Archive for 2014

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[ecrea] CFP: The political economy of contemporary cultural production: text and context

Wed Mar 05 00:35:32 GMT 2014







Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies

Call for Papers

Special Issue:

The political economy of contemporary cultural production:
a focus on the breach between text and context



Guest editors: Irina Turner, Bayreuth University; Dr. Rémi Tchokothe, Bayreuth University



Most contemporary cultural production, for instance music, film, advertisement, literature, journalism, TV, comedy or photography, is at some stage and in some form mediated through and recontextualized in the internet. Techniques like remixing, reshuffling and virality detach products from their original creators and owners and question the notion of originality and ownership per se. Authorship is now a common effort enabling multiple formerly passive recipients to become participating ProdUsers (Bruns 2007).

These techniques and trends are also transmitted into cultural products of the analogue world; e.g., into theatre productions, cartoons, or fine arts, and hence influence our world perceptions ubiquitously, i.e. online and offline. The multimodality and simultaneousness of cultural production turns readers and recipients of cultural texts into hyper-connected consumers. Text is here understood in its broadest sense, namely as any form of "readable" output.

Hyper-connectedness and internet-enabled recontextualization-chains fascinate through their ability to create constant innovation and seemingly self-automated recreation. Nevertheless, this makes many cultural products appear to be removed from their original source, to have anarchically and democratically emerged from somewhere unknown, and to exist in empty space. While the notion of "personal experience" as a vehicle for credibility and authenticity is the most important online currency, intriguingly and seemingly contradictive, virtuality blurs roots and sources to and from people and institutions and so disguises agendas and power relations.

Recent (internet) media analyses of cultural products have celebrated the innovation and anarchic liberation from restricting conventions of culture production brought about by intertextuality, have focused on intra-textual dynamics of the meaning-making process, on processes of recontextualization and on audience effects. However, it seems to be neglected that even the internet has a history and that (online) cultural products are made by real people with an agenda and social situatedness.

This special issue aims at balancing out this perceived dominant frame in analyses, and invites papers that critically focus on the beginnings and contexts of cultural products, i.e. their political economy, and aim to trace the individual history of emergence. While an isolated description of investors and agents might not bring much insight into the interpretation of the product per se, a good starting point for analysis is the breach between text and context and the friction point of the product to its enabling environment; which called in-between space by Homi Bhabha.

While previous issues of Critical Arts problematising culture as a product have focused on (neo)colonial discourse and global capitalism (16/1, 2002), on the question of copyright and intellectual property (20/1, 2006), or Cultural Economy in South Africa in particular (guest editor Narunsky-Laden: 24/1, 2010), this issue seeks contributions that specifically shed light on dynamics of cultural productions in the online world and their contextual relations to the offline world.

Though the internet is the dominating medium driving the feeling of disconnected floating, the contributions may also address offline cultural products that carry features typical for the internet such as hyper-connectedness, simultaneous multimodality, multiple and non-elitist authorship and constant recreation of intertextuality.

Areas of interest for this issue seeking original contributions are:

· Historical traces and contemporary examples of internet culture and its specific products

· Enabling economic and political parameters of media and cultural production

· Case studies of meaning-structures in cultural products with a focus on (dis-)continuities and breaches

·         Enabling or devitalizing cultural policies in specific settings



Papers can address for example:

1. The question of where (dis-)continuities in the history of the product become visible.

2. In what way discontinuities are connected to a social reality that is made of people with agenda and ideology.

3. Practices of intertextuality, multicontextuality, multimediality and multimodality - critically examined.



Deadlines:

Submission of abstracts with five key words and short bio: 15 April 2014

Author notification of abstract acceptance:  15 May 2014

Submission of final papers: 30 July 2014

Publication Date: August 2015



Critical Arts Home Page:

http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=151&Itemid=87

eJournals Archive (1980-1992):

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/

Notes for Authors:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/rcrcauth.asp

Enquiries and requests for additional information about this issue can be directed to the editors: (irina.turner /at/ uni-bayreuth.de); (remi.tchokothe /at/ uni-bayreuth.de)



Critical Arts is indexed on ISI, IBSS, Scopus, MLA and many other indexes, and is SAPSE-registered.





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