-------- Original Message -------- Subject: CFP: Community (6/15/05; e-journal issue) Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 19:42:43 +0100 From: Joanna Zylinska <j.zylinska@virgin.net> To: cfp@english.upenn.edu Electronic journal Culture Machine invites submissions for its special 2006 COMMUNITY issue. Culture Machine is an international, open access, peer-reviewed electronic journal whose aim is to promote original, exploratory work in the areas of cultural studies and critical theory. It seeks to generate possibilities for new areas of interdisciplinary inquiry. In recent years, the notion of the community has emerged as an important as well as contested field of cultural and theoretical exploration. In his influential study Imagined Communities (1983), social anthropologist Benedict Anderson discusses the concept of the community as it is related to the idea of the nation. As an imagined cultural and political artifact, the nation provides a collectivity with a sense of continuity and cohesiveness, while concealing the foundational violence that underlies such collective myth. While Andersons articulation of the community is still largely circumscribed by the political concept of the nation state, philosophical inquiries into the notion of the community by Jean-Luc Nancy (The Inoperative Community, 1983), Maurice Blanchot (The Unavowable Community, 1983) and Giorgio Agamben (The Coming Community, 1993), seek to open it up toward a broader politico-ethical context. Nancys call for the deconstruction of the immanent community has been particularly influential: community as the dominant Western political formation, founded upon a totalizing, exclusionary myth of national unity, must be tirelessly unworked in order to accommodate more inclusive and fluid forms of dwelling together in the world, of being-in-common. In this issue, we propose to engage in multiple explorations of the community as a socio-historical, politico-ethical and cultural construct. * With the demise of the traditional community as related to the nation-state, what alternative formations or new collectivities, bound together by a very different nexus of belonging, have emerged in its stead? * How viable is the metaphor of the global community (the global village)? * Can the community be predicated on the ethical, perhaps cosmopolitan vision of sharing and unimpeded border-crossing, or is it, on the contrary, yet another homogenizing, totalizing fantasy that only benefits the empire of the capital? * How does it relate to such increasingly unstable concepts as citizenship or multiculturalism ? * What is the function of the community in the rapidly shifting geopolitical context, of which the European community is a particularly fecund contemporary example, as is a plethora of its postcolonial, post-Western articulations (in the Middle East and Africa, for instance)? * Is there community after communism? * To what extent does Hardt and Negri's multitude (Empire, 2004; Multitude, 2004) represent a new form of community (one made up of a multiplicity of singularities)? * Among the newly emergent formations, the notion of the virtual community is of particular interest. We would like to investigate the virtual communities that have mushroomed in numerous guises: as both cultural avant-garde and cultural decadence; as the mainstay of political conservatism (white supremacy networks) and the forum for politically progressive forces (international peace coalitions). * Finally, are we perhaps moving towards the unworking of the community to a degree when it ceases to be a workable concept altogether? In reflecting on the notion of community, this special issue of Culture Machine also aspires to become a meeting place for the community of minds; indeed, a site of community in its most basic sense of communication and circulation of meaning. Please send an abstract of 500-750 words to Dr. Dorota Glowacka, at . 1. The deadline for submitting abstracts is June 15, 2005. All contributors will be notified soon after the deadline whether their abstract has been selected. 2. The deadline for completed papers is October 20, 2005. All papers will be peer-reviewed. -- Dr Joanna Zylinska Department of Media and Communications Goldsmiths College, University of London New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK -- Jesper Tække - MA. Ph.D.-Student - IT University of Copenhagen - Dept. of Digital Aesthetics & Communication - Rued Langgaards Vej 7 - DK-2300 Copenhagen S - Phone +45 7218 5000 - Direct +45 7218 5037 - Fax +45 7218 5001 - http://home16.inet.tele.dk/jesper_t/ - e-mail: jespert@itu.dk