Call for Papers

ASAP/J CFPS

Cluster Call for Papers: Hauntings

We invite submissions for an ASAP/J cluster on haunting in the contemporary arts. In recent years, we have seen a significant number of art works across artistic media that revolve around the process of haunting, including Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding The Ghosts, Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over, Tyehimba Jess’ Olio and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! The Gothic genre has long been haunted, from Mary Shelley’s famous nightmare in the Alps to the lighter-spirited spooks of the popular sitcom, Ghosts. But ghosts are now seen to stalk other cinematic genres and aesthetics. We see this spectral surge in works including David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, Mati Diop’s Atlantique, and Remi Weekes’ His House. Literary criticism and theory have also shown a tendency towards the spectral—as both ontology and metaphorics; Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake, Esther Peeran’s The Spectral Metaphor, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s Racial Melancholia, and several works by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney bear collective witness to a broader critical turn—or return–-to the haunt as a subject of animating, or at least un-dead, interest. How should we come to terms with the experience of haunting, and what can it tell us about the arts of the present (and their contemporary analytics)? How does the strange temporal jag figured by the appearance of the ghost place a kind of pressure on the very concept of “the present”? What is the relationship of haunting to other forms of lingering or “present” absence, as inscribed at the heart of traumatic histories of racial or sexual violence? How do different media or art forms haunt each other, and haunt us? In this sense, the question of haunting conjures the specter of debates surrounding ways of reading, and how we relate to texts. We welcome submissions that broadly consider haunting, hauntedness, and haunts across the arts, including painting and visual art, as well as cinema, television and literature. 

Email Emmy Waldman (Virginia Tech) and David Hering (University of Liverpool) at  and to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biographical statement (no more than 75 words) by April 30, 2024. Potential contributors will be notified by May 31, 2024 and they will then have to submit their essays (1500–3000 words) by September 30, 2024.


We are actively seeking pitches for two new review formats: Provocations and Uncanny Juxtapositions.

Provocations brings together multiple scholars and/or artists to consider a recent scholarly monograph or edited volume by situating it within a field and posing questions for future inquiry. Provocations approach a chosen book with a focus on what comes next: what lines of thought are opened up by the book, and what questions does it leave for future research in the field? A prospective guest editor should pitch a title to the Reviews Editors as well as the names of 3–4 other scholars they have invited to join the conversation. In its final, published form, a Provocation will include an approximately 300-word capsule summary of the book written by the guest editor followed by a similar-length paragraph from each of the invited provokers.

In an Uncanny Juxtaposition, a reviewer puts together two very recent works of art, creative production, or literature—or two scholarly monographs on arts of the present—that would otherwise seem to have no connection, traversing the so-called high/low divide, and transcending medium. The review brings out unexpected intimacies and resonances between them. How does a new pop song re-frame a recent gallery exhibit at MoMA and vice versa? How does a book in media studies and a book in architectural theory—two books with minimal overlap in citation networks—work toward a common thesis or intervention? Uncanny Juxtapositions should be 1,500 to 2,000 words.

Please contact both Reviews Editors Jerrine Tan and Michael Dango at reviews [at] asapjournal.com to inquire about either of these formats. There is no deadline to pitch these formats. In your email, indicate the format you are interested in and please include a brief bio (50 words), including prior publications. ASAP/J is committed to boosting the voices of emerging and contingent students and scholars; if you don’t have prior publications, please just tell us why you think you’re the right person for this particular review. 

ASAP/JOURNAL CFPS

Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue

Performing to Reimagine: Enactment & Activism in 21st century Museums

Special Issue Editors: Aileen Robinson and Gwyneth Shanks

Essay Submission Deadline: *new deadline* May 1, 2023

Curators, artists, and theorists have increasingly been wrestling with demands to reimagine museums, from the logics governing what defines artistic representation to those structuring museum operations. If recent demands resonate with calls from past decades in their focus on trustees, labor equity, and representation, cultural workers like Yesomi Umolu and La Tanya S. Autry have also foregrounded the language of care and mutuality, centering the intellectual and activist labor of feminists of color, queer theorists, and decolonial thinkers for whom questions of subjectivity, value, and autonomy are key. This special issue focuses on the intersection between renewed and intensified critiques of cultural institutions particularly grounded in the body and a curatorial embrace of distinctly performance-based art practices.

We invite contributions from a range of disciplines and perspectives that link this so-called “performance turn” within global contemporary and modern art museums with muséal critiques in dialogue with racial capitalisms, postcolonial feminism, and transnational articulations of contemporary art. The issue aims to offer a critical analysis of global contemporary art, attentive to the impact that globalization, neo-colonialism, and decolonial thought is having on contemporary artists.

This special issue centers the body and performance as loci of political and epistemic knowledges, and is invested in forms of enactment, activist practices, and representational and political formations of the subject in contemporary art. We are particularly interested in contributions that attend to the issue’s themes through an engagement with the conditions and material impacts of an international contemporary art landscape, focused on the distinct ways economic, representational, and political contexts shape performance practice. This issue approaches the intersection of museums and performance as a site of and for social, political, historical, and aesthetic critiques that, when traced, help illuminate globalized and ongoing projects of neo-colonization, development, and reimagining.

We welcome contributions that:

  • Take up performance in all its interdisciplinary guises, including, but not limited to, dance, ritual, participatory event, performative installations, or sound;
  • Engage the issue themes through a focus on globalization, the diaspora, transnationalism, and/or other global critical approaches;
  • Consider performance as a heuristic for exploring the interstitial spaces or structures of museums, like restaurants or board governance charters;
  • Question how live works and analyses grounded in embodiment and corporeality can reveal the racialized, gendered, colonial, and/or economic structures of the contemporary art museum; and/or
  • Examine how art of the present might be reformed if its institutions are themselves remade.

As artists, staff, and visitors variously confront and rescript the museum’s potential, this special issue asks, ‘How can performance, as a complex and shifting analytic, bear witness to or render legible these transformations, disruptions, or impossibilities?’

Essays due by May 1, 2023. Please send queries or abstracts via email to the guest editors Aileen Robinson () and Gwneth Shanks (). Completed articles should be submitted to the journal’s online submission site at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/asapjournal.

Whereas the ASAP/Journal print platform features articles in traditional print format (text and image), the editors will consider essay submissions for the online journal platform in the form of visual, electronic, and musical text, images, and other forms of writing. Visit www.asapjournal.com for more information about our online, open-access platform.

Full-length essay submissions of 6000-8000 words (including notes but excluding translations, which should accompany foreign language quotations) in Microsoft Word should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. All content in the journal is anonymously peer reviewed by at least two referees. If the contribution includes any materials (e.g., quotations that exceed fair use, illustrations, charts, other graphics) that have been taken from another source, the author must obtain written permission to reproduce them in print and electronic formats and assume all reprinting costs. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000–1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended for publication. ASAP/Journal does not consider already published work or work simultaneously under consideration by another publishing source. Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; when submitting manuscripts, authors should remove identifying information by clicking on “File”/”Properties” in Microsoft Word and removing identifying tags for the piece. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them. For additional submission guidelines, please see: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asap_journal/guidelines.html

Aileen Robison (editor) received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She is Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, and, prior to that, was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She specializes in the history of optics and physics, magic performance and practice, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British theatrical performance and stagecraft, and Black diasporic performance cultures.

Gwyneth Shanks (editor) is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Performance at Colby College. Her work considers how performance can propose strategies for revealing and dismantling colonialist and racialized histories of representation in contemporary art. Her book manuscript, The Museum on the Move: Race, Coloniality, and a Transient Politics, examines contemporary artists whose work offers strategies for reimagining the contemporary art museum and dismantling colonial histories of representation. She held curatorial positions at the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art through the Independent Study Program. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from UCLA.

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We love our print journal and it loves us. And we love it when we can collaborate with one another.

If you are the editor of a forum or special issue forthcoming with ASAP/Journal, there are two options for collaborating with ASAP/J.

Cluster

Sometimes material is best suited for digital. You are welcome to pitch a supplementary cluster to the editors of ASAP/Journal and ASAP/J as part of your proposal to the print journal. This cluster may include video, image, audio, as well as text, and will be published at the same time as your print issue. Please see ‘Submit a cluster’ for guidelines or if in doubt please get in touch with Alexandra Kingston-Reese at editor [at] asapjournal.com if you have questions.

Reviews

If you would like to pitch 2–3 reviews as part of your special issue or forum, please get in touch with our Reviews Editors at reviews [at] asapjournal.com. You may have reviewers and books/exhibitions in mind, but we can also solicit writers and/or suggest titles for review. These will be published at the same time as your print issue.