Call for Papers

NUMBER 10 (2024): (NEO)BAROQUES
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 1ST TO SEPTEMBER 30TH, 2024
PUBLICATION: DECEMBER 15TH, 2024

We invite you to participate in the upcoming issue (2024) on the theme of the (neo)baroque.
In the face of decolonialism and bell-tower nationalism, one of the greatest challenges facing Ibero-Americans (Latin Americans + Iberians) is to construct their own hermeneutics of their pan-Iberian cultural macro-area. This is the only way to avoid the excesses of cultural subordination resulting from the defeat of early Iberian-baroque modernity. The aim is to think with our own heads and, of course, not to renounce any contributions of thought that have been made from anywhere in the world.

The defeat of early Iberian modernity meant that the entire Ibero-American territory (including the Iberian Peninsula) was placed on the periphery of the world-system. Therefore, the peripheral situation of Latin America is not a direct consequence of Iberian colonization, but a direct consequence of the defeat of early Iberian modernity. This is why the study of the baroque, from philosophy, geopolitics, and the social sciences, becomes a priority for Ibero-American thought.

In the book Tradição e artifício: iberismo e barroco na formação americana, Professor Rubem Barboza Filho explains the singularity of Iberian humanist baroque, a neotomist absolutism that is not centralist - unlike the French - in line with the great advances that have been made in the historiography of that period. Here we see how various paradigms, concepts, and languages of modernity from the French Revolution or English industrial capitalism do not serve to interpret the Iberian world.

Barbosa affirmed that the Creoles - through the knowledge bequeathed by the Hispanic-American Universities - elaborated their own "anti-Western" thought to defend themselves against the attacks of Hegel and other thinkers of European bourgeois modernity. This helps to understand the anti-Western fervor that exists in some intellectual sectors, reinforced by the natural anti-imperialism against the United States, which has led, after a mutation given in North American universities, to the disaster of decolonialism, something completely out of touch with the rhizomatic mestizo reality of Ibero-America, which Darcy Ribeiro understood so well.

To analyze America, Professor José Antonio González Alcantud highlights two aspects. On the one hand, "America is not a root, it is a rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari said: its imaginary cartography is rhizomatic." And, on the other hand, "La raison baroque," by Buci-Glucksmann, which points to the impossibility of "a unifying discourse." Therefore, we must "enter into the details and keep the ambiguities very present to approach the new complex formulations of alterity."

In this sense, the neobaroque paradigm has a Latin American anchorage with a leading role for Cubanness, as is present in the works of Roberto Leza-ma Lima, Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier, Haroldo de Campos, Bolívar Echeverría, Samuel Arriarán, etc. Brazilian tropicalism, in all its versions, with all its regionalisms, from Gilberto Gil to Gilberto Freyre, is exactly a Latin American baroque. It is very important to increase Ibero-American dialogue to achieve a convergence of concepts in order to build a solid Ibero-American (neo)baroque thought.

Baroque and tropical pluralism is related to Mediterranean pluralism. From Spain, around the baroque, there are already relevant classical authors such as Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián or theorists like Eugenio d'Ors. There are also many scholars of the Baroque, but the key in this case, recognizing geographical differences in the Baroque, is to handle Latin American and Iberian bibliography. Latin America takes the lead here because the Baroque had greater continuity and resistance than in Iberia. Regarding the neobaroque, from Spain, we can read Pérez Tapias, Hugo de Felguerinos, Soldevilla Pérez, Josep M. Catalá Domènech, or Norbert Bilbeny, among many others. The Baroque can be seen from the angle of the strategy of the dominant classes for the effective acculturation of the dominated or from the angle of the ethos of resistance of the converted, mestizo, or dissident counter-culture. Both visions are valid and complementary. Beyond the potential of the Baroque as a labyrinthine interpretative theory of the past, it is possible to bring it to the present and future. Among other reasons for the popular cultural resistance of recent centuries, as well as for the geopolitical possibilities of weaving alliances between Ibero-baroque based countries. It is about fighting against the internal fragmentation of this space, which has 800 million Spanish speakers, and managing plurality in an intercultural way. It is an alternative to Anglo-Saxon decolonialism, which reduces the anthropology of complexity to a massive - albeit egalitarian - promotion of all ethnocentrisms, in a suicidal competition of reproaches between peoples and individuals.

There are already dozens of books and YouTube videos that advocate for the neobaroque as an effective worldview to navigate the digital revolution of social networks, with the ability to use part of the cultural inventory of the Baroque for current cultural resistance against technosportist and ultracapitalist worldviews. Perhaps it is not so much about recovering an alternative modernity, but at least about expanding it, on the basis of a general critique of the cultural homogenization of bourgeois modernity, incorporating neobaroque postmodernity (La era neobarroca, Omar Calabrese). As Professor Carlos Soldevilla Pérez says, in Ser Barroco, a hermeneutics of culture, this proposal of the neobaroque as an expanded modernity is based on:
1) Betting on a paused, rememorative, and reflective time, along with the care of people and nature.
2) The vindication of an aesthetics of existence.
3) The consideration of the baroque/neobaroque sublime, which values the aesthetics of cultural reception.
4) The development and improvement of popular culture.

We request articles framed within the following thematic lines:

- Historical anthropology in the analysis of the continuities of popular rhizomatic counterculture.
- (Neo)Baroque as a pessimistic complex reality. Opposed and conflicting baroques. Differences between Latin American, Iberian, and Mediterranean baroques.
- Neobaroque as a turn for the social sciences against decolonialism and nationalism.
- Neobaroque, social networks, and artificial intelligence.
- Convergences and conflicts between the first Ibero-baroque modernity and the second Northern European modernity and postmodernity.
- Orientalism and the baroque: encounters and disagreements. Examples from art.

 

 

NUMBER 11 (2025): PHOTOGRAPHIC BOUNDARIES
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 1ST TO MAY 31ST, 2025
PUBLICATION: DECEMBER 15TH, 2025

The concept of the border presents a dual quality close to the human being, not only has it been an instrument of both interior and exterior containment, but it has also aroused in humanity the need to cross them, the need for travel, ultimately the need for otherness, the need for knowledge of the other. The concept of the border is also a metaphor and an invitation to research carried out at disciplinary limits.

Photography, for its part, nearing two hundred years of existence, has gone through various historical phases always associated with the evolution of photographic process technique and technology. It has also been a mirror of social and historical processes. In recent years, we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the use of photography. Digital photography has facilitated the photographic process so much that the role of the photographer, which until recently tended to disappear, is beginning to blur, being reserved for the profession only in those creative and social spaces where disciplinary knowledge still matters.

On the other hand, the integration of photography by academic research circles has been longstanding. In what we could consider scientific photography, anthropology was one of the first disciplines to use it as a research method. The explicit use of photography by anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, subsequently continued by Lévi-Strauss, John Collier Jr., and Malcom Collier, among others, created an important methodological and research tool, although little known outside the field of anthropology. Over time, many other disciplines have included photography in their research, either as an instrument, methodology, or final objective. As a result, there has been an increase in academic publications placing photography at the center of this interest over the past thirty years. Parallel to this fact is the interest that photography arouses in the general population.

Many academic disciplines have researchers interested in photography at a theoretical level, while other researchers work by including it in their methodology. This occurs at a historical moment in which, at the social level, almost every person has a camera, in a global society where more photographs have been produced in recent years than in the entire history of photography. The exponential increase in its consumption, driven by social networks and the incorporation of cameras in mobile phones, has also facilitated a paradigm shift in its consumption and use in recent years.

We invite proposals that address these and other issues related to photographic boundaries from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. We accept both academic essays and research exploring the following themes, which by no means claim to be exclusive:
- Photography Across Disciplinary Boundaries.
- Scientific photography.
- Documentary photography.
- Social representation through photography.
- Photography and artificial intelligences.
- Photography as a means to explore the boundaries between the public and the private.