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Submit A Cluster

ASAP/J welcomes pitches for edited clusters on topics of special interest in the contemporary arts.

What are clusters?

Clusters are a series of topically linked essays or roundtable discussion in print, video, sound, or image.

What topics are you looking for?

As with our single feature essays, we publish work that articulates new arts movements, critically examines emerging aesthetic practices, discovers new critical methods and vocabularies, and investigates how the contemporary arts confront the historicity of artistic form. We welcome clusters that choose as their subject international art, artists, or arts movements of any kind, unrestricted by national, ethnic, religious, or gender borders and boundaries. We invite contributions that address the aesthetics, ethics, politics, forms, and methods of the contemporary arts in any medium, including the cinematic, media, visual, plastic, sound, literary, and performance arts.

How do clusters work?

You would be the primary editor for such a cluster, with support from ASAP/J’s editor. Our general size for a cluster is 6–12 pieces. While by no means a rule and depending on the number of authors per ‘cluster,’ text should be about 500-3000 words in length to foster dialogue, yield more experimental answers, and challenge disciplinary boundaries.

We invite you to consider the digital means at your disposal (video, image, audio, text, forums) and publishable on ASAP/J as you develop your cluster.  We are happy to work with many digital formats, though if you have a particularly technical idea, please do contact us to see whether it will be possible. We welcome interviews, ‘cluster’ features of short form essays, multimedia virtual exhibitions and showcases, forums and other forms of discussion.

Who can pitch a cluster?

We encourage clusters with authors in different stages of their career, from graduate student to full professor, including those in contingent and non-academic positions. In line with ASAP’s commitment to the contemporary arts, we will also evaluate positively proposals that include artists and other practitioners, those that seek participants from multiple disciplines, and those that feature diverse methods and areas. We look favourably on diversity of disciplines in the cluster and we hope that contributors come from at least two different types of academic departments,  programs, or fields, though we. In addition, we encourage our applicants to look for and work with new co-contributors to ensure exciting and truly experimental—even unexpected—conversations and collaborations!

I have a bright idea in its early stages. Can I get in touch with you?

Yes! If you have an idea for an ‘open’ cluster, and it is the right fit, we can also advertise cfps and suggest writers to be in touch with. Please send a cluster proposal in the form of a 200-word call for papers to be circulated via ASAP’s regular channels, including on ASAP/J’s “Calls for Papers” page.

Okay, I’m in! How do I pitch you?

If you would like to pitch an edited cluster, please contact Alexandra Kingston-Reese at editor [at] asapjournal.com. Include the cluster title, the names of your potential collaborators, and a pitch no longer than 150-200 words.

Submit A Feature Essay

ASAP/J welcomes born-digital content such as essays, interviews, working papers, and photographic, audio, and video works, among other forms. We publish work that articulates new arts movements, critically examines emerging aesthetic practices, discovers new critical methods and vocabularies, and investigates how the contemporary arts confront the historicity of artistic form. We welcome essays about international art, artists, or arts movements of any kind, unrestricted by national, ethnic, religious, or gender borders and boundaries. We invite contributions that address the aesthetics, ethics, politics, forms, and methods of the contemporary arts in any medium, including the cinematic, media, visual, plastic, sound, literary, and performance arts.

If you would like to contribute a feature to ASAP/J—typically 2,000 to 4,000 words for an essay—please send a brief pitch of 200 to 300 words, including a brief bio (50 words) and why you want to write about this subject, to ASAP/J’s editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese at editor [at] asapjournal.com. Pitches without these may not be considered.

Submit A Review

ASAP/J publishes reviews of recent scholarly books, art exhibitions, film festivals, and other curated content. Ideally, reviews not only provide a generous and accurate account of a work, but also open it up to larger disciplinary and critical conversations. We are particularly interested in reviews that can build bridges between medium-specific genealogies and specializations, for instance articulating the relevance of an art history book for a literary theory audience, or exploring how a film festival also contributes to discussions in the arts of the present more broadly.

We publish reviews in a variety of formats.

Conventional Reviews and Review Essays

A list of books available for review can be found here, and reviewers may assess either a single book or several titles brought together under a common topic they propose. Single-book reviews should be 1,000 to 1,500 words in length; review essays should not exceed 4,000 words. While we primarily review academic titles, we are also eager to publish review essays on clusters of books of fiction, poetry, essays, arts writing, etc. Michael Dowdy’s essay on “Poetry from a Year of Precarity” is a good example of this genre. We do not publish single-book reviews of fiction, poetry, memoir, etc.

Provocations

This format 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.

Uncanny Juxtapositions

In this format, 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.

How to submit

Please contact both Reviews Editors Jerrine Tan and Michael Dango at reviews [at] asapjournal.com to inquire about conventional review, review essay, Provocation, or Uncanny Juxtaposition. 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. 

Note

ASAP/J is proud of our philosophy of generative, respectful, and thoughtful criticism and the reviews we seek to publish all take that spirit into account. While any responsible review should surely highlight and address any lacunae or gaps in argument, ASAP/J does not publish purely negative reviews which do not contribute to productive debate.

Author Guidelines

At ASAP/J, we value the intimacy and immediacy of conversation. To this end, we provide a forum for scholars, writers, and artists to converse with one another in ways that eschew publication in traditional academic publications.

Given our broad readership base, we prefer an informal conversational style over writing that is too heavy with esoteric academic jargon.

We also encourage formally inventive, visual pieces in a range of genres on the contemporary arts—from digital exhibitions to artistically mapping a complex bit of code.

Author guidelines for features and reviews

  • Manuscripts should be submitted in Microsoft Word.
  • Word counts are max. 4000 words for features and max. 1500 words for reviews.
  • Interviews, dialogues, and clusters should include an introduction of 200-500 words.
  • Submissions should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style using endnotes for citations. You may use digital referencing to hyperlink to relevant sources including videos, news stories, etc. We don’t require a Works Cited or Bibliography.
  • If the contribution includes any materials (e.g., quotations that exceed fair use, illustrations, charts, other graphics) taken from another source, the author must obtain written permission to reproduce them in electronic formats, secure high-resolution image files (300dpi or better), and pay any permissions fees. Please share high resolution images using either Dropbox or Google drive.
  • If you share images with us via a digital folder (preferred), please indicate where an image should be placed within a piece with [PLACE FIGURE X HERE; CAPTION] on its own line within the written submission.
  • You’re welcome to include images and / or video in the body of your text if necessary or it helps to specify layout preferences. If you do so, please place images between paragraphs for ease of layout in WordPress. Please also add a caption.
  • ASAP/J does not accept features or reviews that have been previously published in any language; submissions simultaneously under review by other forums will not be considered.
  • ASAP/J does not publish unsolicited creative submissions, though we do encourage critical work in creative formats.
  • If you have pitched a cluster and it has been approved, you will receive a cluster editorial checklist to work through before submission.

Books For Review

Visual Arts, Architecture, Art History

  • Jaroslav Anděl, ed., Back to the Sandbox: Art and Radical Pedagogy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
  • Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019.
  • Mark Cheetham, Landscape Into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s. University Park: Penn State UP, 2019.
  • Macarena Gómez-Barris, Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.
  • Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham: Duke UP, 2019.
  • Leah Modigliani. Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action. New York: Routledge, 2024
  • Nicholas Gamso, Art after Liberalism. Columbia University Press. 2022.
  • Chris Reitz, Martin Kippenberger: Everything is Everywhere. MIT Press. 2023.

Media, Film, TV Culture, Digital Arts

  • Thomas J. Connelly, Cinema of Confinement. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2019.
  • Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, eds., Disability Media Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2017.
  • Matthew Holtmeier, Contemporary Political Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019.
  • Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.
  • Brigitte Peucker, Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
  • Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan, Text Technologies: A History. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2018.
  • Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
  • Annie Berke, Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television: UC Press, 2022.
  • Eugenie Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams. Duke University Press, 2022.

Literature

  • David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
  • Gloria Fisk, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2018.
  • Min Hyoung Song. Climate Lyricism. Duke University Press. 2022.
  • Steven Swarbrick. The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton. University of Minnesota Press. 2023.

Music, Musicology, Sound

  • Alejandro Nava, In Search of Soul: Hip-Hop, Literature, and Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.
  • Jeffrey T. Nealon, I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
  • Griffith Rollefson, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
  • James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow, eds. Sound Objects. Durham: Duke UP, 2019.

Drama, Dance, Performance

  • Kate Bredeson, Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2019.
  • Emine Fişek, Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2017.
  • Dorinne Kondo. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2019.
  • Leah Modigliani. Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action. New York: Routledge, 2024

Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Philosophy

  • Mark Foster Gage, ed. Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019.
  • Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2021.
  • Cheryl Narumi Naruse. Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore. UC Press. 2023.