ASAP/Review 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/Review’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/Review 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/Review’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 our editors at editor [at] asapjournal.com. Include the cluster title, the names of your potential collaborators, and a pitch no longer than 150-200 words.

ASAP/Review 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/Review—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 our editors at editor [at] asapjournal.com. Pitches without these may not be considered.

ASAP/Review 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 our editors 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/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. 

Note

At ASAP/Review, 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/Review 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/Review 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.

Visual Arts, Architecture, Art History

• Marcus Verhagen, Viewing Velocities: Time in Contemporary Art (Verso, 2024).
• Alice Kaplan, Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris (Chicago, 2024).
• Rebecca Zorach, Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise (Chicago, 2024).
• Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson, eds., The Guantánamo Artwork and Testimony of Moath Al-Alwi: Deaf Walls Speak (Springer, 2024).
• Alison Halsall, Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis (Ohio State, 2023).
• Chris Reitz, Martin Kippenberger: Everything is Everywhere (MIT, 2023).
• Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman, eds., The JAB Anthology (Iowa, 2023).
• Carolyn L. Kane, Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary (California, 2023).
• Monica Huerta, The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (NYU, 2023).
• Brianne Cohen, Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke, 2023).
• Lisa Biggs, The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation (Ohio State, 2022).
• Nicholas Gamso, Art after Liberalism (Columbia, 2022).

Media, Film, TV Culture, Digital Arts

• Sheng-mei Ma, China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups (Ohio State, 2024).
• Feng-Mei Heberer, Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (Minnesota, 2023).
• Diana Rickard, The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU, 2023).
• Robert Burgoyne, The New American War Film (Minnesota, 2023).

Literature

• Kate McCullough, Never on Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium (Ohio State, 2024).
• Laura Elizabeth Vrana, Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition (Ohio State, 2024).
• Mat Fournier, Dysphoric Modernism: Undoing Gender in French Literature (Columbia, 2024).
• Ryan Sharp, Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (North Carolina, 2024).
• Heidi Siegrist, All Y’all: Queering Southernness in US Fiction, 1980–2020 (North Carolina, 2024).
• Cassandra L. Jones, Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women’s Fiction (Ohio State, 2024).
• Eric Cheyfitz, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country: Native American Literatures and Federal Indian Law (Minnesota, 2023).
• Stephanie Li, Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America (Minnesota, 2023).
• Sheri-Marie Harrison et al., eds., Jesmyn Ward (Edinburgh, 2023).
• Kyle Garton-Gundling, Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present (Ohio State, 2023).

Music, Drama, Dance, and Performance

• Patrick McKelvey, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (NYU, 2024).
• Joseph Pizza, Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury America (Iowa, 2023).
• Liz Przybylski, Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams (NYU, 2023).
• Iván A. Ramos, Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics (NYU, 2023).
• Jacqueline Shea Murph, Dancing Indigenous Worlds (Minnesota, 2023).

Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Philosophy

• Melody Jue, Coralations (Minnesota, 2024).
• Cheryl Narumi Naruse. Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore (California, 2023).
• Michael M. J. Fischer, At the Pivot of East and West: Ethnographic, Literary, and Filmic Arts (Duke, 2023).
• Joan Kee, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity (California, 2023).