Traveling Forms | TRANSIT
CFP TRANSIT Journal: Volume 13.1
2020-2021: Traveling Forms
Due to numerous requests, TRANSIT has extended the deadline for submissions to October 11, 2020.
As a pandemic and international solidarity for Black Lives Matter demand reckoning with crises of a global scale, this call for papers proposes to rethink German Studies in its constitutive contradiction: formed around a national canon, yet also situated in global institutional networks, the discipline calls for theoretical, aesthetic, and historical reevaluations of cultural-medial forms in motion. Around 1800, Immanuel Kant conceptualized cosmopolitanism without leaving Königsberg, and the decreasingly mobile Goethe projected the idea of world literature from his study in Weimar, suggesting that visions of global circulation often arise in tension with local limitations on mobility. In this sense, this issue poses questions such as: how has the relationship between bodies, forms and their circulation been envisioned? How does the movement of bodies and forms shape our understanding of transnational exchange? What happens to forms when transported into different cultural contexts?
Such questions must also be considered in light of their political implications. On a fundamental level, even the terminology of the “global” reenacts an imperialist attitude towards the earth and adheres to the logics of market value and racial capital. Scholars like Claudia Breger and Pheng Cheah speak of “world making” to challenge these logics and in turn highlight the constitution of communities through literature and film. World is not identical with the spatial expansion of the globe but a temporal process in which affective attachments are unfolded and reconfigured. What worlds are created by the transnational circulation of forms? And how do border regimes and asymmetrical power relations impact these transmissions? How can traveling forms imagine a world that departs from colonial legacies?
This CFP encourages contributions from all fields that engage with German language, culture and thought. Such disciplines include but are not limited to literary studies, language pedagogy, history, film and media studies, performance studies, geography, philosophy, translation, critical theory, and anthropology.
English- or German-language papers or projects are due for editorial review by October 11, 2020. Please email transitjournal@berkeley.edu, CC misandberg@berkeley.edu (Michael Sandberg, Managing Editor)
Hosting or attending an event on a related topic? Please feel free to download a .pdf copy of our CFP for dispersal.
TRANSIT is excited to announce its collaboration with UC Berkeley’s 29th Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, to be held in the spring of 2021. TRANSIT: Volume 13.1 will feature a special subsection overseen by Jonas Teupert and dedicated to a select number of extended conference papers. The conference’s own call for papers is forthcoming in August. For any questions please contact the conference organizing team berkeleygermanconference@gmail.com.