Call for Papers: react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture, Volume 4
This is a call for papers for react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture, Volume 4, "Subversion Zones: Bodies and Spaces at the Threshold." We seek proposals for feature articles, book and exhibition reviews, and research spotlight articles by August 18, 2023.
Call For Papers react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture Volume 4: “Subversion Zones: Bodies and Spaces at the Threshold”
Deadline: August 18, 2023
From property lines to nation-states, sites located on either side of a border are often considered as bounded spaces that constitute positive entities. But what happens at their periphery? How do edge and threshold zones challenge our understanding of our environments, intellectual categories, and our bodies? Conversely, in what ways do spaces of uncertainty and contradiction shield and reinforce existing power structures, or reappropriate the subversive?
For the fourth volume of react/review, themed “Subversion Zones: Bodies and Spaces at the Threshold,” we seek papers that examine the capacity of thresholds, peripheral spaces, and borderlands to destabilize spatial, bodily, political, and sociocultural identities. We are interested in undetermined spaces and uncomfortable processes of threshold crossing. Such liminal sites may be considered the spatial equivalents of a hairball stuck in the violent process of being coughed up or swallowed down again, suspended somewhere between Georges Bataille’s dyad of excretion and appropriation.1 Following Kant, Jacques Derrida famously termed this “third” space the parergon, the frame or liminal zone that bridges internal and external entities.2 It is architecturally manifest in Irit Katz’s conception of the “common camp” as a space where the marginal is so intractably lodged that it becomes uncomfortably commonplace, or Danny Hoffman’s exploration of how the “uninhabitable architecture” of global modernism is precariously reinhabited.3 Likewise, thresholds proliferate on the urban scale, with Walter Benjamin writing that “The city is only apparently homogenous” as subterranean tunnels, streets, and gateways challenge the firm legal limitations of districts, private property, and interior space in nineteenth-century Paris.4
We invite contributions that examine subversive spaces within the edges, borders, and threshold zones of art, architecture, landscape, or related visual materials and methods. While we welcome all submissions, react/review prioritizes those by graduate students from any discipline at any stage of their MA or Ph.D. program, as well as postdoctoral fellows, and early career contingent scholars.
The journal is currently open to submissions for all categories (see descriptions below). Please pitch exhibition and book reviews directly to the co-managing editors. For feature and spotlight articles, please submit a manuscript, cover sheet, and 150-word bio to the journal’s page on eScholarship using the submit function, located at: https://escholarship.org/uc/reactreview/submissions. Remove any identifying information from manuscripts, as submissions will be evaluated through a double-blind review process. We kindly ask that you provide a separate cover sheet with the title, author’s name, contact information, institutional affiliation, and a short bio.
Questions may be directed to the journal co-managing editors, Taylor Van Doorne & Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, at: reactreviewjournal@gmail.com
Article categories available to open submission:
Feature articles (3,500-4,500 words): Features are research essays focusing on the theme of the call for papers. Feature articles are accompanied by brief responses from members of the editorial staff in order to deepen the conversation and make connections across research specialties.
Spotlight articles (1,500-2,000 words): Spotlight articles are open-ended pieces that discuss new research findings, speculate on pressing research questions, or address methodological issues encountered in fieldwork or archival work. They differ from the more formal feature writing in that spotlight pieces are more exploratory and flexible. Spotlight articles provide space for researchers to share works-in-progress, make connections between research and current events, or reflect on methodologies or the experience of conducting research or fieldwork. This section is also open to new translations of art and architecture related texts accompanied by a brief translator note.
Book/exhibition reviews (750 words): Reviews on recent exhibitions or publications should touch on the theme of the current issue. To be considered for a review, please send a ~150-word pitch and CV to co-managing editors, Taylor Van Doorne & Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, at reactreviewjournal@gmail.com by August 18, 2023.
1 Georges Bataille, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade (1930),” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
2 Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” trans. Craig Owens, October 9 (1979), 3-41.
3 Irit Katz, The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel-Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 4; Danny Hoffman, Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 14.
4 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 8.
