#1

- Intimate Lineages

New deadline - Oct 1st 2020

For this first call we want to cast a wide net of interests, and invite authors to surprise us. We are looking for contributions that are perhaps too personal and too literary to find their place in more classical academic journals, but are at the same time theoretically and methodologically sound enough to allow for a critical peer-review in a scholarly context.  

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• the critical analysis of creative, literary and artistic ‘devices’ that can be used as an epistemological tool in research, such as metaphors that anchor and articulate the creative-critical axis, the use of typical academic citations against personal reflections, autofictional persona-making,  ekphrasis, juxtaposition etc.

• key theoretical figures and historical precursors who explored other forms of academic speaking and writing: e.g. Benjamin’s ‘Denkbilder’, Barthes’ ‘phantasmatic reading’, Foucault’s ‘parrhesia’, Sedgwick’s ‘reparative reading’, Preciado’s ‘autotheory’, Butler’s ‘performativity’, Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’, to name a few.

• the potentials and pitfalls of operationalizing personal experiences in the context of scholarly research (relation between autofiction and ‘truth’; the ‘bubble’ of scholarly life; addressing the implicit taboos and fashions of intellectual life; the ethical task to challenge ‘normalisation’ by exploring different modes, practices of life...)

• the relation to cultural heritage and remembrance, following the Warburgian idea of ‘afterlife’ (Nachleben); how  images, affects and stories shift and appear through time, creating intellectual and emotional lineages, but also anachronic flashes and wormholes that go both ways. 

Some questions that can kick-start some of the conversations in which we would love to partake:

• Are we repurposing the past, or is the past benefitting from the now? 

• How do we engage both in a critical and intimate way with past forms of feeling, thinking and experiencing?  

• How “truthful” can a personal account be? How does the injection of critical theory support or refute one’s intimate “truth”?

• How can ‘creative’ writing become more than just a rhetorical ‘gimmick’ in scholarly texts, how to operationalize it as an epistemological supplement in gaining knowledge about a specific subject? 

• What is the relationship between writing, visual art, and subjective experience in the age of data overwhelm and fingertip access to endless image and commentary?

• What is the architecture of a hybrid text?

• How do we create intellectual, emotional, and artistic lineages? What are the politics and particularities of inserting oneself in such lineages?

• Who are the early proto-creative-critical writers, artists, and scholars that have been understudied thus far?

• Can the creative-critical subvert the access to knowledge-validation systems and allow for a new, more diverse generation of artists, writers, and thinkers?

• How can the “auto” introduce the “allo”, how can the self be about community?