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.