Call for Papers

ASAP/REVIEW CFPS

Cluster Call for Papers: Hauntings

We invite submissions for an ASAP/Review 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 the Reviews Editors 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/Review 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

Forms of Care

Special Issue Editors: Alexandra Kingston-Reese and David James

Essay Submission Deadline: January 31, 2025

“The forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or exhausted by it.”
— Sadiya Hartman

What forms does care take? This is a question that have spurred current scholarly and political debates that expose the histories of coerced care under colonialism and racial capitalism, lament the systematic dismantling of caring infrastructures under neoliberalism in the Global North, and at the same time call for a more expansive sense of caring activities and imaginaries. This question also has a rich and interdisciplinary history in the medical humanities, disability studies, the environmental humanities, literary studies, affect theory, moral philosophy, feminist and queer theory, and beyond. As a word tied to the realms of both emotion and practice, care poses a challenge to representational form, even as it requires sustained and urgently interdisciplinary considerations of care’s ethical, institutional, phenomenological, and social forms. The unpredictable, ambivalent, spontaneous, and sometimes difficult practices and feelings around care exist alongside the racial, cultural, environmental, epidemiological, political, and/or biomedical frameworks, unequal structures, workaday routines, and affective modes of scrupulous attention that acts of care entail.

Speculating new forms of care, “not reducible to or exhausted by” racial capitalism, is the next step in the evolution of this discourse traversing a wide range of disciplines, fields, and methods in the medical humanities, disability studies, environmental humanities, literary studies, Black studies, affect theory, creative and clinical practice, political, ethical, philosophical, and feminist approaches, among others. This special issue for ASAP/Journal solicits essays that articulate new forms of care. During ever new crises, what new forms of care are animated to address them?

We welcome contributions that reflect or challenge this question. Contributions may also:

  • Consider how care is formed. What structures and infrastructures are required to “form” care? How might we describe and/or experiment with those forms?
  • Examine what sets care apart as a mode of artistic labour. What modalities and styles of attention require and are required by care?
  • Reenvisage institutions, methods, and genres as forms of care—how does care make space within, outside of, or alongside their existing structures and itineraries?
  • Consider how form and practice productively co-mingle. What might be lost if practicesof care are not granted analytical priority?

We are interested in how care is mobilised in a wide variety of contexts from across the globe. By “forms of care”, we are interested in how contributors can expand upon the histories of coercion and violence in caregiving economies (for example, Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America [2010] and Blair Kelley’s Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class [2023]), in order to theorise forms of care as redistributive “social poesis” that resist the logics of racial capitalism and colonialism. Recent examples of new forms of care might include Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “fractal thinking”, Rizvana Bradley’s “entwinement” (after Hortense Spillers), Ruth Gilmore’s “organized abandonment”, or Hartman’s own “critical fabulation.” We also welcome contributions that develop formally particularizing approaches to the very styles and aesthetic idioms through which care practices are alternately evoked and challenged, articulated and remodelled.

Essays due by January 31, 2025. Please send queries or abstracts via email to the guest editors Alexandra Kingston-Reese () and David James (). 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

Alexandra Kingston-Reese (editor) is Senior Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of York. She specialises in 21st century literature, with a particular interest in the novel and essay after 1945, aesthetics, affect, form and the practices and politics of reading.  She is the author of Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the editor of Art Essays: a Collection (University of Iowa Press, 2021). She is also the co-editor of ASAP/Review, the open access platform of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

David James (editor) is Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. His recent books include Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Modernist Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has edited numerous books, including The Legacies of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and, most recently, Modernism and Close Reading  (Oxford University Press, 2020). For Columbia University Press he co-edits the book series Literature Now, and is the Editor for British and world anglophone writing at Contemporary Literature. He is currently completing Sentimental Activism (forthcoming with Columbia University Press), a book about the politics of compassion and solicitation in medical memoir, disability narrative, poverty fiction, and refugee writing.

ASAP/REVIEW X ASAP/JOURNAL

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/Review.

Cluster

Sometimes material is best suited for digital. You are welcome to pitch a supplementary cluster to the editors of ASAP/Journal and ASAP/Review 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.