cfp.english.upenn.edu

Deadline: February 15, 2012

Book Reviews for Schuylkill graduate journal: Bondage and Power -- Special Issue

Schuylkill graduate journal is seeking submissions from all disciplines for our 10th volume of critical essays and book reviews to be published in Spring of 2012 (online and print). We are seeking book reviews on works addressing the question of bondage and power (broadly defined), 5 pages in length; double spaced; MLA format; no footnotes. Current graduate students should direct their work to Colleen Hammelman and Beth Seltzer at skook@temple.edu by February 15, 2012; no simultaneous submissions please. All reviews will be anonymously reviewed by at least two staff members. Please e-mail submissions with author name and contact info on first page only. In an effort to minimize our environmental impact, copies of submissions not accepted for publication will be recycled.

In his renowned 1992 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1992), Mike Davis describes the social warfare in Los Angeles that pits the interests of the urban poor and the middle classes. He argues:

The obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. Yet contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating ‘postmodern space’, or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan ‘galaxies’, has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at the street level.

Davis further describes the ways in which “redevelopment massively reproduced spatial apartheid” and how the new architecture and security apparatus in LA has served to bound the poor and homeless to a life as fugitives and always in motion, “pressed between the official policy of containment and the increasing sadism of Downtown streets.” This is but one demonstration of the complexity of bondage and power in society. This is a multifaceted issue in the humanities: the definition and re-definition of these terms and the nature of their interaction has been debated by philosophers, literary theorists, sociologists, novelists, poets, journalists, political theorists, geographers and other scholars of the humanistic sciences across various time periods.

Because we want to provide an original and important angle to the discussion of new works, we will publish reviews by graduate students exclusively. Additionally, the reviews will explicitly address the reviewer's impressions of the importance of the work to future research as well as emerging fields, disciplines, approaches, etc.

To compliment the articles centered on this issue’s special topic of bondage and power, The Schuylkill seeks book reviews of recent scholarship that in some way deal with this topic. Below is a list of suggestions, but the editors are open to other works provided they were published in the past two years.

A few suggestions (though the possibilities are by no means limited to this list):

Gene Sharp’s Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts. (2011)
Isa Blumi’s Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State. (2011)
Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong’s Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen.(2011)
John Hench’s Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. (2010)
Stephanie Li’s Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women. (2010)

We welcome reviews focusing on any of the multi-dimensional aspects of power and bondage, ranging from the bondage of labor to power and the environment to institutional bondage and power, and topics in between. Please feel free to write with questions or proposals.

The Schuylkill is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal founded, edited, and run by graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia. We are looking to publish the scholarly work of graduate students in the humanities from around the globe. We are especially interested in work that, in presenting a rich and nuanced perspective on the topic of bondage and power, blurs the boundaries of the disciplines (literary theory; philosophy; history; political theory; religious studies; cinema studies; women’s studies; art history; etc.)