Contemporaries CFP

Contemporaries invites guest editors to pitch us ideas for the clusters of the future. If you can think of a contemporary cultural artifact, text, or idea that inspires widespread fascination, curiosity, perplexity and feeling, you may also think of a short list of writers who you'd like to read on that subject. Pitch us!

Editor in Chief:
Gloria Fisk

Senior Editors:
Francisco Robles and Michael Docherty

Editor:
Tyler A. Tennant

Q: What makes a good subject for a cluster?

A: You know it when you see it, and you can't look away. Everybody you talk to has something to say about it, and each one says something different. Those conversations leave you thinking in new ways about matters of importance for contemporary culture writ large.

Q: What if you have an idea for a cluster, and you have a writer or two in mind, but you don't know how to proceed?

A: Pitch us! We can solicit writers, too, and we may also know some who share your interest in your subject. We can also work with you to develop a call for papers.

Q: What does a pitch involve?

A: For an initial pitch, describe your idea for the cluster in 150-200 words, and send that description to the editors at post45contemporaries@gmail.com. We'd also love to see a potential title for the cluster along with a list of possible participants (either people you've asked, or people you'd like to ask). Tell us also why Contemporaries is the best place for your theme. If you have a draft of a call for papers, we'd love to work with you on that, too.

Q: How does the editing process work?

A: After an idea is accepted as a cluster, the guest editor works with an editor at Contemporaries to refine it and assemble a list of writers. The guest editor communicates with the writers in the cluster to gather drafts of the essays and do a first round of edits. Then the guest editor passes the drafts on to our editor, who communicates with the writers about another round or two of edits. Our associate editor then uploads the submissions to the site and creates custom banner images for each piece. Then, we publish and we celebrate!

**Q: How big is a Contemporaries cluster, generally, and how long is each essay?**

A: Contemporaries publishes clusters and essays that vary significantly in their size and shape, but we like to keep them on the smaller side. We find that a cluster that has more than six to eight contributors tends to grow diffuse, and that lack of coherence prevents any of the pieces from getting the attention it deserves. An essay that is longer than 3000 words or so inclines to lose its readers, too. But these are generalities, and we're glad to discuss the variety of ways they might apply.

STUDENT PROTEST STATEMENTS

The editors of Contemporaries are also professors, and we see how our students are spending the spring of 2024: Advancing a clear moral vision for the future, where Palestinians can live in freedom and peace; the U.S. university system divests from perpetual war; and antisemitism has no place.

We love to see it — so we are dedicating this cluster to it.

This is a call for college students: Send us the statements, demands, and community guidelines that animate your collective protests on campus this spring.

We are looking for documents that speak in a single voice on behalf of a specific student group, with the aim to publish those documents exactly as they're written.

This call is motivated by our admiration for this student movement and our horror at its misrepresentation in our public sphere. By amplifying the voices of the protestors, we hope to represent the quality and diversity of the protests they extend across institutions public and private, in every region of the U.S.

In aggregate, we hope that these statements will help their readers answer questions like:

How are contemporary college students connecting the dots between the tuition they pay to a corporatized university system and the ongoing violence in Gaza?
What specific demands does this student movement make from the universities where it unfolds, and how do those demands vary from one institution to another?
How does this movement work, logistically, to ensure the safety of the whole campus community?
How does this protest movement combat the logics of antisemitism while it also protests the U.S.-funded militarization of the Israeli state?

Send your statement with the name and any relevant information about the group it represents to: post45contemporaries@gmail.com, subject line: Protest!

"Reading Taylor Swiftly"

Deadline: June 15, 2024

Co-editors:
Stephanie Burt, Donald and Catherine Loker Professor of English, Harvard University
Gabriel Hankins, Associate Professor of English, Clemson University

Reading Taylor swiftly: we have all done it. As singer, lyricist, performer, and as celebrity text, Taylor Swift invokes and invites immediacy of response: she's singing to me, she's singing for me, her desires are mine, she’s just not my thing, her lyrics are basic or based. The responses are immediate and everywhere in the Eras Tour Era, as are reactions from the Departments of Tortured Poets. Less common, as Michael Dango has noted in a critical review of "the Era of Taylor Swift Studies," are attempts to mediate our engagements with Taylor Swift through theory, material analysis, cultural studies, fandom studies, or the tradition of the lyric. Swift's enormous fan base, her diverse publics and counterpublics, her contested celebrity image, the affective structures of her albums and concerts, her precisely designed intimacies, her struggle for artistic control over her own work, her feminism, her politics, her lyric personas and transformations, her collective and collaborative work, the art itself: all these are taken as mere cultural epiphenomena of "too late capitalism," to use Anna Kornbluh's concise periodization. The result is that a critical immediacy of response has come to mirror its cultural-industrial counterpart, and critics and fans alike have tended to read Taylor too swiftly.

This cluster calls for new mediations of Taylor Swift, her music, her lyrics, her cultural moment and her celebrity text, whether as an object of longing, loathing, identification, disidentification, adoration or abjection. Stephanie Burt and friends will write an introduction to the cluster; we anticipate great interest.

We invite papers on, for example:

Lyrics, forms, and lyrical traditions
Taylor and the literary past
The Department of Tortured Poets Era
Teaching Taylor across traditions and disciplines, i.e. sociology, psychology, musicology, Sound Studies
Celebrity studies, cultural studies, "Taylor Swift" as star image, celebrity text, and brand
Queer/transfandoms, remix cultures and meanings, and the meaning of Swift style
Swift and Swifties outside the American frame
Affective and temporal structures of belonging, unbelonging, longing
Poptimism and anti-poptimism in a time of precarity and polycrisis
Swift as cultural text and counter-text, normcore and normporn
Swift and the future of music criticism
Swift and craft: songcraft, stagecraft, musicianship, fashion design
Swift and the archive: unreleased, rumors and rarities
Material Girls and materialist politics
Re-reading Pop Icons after the Madonna-ology moment
Swifty feminism(s) and anti-feminist backlash
The Eras Tour as music-industrial moment
Taylor Swift in the City and the Country: metropolitan listeners and their others
Racebending, baiting, and re-crafting in the Eras Tour Era
Swift and Whiteness