Call for Papers: Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

CFP, Edition 8: “Yesterday’s Contemporaneity: Finding Temporality In The Past” 

 

In recent decades art historians across the discipline have offered new insights into how communities in the global past understood their own positions in time. For example, Marvin Trachtenberg has made the case that twelfth- and thirteenth-century European architecture articulated a form of medieval modernism. Conversely Paul Binski has argued for how the same material could be understood as not only innovative, but also firmly historicist in nature. Studies of eschatology in artworks ranging from Renaissance wall paintings in Italy to Pure Land Buddhist Mandalas in Japan have highlighted how people in the past used theology to conceptualize their own place in time in the face of an uncertain but infinite future beyond their death. Meanwhile, studies of the visual cultures that emerged under different eras of imperialism and colonialism have illuminated how local and foreign definitions of time, history, and contemporaneity could directly shape the identities of both conquered and conquering peoples.  

 

Contemporaneity asks what it means to be contemporary. The term is often invoked in reference to the current lives of citizens of today’s world, but this edition seeks to highlight contemporaneity across a wider variety of historical contexts. The aim is to uncover how cultures throughout the global past have negotiated temporalities, modernities, and historicisms, to come to terms with what it means to be present in their own moment. How can both history and modernity be visualized, contextualized, or conceptualized to create a sense of contemporaneity? How have institutions created temporalities for the cultures they study, and how can a historical object or space shape a person’s perception of an entire culture’s identity or agency? What is at stake in defining a work of art’s place in time? 

 

Submissions on all topics will be considered. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to: 

 

-modernism, medievalism, and historicism 

-modernity and history in a global context 

-anachronisms, futurisms, and revisionist histories  

-Orientalism and other uses of the temporal in cross-cultural exchange 

-spoliation, re-use, and/or appropriation 

-museums, the ethics of collecting and “Grand narratives” 

-traditional or historical art and crafts and the preservation of style 

-contemporary interventions on historical objects or sites  

-creation myths, apocalypses, beginnings and end times 

 

 

The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2018. Manuscripts (circa 6,000 words) should include an abstract, 3-5 keywords, and adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. To make a submission, visit contemporaneity.pitt.edu, click Register and create an author profile to get started. Proposals for book and exhibition reviews, interviews, or other scholarly contributions will also be considered, and we recognize that these submissions may take many forms.

Proposals and questions can be directed to the editors at contemporaneityjournal@gmail.com

Contemporaneity is a peer-reviewed online journal organized by the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Visit contemporaneity.pitt.edu and constellations.pitt.edu for more information.