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CALL FOR PAPERS<
Proposals for papers and presentations are invited from art historians, curators and artists that examine the art and visual culture of Eastern Europe in both historical and contemporary contexts. The SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art will be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art on 23 October 2010.
The SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art provides a forum for the presentation of new research into practices of informal exchange and patterns of alternative communication between experimental artists in the Eastern Bloc. This seminar explores the ways in which unauthorised artistic ideas were able to transgress national and ideological boundaries through networks of friendship and artistic collaboration that flew in the face of an official culture of isolationism, censorship and political control. It focuses on processes of artistic exchange that took shape at a grass-roots level, inventive strategies to surmount bureaucratic obstacles, and the specific meaning of ‘networking’ in the context of communist Eastern Europe. The seminar also considers the degree to which state-sponsored artistic events, held for Cold War propaganda reasons, could become spaces for unofficial exchange, the roles available to exiled artists and intellectuals in facilitating international communication, collaboration and the circulation of materials, as well as the contribution of curators and intellectuals from the far side of the Iron Curtain in creating informal networks.
The Social East is a platform for innovative, transnational research on the art and visual culture of Eastern Europe initiated by Dr. Reuben Fowkes in 2006. Based on active collaboration with institutes of art history across Europe and the involvement of prominent academics, curators and artists, SocialEast has become an internationally-recognised generator of pioneering research into the art history of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. This second SocialEast Seminar at the Courtauld Institute follows on from the SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage held in February 2009 and co-organised with Dr. Sarah Wilson. Previous SocialEast Seminars have dealt with issues of Foreign Experience, Art and Ideology, Art and Documentary, Art and Revolution, Art and Memory, Art and Empire and the Legacy of 1968 and were held at Manchester Art Gallery, the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, Krakow University, and Mimara Museum Zagreb.
The SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art is organised in collaboration with Dr. Klara Kemp-Welch of the Courtauld Institute as part of a three year Leverhulme Trust funded project entitled Festivals and Friendships: Networking the Soviet ‘Bloc’, examining unofficial exchange between artists from East-Central Europe and former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s. The seminar is supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the Courtauld Institute Research Forum.
To propose a paper for the SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art, please send a 200 word proposal and biographical note to info@socialeast.org
The deadline for submitting a proposal is Monday 15 March 2010.
New Link Added: ” In Conversation with Gulsen Bal”
THIRD TEXT Special Issue: BEYOND NEGRITUDE
Guest Editor: Denis Ekpo
CALL FOR PAPERS
Senghor’s Negritude sought to regenerate the hitherto disqualified races and cultures of Africa and to create symbiotic relations among the races and cultures of the world. It also sought to create new models of egalitarian human society for a world rid of exploitative neo-colonial systems. However, the over-privileging of racialist, ethno-artistic contents seemed to have suppressed many of Negritude’s rich socio-political insights. Today Negritude is seen generally as a failed ideology. But in this era of obfuscating theorems of the postcolonial condition, Africa and the world at large stand to gain by not only re-examining the historicist failure of Negritude as a simpler and saner discourse of postcolonial reconstruction but also configuring the move beyond Negritude as a re-understanding of this failure and a search for creative remedies to it. Thinking Beyond Negritude could be approached from any of these rubrics.
1] Senghor’s original ideas of Negritude. Has justice really been done to the authentic productive spirit of the Negritude philosophy? Was Negritude a call for a mere return to African traditions or was it a serious alternative modern social philosophy for the re-organization of postcolonial human society not only in Africa but worldwide. Why was the original spirit of Negritude so prone to reductionist mis-understandings?
2] Senghor’s vision of a reconstructed Africa . Senghor’s socio-political vision for contemporary Africa was mired in the contradictions between his intellectual embeddedness within the legacies of colonialism and his African Socialistic rhetoric that sought to tame those legacies. In retrospect, what performative lessons can be drawn from the failure of this vision for the search of new models of socio-political engineering for postcolonial Africa? Can the traditional African social model of collectivism based on symbiotic co-operation [which Senghor discovered to be a more humane alternative to the aggressively competitive models of modernity’s socio-economic relations] still provide a reliable road map to viable socio-economic re-organisations in non-west societies? Conversely, the political today in most of Africa has taken monstrous turns probably because, among other things, Africans failed to pay heed to Senghor’s allegedly reactionary theories on decolonization. In what ways does Senghor’s political theory illuminate today, the impasses of nation, democracy and development in Africa?
3] Dialogue with other cultures. The legacy of a world-healing Negritude based on a new humanism of racial/cultural cross-breeding, symbiosis, universal culture, is today being bastardized by Postcolonial theory’s textual coquetries on hybridity, multi-culturality etc. Perhaps a post-essentialist Negritude of performative cross-cultural symbiosis and métissage correct the sophistries of Theory’s merely chic cosmopolitanism?
4] Negritude and the future. Senghor once said: ‘Any race that does not believe it has an exceptional message to deliver to the world is ready to be stored in museum’. Was Negritude the last exceptional message that Africa delivered to the world? If not, by drawing on the misrecognised potential of Negritude, how does Africa re-think, beyond Negritude, its still unhappy location within the now globalizing world culture, politics and economy? We invite contributions from scholars all over the world who are interested in exploring any of the After-Negritude issues outlined above. Such contributions, not more than 5000 words in length, should be sent by E-mail attachment not later than 30 October 2009 to:
Guest Editor: Denis Ekpo: ekpo_d@yahoo.com
Cc’d to Richard Dyer at Third Text: Thirdtext@btinternet.com
See www.thirdtext.com news section for full details
LIVRAISON #12
Third Text has published a select anthology in French, Livraison #12. Previously published articles from past Third Text issues have been translated in French featuring articles by Rasheed Araeem, Jimmie Durham, Geeta Kapur, RAQS Media Collective, Gerardo Mosquera, Yang Zhenzhong, Shilpa Gupta, Olu Oguibe, Ihab Hassan, Slavoj Zizek and Gregory Green, Zygmunt Bauman, Ian Chambers, A Raghuramaraju, Ella Shohat, and Ilana Salama Ortar.
Livraison #12 was edited by Stephen Wright, and Published by Rhinocerous.