Central European Bohemianism

A thematic issue of Ars Journal <http://www.dejum.sav.sk/?language=en&section=magazine>, published by the Slovak Academy (Chief Editor Ján Bakoš), to be published in 2013, aims to explore diverse manifestations of Bohemianism, with a focus on Central Europe.

The term ‘Bohemians’, as well as the geography and history of ‘Bohemianism’ is ambiguous and infinitely expandable. Referring to the inhabitants of the Czech lands of Bohemia, since the 15th century the French term Bohémiens was as used as a synonym for Romani Gypsies, commonly believed to have lived in this area of Central Europe. From the end of the eighteenth century, the term was applied to ‘drifters living by their wits’(Darnton 2006), to be then associated with informal communities of artists, poets, musicians, philosophers and journalists, rebelling against the norms and tastes of bourgeois society. Linked to the notion of the autonomy of art, Bohemianism had become a shorthand for transgression, for the defiance of authority and power, as well as for modern art and modern identity. Although the ‘historical’ capital of La Bohéme was the Quartier Latin of pre-Haussmann Paris, Bohemian communities and districts emerged also in other major cities of Europe and America, such as in London’s Soho, Munich’s Schwabing, New York’s Greenwich Village, or in Venice Beach, California. This issue aims to examine the particularities of this socio-cultural attitude in urban communities of Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Cracow, Warsaw, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, and other cities. It endeavours to focus on the nineteenth century and the Belle Epoque, the period which has seldom been explored in Anglophone studies on Central European art, in contrast to the attention attracted to the rebellions of the Central European Avant-Gardes.

Amongst the issues which could be raised, are:
• Affinities between Bohemians and Romani
• Diverse targets of the Bohemian critique
• Bohemianism and the rise of the art market
• Bohemianism and the rise of art criticism
• Privileged media
• Interdisciplinarity/ intermediality
• Reception of Henri Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (1849/51)
• Gender and sexuality
• The others of Bohemianism, beyond the ‘bourgeois philistine’
• Venues and spaces
• Bohemianism versus provincialism
• The internationality of Bohemianism
• Bohemians and the issue of national identity / political sovereignty
• The myth of Bohemia in national Art Histories

The language of publications will be English, with a short summary in Slovak. The contributions deadline would be August 2012. Please, send a short synopsis of 400 words by 31 January 2012 to the guest editor Kasia Murawska-Muthesius <K.Murawska-Muthesiusbbk.ac.uk>.