This is a Call for Writing: Conceptual Writing (plural and global)
and Other Cultural Productions (500 to 800 words) for Jacket 2.

A
couple of weeks ago, many responses to Katie L. Price’s valuable recent
compilation of viewpoints on Jacket2, “What is the relationship between
Conceptual Art and Conceptual Writing?” began circulating online and on
Facebook. These led to discussions that were eye opening and inspiring,
and they prompted me to do more thinking (and feeling) about the place
of my own practice in this world, and about my own civic roles as a
scholar and editor. I promised myself that I would move beyond gesturing
towards more inclusive conversations and actually do something. I
decided that I would change the nature of the question in order to seek
alternative answers that represented a broader and more diverse array of
practitioners across mediums and geographies.
So, after
discussion with the editors, Julia Bloch and Jessica Lowenthal over at
Jacket2, I have decided to further a discussion prompted by a question
that travels in another direction, gathering up other sub-questions as
it does: “What is the relationship between what-could-be-considered
Conceptual Writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions?”

The goals here are:
1) To pluralize and expand the field of influences for contemporary conceptual or conceptual-like writing
2) To create records of aesthetic and political genealogies that resonate as true and lived for practitioners
3) To articulate the critique of dominant and hegemonic genealogies or
histories associated with contemporary conceptual and conceptual-like
writing
I am contacting you in the hopes that you’d like to
contribute a short response (500 to 800 words) to this call for writing.
This is a very limited word count, admittedly, but my aim is to collect
as many view points as possible and to feature these as quickly as
possible. Please consider this the initial step in the longer and
continuous journey of telling and claiming history.
Aspects/Foci:
– Theories of the avant-garde and alternative temporalities
– Alternative and non-western concepts of innovation
– Low-innovation and anti-aesthetic innovation
– Connections between conceptual writing and other underrepresented
aesthetic mediums: dance, music, textiles, decorative arts, folk craft,
outsider practices,
– Connections between conceptual writing and
other non-represented cultural practices: religious ritual,
non-religious ritual, domestic spheres, social activism, psychoanalytic
and non-psychoanalitic therapy
– Race and ethnic identity, indigeneity, and non-identity politics, and the question of intersectional difference
– Biographical narratives, familial identity, and subjective impressions of influence
– Genealogies of affect; trajectories of emotional aspects of praxis
– Sexuality, bodily practice, desire and subjectivity
– Low-art, pop, mass products, non-art
– National identities and transnational relationships/non-relationships, and the politics of migrancy, itinerancy, vagrancy
– Postcolonial implications and settler/non-settler politics
– Anthropology, social work, ethnography
– All other aspects that you sense are not represented in already existing accounts
Responses that are particularly welcome and in short supply:
Responses which focus on close readings of single texts (however ‘closeness’ may be defined)
Responses which focus on unread, underrepresented practitioners in
minorized relation to institutions (through race, class, sexuality,
politics, gender, and intersections of these)
Responses which speak of your own practice and life
Responses which do comparative readings of a poetic text and a text outside the field of poetry
Responses which link private life to public practice

Immediate action: Please write back to express interest as soon as
possible. Please also let me know if you can’t invest at this moment.
Please circulate this to others who may be invested in this discussion.
Other actions: Compose

Due date: March 20, 2015.

Submission: Please email your response of 500 to 800 words in a
document to me. Please follow, to your best ability, the style guide
provided by Jacket2. The guidelines are flexible particularly around
citations, but Jacket2 asks that all sources be cited. J2 is unable to
run epigraphs or section titles because of design limits. If you would
like to include images or multimedia links to already existing online
content, please do so.

Divya Victor, divyavictor@gmail.com