CFP: Nineteenth-Century Visual Technologies in Contemporary Practices (Special Issue)

The editors of the online peer-reviewed journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century invite proposals for a collection of essays on the ways in which contemporary art and heritage practices have been engaging with forms of nineteenth-century immersive spectacle. Proposals are due by March 1, 2022.

The edited volume will appear as a special issue of the journal. The editors welcome contributions that explore and interrogate the ways in which these interventions reinterpret nineteenth-century visual technologies. They are interested in testing the ways in which nineteenth-century spectacle has come to be understood.

The editors invite papers that investigate the renewed relevance of nineteenth-century immersive spectacles in contemporary artistic and museological practices:

• Why do such highly-curated embodied experiences of the world in flux find a new relevance in contemporary times?
• What varieties of subjectivities are articulated for contemporary viewers in these encounters?
• How do such new sites of memory—lieu de mémoire­ as conceptualized by the French historian Pierre Nora—thematize the contemporary against the background of ideologies of race, alterity and cultural heritage? 

Interested authors should send their 300-word abstract and a short 100-word biography to the editors Patricia Smyth ([email protected]) and Gülru Çakmak ([email protected] ).

Accepted essays (about 7000 words) will be due to the editors October 1, 2022. Since the papers will be published in an online platform, the editors are open to suggestions for incorporating multi-media resources to the published papers such as video, sound file, animation, etc.