and commentaries will be considered.

Essays should be 6,000-10,000 words, interviews 6,000 words, and commentaries 1,000-2,000 words.

Please submit completed essays, a 100-word abstract, a fifty-word
biography, and a CV by September 15th, 2012. Submissions should
conform to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Please see the Black Camera website for journal-specific guidelines:
http://www.indiana.edu/~blackcam/call/#guidelines

Direct all questions, correspondence, and submissions to guest editor Carmela Garritano (University of St. Thomas) at
cjgarritano@stthomas.edu.

Call for Papers: “Nollywood and the Global South” a Special Issue of The Global South, Deadline for abstracts 4 November 2011

CFP: The Global South 6.2 (Fall 2012)
Nollywood and the Global South

The Global South is an interdisciplinary journal, published semiannually by Indiana University Press. The journal focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization. Its premise is that the various Souths苯rom the North American South to the European South, Latin and Central America, Africa, Asia, and Australia貞hare comparable experiences that differentiate them from mainstream and hegemonic cultures in their locations. Since many of these Souths share not necessarily a common wealth, but various issues of marginalization and inadequate access to means of production and amenities under globalization, TGS is concerned with the intersections among their experiences. The journal is interested in how authors, writers, and critics respond to issues of the environment; poverty; immigration; gender; race; hybridity; cultural formation and transformation; colonialism and postcolonialism; modernity and postmodernity; transatlantic encounters, homes, and diasporas; resistance and counter discourse; among others under the superordinate umbrella of globalization. This Call for Papers is for a special issue on Nollywood and the Global South.

Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, is one of the fastest growing movie industries in the world. In terms of creativity and inventiveness, Nollywood movies provide a good example of Africans consuming what they produce. The responses of people of African descent in the Diaspora and in the Global South as well as those of people all over the world to the phenomenon of Nollywood raise critical social, economic, literary, and cultural questions about globalization and interculturalism. In this issue of The Global South, we invite essays from scholars working in all areas of African and film studies on all aspects of Nollywood, globalization, and the global south, including essays on the history and emergence of Nollywood, how Nollywood acts as an agent of globalization and how it contests globalization by promoting local discourses, how Nollywood functions as an alternative means of cultural representation, counter-discourse, and cultural renaissance, as well as articles on theory and aesthetics. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

History of Nollywood
The Future of Nollywood
Reality in/and Nollywood
Karma and Nollywood
African Morality and Nollywood
Nollywood and Auto/biography
Nollywood and Cultural Renaissance
Nollywood and Tradition
Nollywood and Religion
Nollywood and Race
Nollywood and Gender
Nollywood and Class
Nollywood and Ethnicity
Nollywood and Globalization
Nollywood and the Nigerian Music Industry
Nollywood and Aesthetics
Nollywood and Nigerian Politics
Nollywood and the African Diaspora
Nollywood, Hollywood, and Bollywood
Nollywood and Language
Nollywood and Orality
Nollywood and Madness
Nollywood and Cultural Conflict
Nollywood and Marriage
Nollywood and Crime
Nollywood and Reflections on Africa

This special issue of The Global South (co-edited by Adetayo Alabi, Ifeanyi Ezeonu, and Kolawole Olaiya) is scheduled for publication in Fall 2012. Please submit abstracts and a short bio by November 4, 2011, final drafts of essays by March 4, 2011, and inquiries to Adetayo Alabi, aalabi@olemiss.edu. Essays should be 25-35 double-spaced pages long and should follow the MLA style.

You can read more about The Global South at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=globalsouth

Call for papers on Contemporary Youth Cultures in Africa for special issue of African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society. Abstract deadline: 30 September 2011

Call for papers for special issue of African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society

Call for Papers (African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society): Late Modernity, Locality and Agency: Contemporary Youth Cultures in Africa

More than a decade and half ago, Donal Cruise-O’Brien (1996) had declared that the African youth were ‘a lost generation.’ This fatalistic summation of the fate of the African youth was perhaps for good reason. The enormous socio-economic and cultural forces surrounding the lives of young people in Africa were [and still are] simply daunting. And at the very core of this seemingly insurmountable socio-economic atmosphere are the pervasive unjust protocols of postcolonial regimes under which most African youth live. Indeed, more recent scholarship suggests that there is no respite yet for the African youth as the hopeless situation has escalated (See Abbink, Jon and Ineke Van Kessel 2005 & Alcinda Honwana and Filip De Boeck 2005). On account of the inclement socio-economic and political circumstances surrounding young people in Africa, what we are now witnessing across the entire continent is what Mamodou Douf (2003) describes as the ‘dramatic irruption of young people in both the domestic and public spheres,’ putting young people at the very heart of the continent’s socio-economic and political imagination (Durham 2006).

But the challenges facing African youth are not peculiar to them. All over the world, the new sociology of youth points to a growing concern about the ramifications of globalization, late modernity and general global social and economic restructuring for the lives and futures of young people. But amidst the lingering fears of the future of the young, scholars have also called for a deep reflection and rethinking of young people’s own resilience and agency in the midst of these turbulent times. This special issue of African Identities, tentatively entitled Late Modernity and Agency: Youth Cultures in Africa, seeks to reflect on the varied contours of youth responses to social change in Sub-Saharan Africa. While young people in Africa continue to face extraordinary social challenges in their everyday lives, what are the unique ways in which they have reinvented their circumstances to keep afloat in the midst of seismic global social changes? Papers are solicited on a wide range of topics on the African youth that may unravel young people not only as victims but also as active social actors in the face of a shifting global modernity. The themes may include amongst others:

– African Youth and Globalization
– Late Modernity and Social Change
– Youth and Media—Film, Television, Video, Internet, etc
– Hip-hop, Club Cultures and other forms of Popular culture
– Mobility and Social Media
– Gender and New Economies of Youth
– Democracy, Power and Youth Activism
– Youth and Conflict in Africa
– New Subjectivities and Agency
– Neo-Pentecostalism as Subculture
– The Informal Economy and Invented Pathways
– Lifestyles and Identity Constructions
– New Spatial Politics in Public and Domestic Spaces

Abstracts of not more than 500 words (including name, position, institutional affiliation, and email contact) may be sent to
P.UGor@bham.ac.uk no later than September 30th, 2011. This special issue of African Identities will be published in the summer of 2012.

Call for abstracts for journal Many Cinemas: Dread, Ghost, Specter, and Possession in Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema. Deadline 15 August 2011

See this call for abstracts for the journal  Many Cinemas:

Dread, Ghost, Specter, and Possession in Asian, African and Latin American Cinema

“For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?”
(Charles Dickens: Master Humphrey’s Clock)

In our third issue of manycinemas we are turning our attention to the unexplainable and the supernatural. We are looking for academic essays on films in which we get in touch with “Dread, Ghost, Specter, and Possession.”

We are interested in cinematic aesthetics of films which show these phenomena out of the view of different cultural backgrounds. Like in the other issues these should be films from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Dread – cinema is a modern tale. The monsters of childhood/past come alive and haunt the protagonists on the screen. How do they meet their fears? How does the film show the fear? And, is there any escape?

Ghost – what kind of ghosts are manifested in non-western cinema? How do they haunt, or do they do such things at all?

Specter – dreams, visions, how does film show these things, from where do they come from, and what kind of meaning they have?

Possession – how is a character going to be possessed by something/someone. And how is the behavior of the possessed?

There are many movies all over the world which show one of these phenomena. We are looking for essays which analyze films on one, two, or more of the issue’s topics.

We are interested in:

– the cultural anchors and meaning(s) of supernatural phenomena
– appearance of ghosts, specters, etc.
– the role of ghosts/ specters in movies (good or evil)
– dread and religion
– raising the dead
– juju films, yokai movies, etc.
– and much more

We are also looking for our rubric “Beyond the Screen” for an essay on this topic which is loosely connected to film like theater, music, dance, performance, visual culture, comic…

Please send us your proposal (300-500 words) with the titles of films you will include and a brief CV until 15th August 2011. (later complete essays until 15th March 2012). Do not hesitate to mail us, if you have some questions.

The later articles should have a length of 3000 to 5000 words. For styleguide: look here http://www.manycinemas.org/styleguide.html

Please

send your proposal to
Helen Staufer and Michael Christopher
manycinemas@anpa.de
or: editors@manycinemas.org

Call for submissions to new Journal of African Cinemas

(From H-AFRLITCINE)

Journal of African Cinemas

ISSN: 1754-9221

Journal of African Cinemas is a new peer-reviewed journal. We are accepting submissions for Volume IV scheduled for 2011.

The theme for this issue is:

The Many Cinemas of Africa

 We are looking for submissions for theoretical essays, reviews, and comparative analyses regarding African cinema through its historical and contemporary legacies. We concentrate on the growing African cinematic society, as it interrogates African ontologies with regard to the African filmmaker’s conceptualization of space, time and identity.

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Articles of up to 6000 words will be considered.  Please send both digital or/& hardcopies to either one of the editors: Keyan G Tomaselli (<mailto:tomasell@ukzn.ac.za>tomasell@ukzn.ac.za) CCMS, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College Campus, Durban 4041, South Africa;

or Martin Mhando (<mailto:m.mhando@murdoch.edu.au>m.mhando@murdoch.edu.au).

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol BS16 3JG, UK. <http://www.intellectbooks.com/>www.intellectbooks.com

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Other journals by Intellect: Creative Industries Journal, Northern Lights, The Soundtrack, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Studies in Australasian Cinema, Studies in Documentary Film, Studies in Russia and Soviet Cinema, Studies in European Cinema, Studies in French Cinema, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, New Cinemas, and Film International etc

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