full name / name of organization:
Electronic journal Culture Machine invites submissions for its special
2006 COMMUNITY issue.
Culture Machine <http://www.culturemachine.net> 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
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 Anderson’s 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. Nancy’s 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
* 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
* How viable is the metaphor of the “global” community (the global
* 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
* 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
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 ZylinskaDepartment of Media and CommunicationsGoldsmiths College, University of LondonNew Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK*** New book - The Ethics of Cultural Studies - out now ***My website: http://www.joannazylinska.netReviews Editor for Culture Machine: http://www.culturemachine.net ========================================================== From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List CFP_at_english.upenn.edu Full Information at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu ==========================================================Received on Thu May 19 2005 - 11:23:27 EDT