Cultures have used visual means to record, define, interrogate, and delimit individual and collective identities, their historical context, and presence in time and space. Identity must be articulated before it exists and and so art and artists enact, create, resist, and reify individual and collective identities, often challenging both material borders and conceptual boundaries that determine identity in contrast to the Other. Interrogating bounded concepts of identity in the visual world opens up new avenues for understanding social and aesthetic interactions and their relationships to constructed geographical, ideological, and temporal limits.
In its 6th edition, Contemporaneity seeks submissions that cover a wide range of issues, topics, periods, and disciplines with an emphasis on the complexity of art and identification in time and space. While submissions dealing with the effect of borders on national and regional identities are particularly welcome, we also encourage historical scrutiny and theoretical analysis on borders and race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and other categories of identification. We are interested in historical explorations of how concepts, categories, and limits of identity have been constructed at different moments in time either through the arts or about artists. Indeed, border crossings serve as a means to understand acts of inclusion and exclusion of not just bodies and materials, but also of ideologies and cultures. How have different identities experienced border or boundary crossings differently? What borders have been erected to insulate normative identities and how have the arts served to reify or challenge these essentialist categories of identity? How has the articulation of concepts of identity evolved and inflected past and present discussions of particular identities? Areas of focus may relate to visual culture and refugees, diaspora, exiles, émigrés, expatriates, migrants, cosmopolitans, outsiders, ethnic or religious minorities, queers, gender and sexual non-conforming individuals, among others. This edition will be published in the centenary of WWI (1914-1918) and, as such, we are especially interested in explorations of how the reshaping of borders and identity at the conclusion of WWI inflected artmaking. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
The role of visual culture in/about the refugee crisis
Migrant, diasporic, or exilic time and art
Historical accounts of migration through visual culture
Modes of cosmopolitan imagination
Gender and sexuality and border transgression
Discursive/Imag(in)ed constructions of borders
The bodily and material effects/representations of immaterial borders/boundaries
Chronology and artistic evolution for Outsider Art(ists)
Visualizing concepts of presentness and belonging in subcultures
Art produced within/for collective communities: religious or national
Disciplinary borders and the exclusion of groups of artmakers from scholarly inquiry
The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2016. Manuscripts (circa 6,000 words) should include an abstract, 3-5 keywords, and adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. To make a submission, visit contemporaneity.pitt.edu, click Register and create an Author profile to get started. Proposals for book and exhibition reviews, interviews, or other scholarly contributions will also be considered, and we recognize that these submissions may take many forms.
Proposals and questions can be directed to the editors at contemporaneityjournal@gmail.com.
Contemporaneity is a peer-reviewed online journal organized by the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Visit contemporaneity.pitt.edu and constellations.pitt.edu for more information.
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