Ilha do Desterro - Call for Papers

Issue v. 71, n. 2 (May 2018)

Special Issue on Artistic Collaborations

Guest Editors:

Maria Rita Drumond Viana, UFSC

Alinne Balduino Pires Fernandes, UFSC

Miriam Haughton, NUI Galway

This special issue is dedicated to interrogating the histories, role(s), and dynamics informing the practice of artistic collaborations in cultural and social spheres among artists in English-speaking countries or within transnational contexts. The act of collaboration often foregrounds a creative space that speaks to values of community, exchange, and artistic exposure. At the same time, artistic collaborations become enmeshed by intensities of process, personal/public politics, and both the tacit and explicit complexities surrounding paradigms of authorship and autonomy. Key to the theorisation of artistic collaborations is the growing scepticism around the figure of the ‘Author’, singular, with capital ‘A’. In 1991, Jack Stillinger in his seminal work Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius began to question the pervading prevalence of this figure despite ample evidence of the involvement of other minds in certain creative processes. Others have since employed case-studies with pairs/partners (often couples) and groups of artists across the arts, philosophy, and sciences to explore the dynamics that emerge from the joint work.

The processual aspect of artistic collaborations can be made visible to scholars by different means: letter exchanges between the involved parties and/or their friends, notes taken in personal, artistic, and research diaries, photographs, and making-of videos, among others. The need for dialogue, so that one can be understood by the other, provides one of the constitutive bases of the working relationships within collaborations. Not surprisingly, documentary sources—witnesses to the creative processes—involved in collaborations are often more abundant than those extant from creative processes by single individuals. Communication amongst collaborators strengthens circles of friends, as well as of tensions, organised as they are in sociability networks.

This trans- and multidisciplinary issue of Ilha invites articles dealing with literary, interart, and intermodal collaborations, involving artists and practitioners in the Anglophone context or from comparative approaches. In particular, we are interested in collaborations in pairs or groups, including:

• Creative writers, in particular when there is a question of power imbalance (male/female writers, mentor/mentee, generational gaps, etc.);

• Writers and illustrators, book designers, and other visual artists;

• Film directors and screenwriters, as well as other individuals involved in film or TV production;

• Playwrights, artistic directors, actors, scenographers, or the ‘theatre-maker’, ‘theatre artist/auteur’; terms developed from the professional acknowledgment of the multi-authorial process of roles in theatrical production;

• Writers and translators;

• Multiple translators (working in texts for different languages or on a single text).

Reviews are also considered for books published from 2015-2017, under the scope of this literature issue. The journal’s main themes are: Literatures in English—the  geopolitical study of works and authors of Anglophone literatures in the light of contemporary critical theories; theoretical and cultural intersections, with a focus on the study of literatures, other arts and media, as well as their interrelations and/or theoretical and cultural specificities.

About Ilha do Desterro:
Ilha is a pioneering journal and one of the longest running journals dedicated to English Studies in Brazil, covering linguistics, applied linguistics, translation, and literature and cultural studies in alternating issues. It was established in 1979 and is one of the top 5 journals in the area of Arts, Literatures and Languages in Brazil, and has since achieved international reputation. Ilha is an open Access Journal, indexed in many platforms, including the MLA International, ProQuest, SCOPUS, and SciELO.

For information on formatting guidelines for authors and how to submit your proposal online, please consult: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/about/submissions

Deadlines:

Send articles by 1st of August 2017

Expected to be published in May 2018

Should you have any queries, please email the editors:

Dr Alinne Balduino P. Fernandes, UFSC - alinne.fernandes@ufsc.br

Dr Maria Rita Drumond Viana, UFSC - m.rita.viana@ufsc.br

Dr Miriam Haughton, NUI Galway – miriam.haughton@nuigalway.ie