CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS LiNQ VOLUME 36 2009:

Extended Closing DATE 1 October 2009

POP Goes the Region

The small town, the local, and regionalism have long been considered precious territory to be guarded by grassroots music and local art movements, enshrined in high letters, and embalmed in obscurity. This issue of LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland) seeks to challenge and update this notion of the regional. As the Internet connects us in a global village of downloadable ephemera, the local community is redefined. How does the region connect with the popular?

The phrase 'pop will eat itself' conjures a virtual world of art, writing, and music in which the key words are revise, reuse, reissue, remaster, recycle, and reboot. This is the world in which the ABC show "Lawrence Leung's Choose Your Own Adventure" satirises the ambitions of a Chinese-Australian local-boy who forms a rock group over Skype with a back-up band in India called "The Sweatshop Boys." Indeed, cyberspace more broadly allows us to make strange, sometimes funny, hybrid-mixes of the local, the global, and the popular. But just how does this globalised world take up and alter our experience and understanding of the local, in general, and of regional literature, art, music, and art movements, in particular?

Exhibitions like Stephen Danzig's/IDA projects' Vernacular Terrain (QUT 2007: http://www.idaprojects.org/IDAA/brocures/vt2_tri-fold_cover_proof_06.pdf ) showcase how the intersections of the local, the global, and the popular in art and media do not eviscerate regional identity and artistic vision, but rather produce new ways of being that emerge from "the convergence of new models of spatial thinking, vernacular creativity, popular culture, corporate branding, and hybrid economies."

We are calling for academic papers, submissions of short stories and poems, and visual art that contemplate the intersection of the regional and the popular in regional Australia but also in terms of regional/global intersections more generally.

Academic papers might address issues such as:

Regional Writers and Popular Literature: transcending the obscure
Regionalism and the Internet
Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures
Boundaries between High and Low in Regional/Global Culture
Regional Art/Identity and the Global Marketplace

Submissions of no longer than 15 double-spaced pages are requested in double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman, with MLA referencing, in Word .doc format. Please send files as attachments to the LiNQ editorial board care of

Victoria.Kuttainen@jcu.edu.au