Critical Arts - A journal for South-North Cultural and Media Studies - invites short, punchy, challenging articles on some aspects of resistance, struggle and/or coping under conditions of siege – conceptual, bureaucratic and situational ...
The post-millennium world has seen a rapid escalation of violent conflicts in the Middle East, West, Central, North, and some areas of Southern Africa, and ongoing civil wars and human rights abuses in a variety of other regions across the world. As a means to engage these developments, Critical Arts instituted a new Section, "Under Fire". This is in keeping with its interpretation of cultural studies as a form of praxis, of experience, and of strategic intervention, in which individuals find themselves caught up in a broader process over which they may have little or no control.
The aim of this section is to invite short theorised autobiographies, authoethnographies, and dramatic narratives of what it is like living under fire, of the relevance of cultural studies in such circumstances, and how it could be deployed to challenge such conditions. (Length: anything up to 2000 words.) How does one explain the contradictions, the opposing ir/rationalities, the fracturing of logics which so brutally feed political solidarities at any cost?
The original Call emanated from a number of unsolicited submissions we have been receiving from colleagues in Palestineand Zimbabwe, letters from friends in Israel, and marginalised groups in South Africa, and from academics whose research and work is pilloried by hostile authorities. The exigencies of being under fire make it hard to find the discursive space in which participants can catch enough breath to speak the truths of their own participation:
When does a culture of resistance lose focus, becoming a culture of violence as an end in itself?
At what point can one recognise when legitimate defence against violence has suddenly become indistinguishable from the Warsaw Ghetto?
How can we turn war-talk into justice-talk, without provoking war-mongers to renewed efforts?
In a world with a global view of even the most local eruption of violence, how can those under fire on opposite sides of the street, the valley, the river, the sand dune find enough space to escape the solidarities of occupation, of resistance, and develop a language of restitution, restoration, Reformation, in the face of corporate and state reaction?
Closer to our sites of research, when does academic managerialism, burocratization of research become offensive, anti-humanist and self-destructive? The academic enterprise is under fire itself, as are many employed within it.
"Under Fire" hopes to become such a space, and we do not expect to define what will make submissions acceptable or not. The object is for those who have had enough, to speak in the ways they believe those across the camp or the river might attend to them. We'll consider these submissions as and when they are received, and where appropriate publish them in successive issues of the journal. Where necessary we will moderate inputs, but will avoid managing them.
The "Under Fire" submissions should reflect not just the pressures of a personal involvement within a context of oppression, occupation, or resistance; it should carry a clear indication of just how this involvement tests the cultural studies tradition. In this "test" the writers' experience must draw not only on the cultural studies method of examining texts and contexts, but should also use the writer's own context as the critical touchstone for pushing the cultural studies envelope.
Email you narratives to: Keyan G Tomaselli, editor: tomasell@ukzn.ac.za and copy to Critcalarts@ukzn.ac.za
For further information on Critical Arts see our website: http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=151&Itemid=87
The Critical Arts Routledge site is: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=journal&issn=0256-0046
Shaun Ryan
Gail Robinson
Editorial Coordinators
Critical Arts: A journal of south-north cultural and media studies
Culture, Communication and Media
Studies
Howard College Campus
University of KwaZulu-Natal
King George V Ave
Durban, 4001
South Africa