USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nota Bene: Call For Papers For A Special Issue On Afrika

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Call For Papers:

Critical Interventions Special Issue on Fractals in Global Africa.

Spring 2012

 Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art and History invites contributions for a special issue on African Fractals in Global Africa to be published in Spring 2012. We are interested in receiving proposals for substantial articles on all areas in which African painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, film, and other cultural productions intersect with fractals, networks, complexity, self-organization, and other nonlinear models. Locations could include any African-influenced culture around the globe as well as well as continental Africa.

 Possible topics could include any of the following in relation to Africa or the African Diaspora:

 

Fractals in art and design education

Scaling and recursive patterns in the arts

Fractal routes/roots (Gilroy's phrase)

Visual metaphors of branching (eg the Baobab, the arabesque)

Scaling or self-organization in traditional or contemporary architecture

Fractal social networks and the arts

Cycles within cycles in expressive media

We invite proposals to be submitted by February 28, 2011. The deadline for the final version of the paper is July 31, 2011. Articles should be based on original research, which has not been published before. Proposals should be no more than 500 words. Articles may be up to 7,500 words (not inclusive of the bibliography) and contain up to ten images. All rights for reproduction of images must be cleared in advance and submitted along with the article.

Critical Interventions is a peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for advanced research and writing on African and African Diaspora identities and cultural practices in the age of globalization. As an arena for rethinking African arts and exploring the nature and value of African art/cultural knowledge, Critical Interventions is interested in how the recent work on fractal structure in African arts and culture can be extended, discussed, contested, and theorized in domains such as aesthetics, politics, philosophy and economics, as well as applied to practical matters such as education and design.

Proposals of no more than 500 words (or queries) should be sent to

Audrey Bennett, Guest Co-Editor (bennett@rpi.edu)

Associate Professor of Graphics

Department of Language, Literature, and Communication

School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Rensselaer

110 8^th Street

Troy, NY 12180-3590