Call for Papers:
European Journal of American Studies (EJAS), Special Issue “Beat Times: Queer Temporalities in Beat Writing” (Edited by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo and Juan Antonio Suárez)
Issue description:
Spatial discourses have dominated much of the scholarly debate around the artistic and literary production of the Beat Generation, producing over the last decades a substantial body of work on travel, border-crossing, liminality, dwelling, and heterotopias. By contrast, the temporal dimension of Beat literature has remained fairly understudied. While Beat poets and artists traveled far and wide, inward and outward—as they embarked on physical and psychedelic trips—and their work offers ample testimony of dissident spatial practice, it also suggests new forms of thinking about and relating to time. Temporal loops, repetitions, time folds, anachronisms, heterochronias, diverse uses of memory and of the past, and multiple other disruptions of linear clock time occur frequently in Beat literature and art.
This special issue aims at studying how the Beats’ social, sexual, and artistic marginality prompted alternative perceptions and uses of time. Understood as queer temporalities—a concept developed by critics José E. Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman, among others—these alternative perceptions contested reigning (chrono)normativity. At odds with the dominant temporal order, the Beats rebelled against the functional, productive time characteristic of contemporary technocratic societies and embraced unproductive, contemplative, and aberrant durations; they opposed the cult of linear progress with critical uses of memory and invocations of the past; they imagined utopian futures; and they generally envisioned life (in Halberstam’s words) “according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- narrative and/or formal uses of synchrony, asynchrony, serendipity, and nonlinearity in Beat writing
- fragmentation, instantaneity, epiphany, and atemporality
- the times of (sexual, ethnic, racial, cultural) “others”
- “real” and psychological time
- narcotic and oneiric times
- space and time intersections—Beat chronotopes
- sexual, gender, ethnic, and temporality fluidity
- memory and remembrance
- non-human and post-human memories—memory of objects, places, sounds
- collective and individual times; official and unofficial temporalities
- unproductive temporalities (statism, wasting time, waiting, lingering)
- technologically mediated time: recording technologies (film, tape, video) and temporal manipulation
About the journal:
The European Journal of American Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal published by the European Association for American Studies (EAAS). It is indexed in SCOPUS, SJR (Q1), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI, Q2).
Timeline:
Contributors send their abstracts by May 1st 2023
Contributors send their manuscripts by December 1st 2023
Editorial Screening by December 15th 2023
Peer review round 1 completed by March 15th 2024
Peer review round 2 (if necessary) by June 1st 2024
Final Editorial decision by August 1st 2024
Acceptance letters will be provided upon acceptance.
Submitting Articles:
Abstracts and articles should be submitted electronically in a message sent to the editors (estibaliz.encarnacion@um.es and jsuarez@um.es) as an attachment in .doc format. Contributions should be between 7,000 and 8,000 words and should be preceded by a short abstract and a list of key words. Biographical references and general presentation should follow the MLA Style sheet (here)
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