CFP May 7, 2002

Globalization and the Image (special issue of genre)

Kurt M.

Call for Papers
"Globalization and the Image"

Special Issue of Genre (Fall/Winter 2003)

This special issue proceeds from the understanding that the image serves a
crucial function in both historical and contemporary discourses of
globalization and globalism. The idea of the image that this project takes
as its object of inquiry appears as a synchronic representational complex,
both graphic and textual, and encompasses literary, iconic, pictorial,
filmic and videographic domains. Its media appear equally diverse, ranging
from novels, televised programs and advertisements, theoretical texts,
economic treatises, and journalistic narratives to films, professional and
amateur photography, displays of construction projects, maps, and internet
Web-designs.

"Globalization and the Image" will consider historical, political,
theoretical, economic, and rhetorical aspects of, and responses to,
discourses of globalization, especially as they bear upon images and the
material conditions of their deployment. Articles considered for this
special issue will explore the degree to which the image broadly conceived
promotes, resists, maps, reflects, and indexes the complexities of
globalization. The following categories represent productive lines of
inquiry, although contributors should not feel limited to these rubrics:

Images and Empires: Edward Said has argued that European imperialisms in
effect "made the world one." To what extent were the global reaches of these
empires enabled, sustained, and resisted by particular images (of, for
example, exoticism or Western domesticity)? How does the image help to
ground and structure narratives of expansion, conquest, or assimilation? How
have images served to confront or to resist the extension of these empires?
In what ways were images deployed in struggles for home rule or
decolonization? Do particular images indicate lines of continuity or
fracture between the machinations of the old empires and the new aims of
global capitalism?

Narrative Affiliations of the Image: To what extent do images shape and
deform narratives of globalization and limn new maps of globality? The image
is usually understood to unfold synchronically - "an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time," as Ezra Pound famously announced -
but how might the image be understood to establish, modify, and reorient
diachronic relations, especially within narratives of global capitalism and
its others? Do images encourage us to explore models of narrative, social,
and political affiliation other than those that depend upon causality,
influence, or allegiance? For example, can images help us perceive new
homologies, intertextualities, and networks in the global arena?
National Imaginaries: What roles have images played in promoting nationalism
in the postcolonial era? How does an increasing movement toward
globalization in a range of institutions challenge or affirm the aims of
various nationalisms? To what extent do specific images of globalization
and/or of the nation serve as sites of mutual affirmation or contestation?

Global Circulations: How do images (logos, slogans, spectacular photos,
pictorial advertisements and campaigns) help to extend the marketing of
global capitalism? What functions do images perform in transnational
exchanges (including exchanges of information via global news networks and
of fashion via such media as MTV), and how do they define the scope of
various regional circuits of exchange? How does globalization modify
marketing strategies aimed at national and regional audiences? Do images of
the South enable the extension of Northern markets into the South? What
kinds of images become battlegrounds for intellectual property disputes in a
global market?

Imagining the Local: How do particular images (of impoverished children, of
clear-cut forests, or of trash, for instance) assist in local resistances to
and manipulations of globalization? How do they enable threatened spaces,
species, and communities - whether minority populations within and across
national boundaries, traditional architectures, cities, and environments, or
indigenous flora and fauna - to oppose or to turn to their advantage the
march of global capitalism? How is the local rendered global through
self-imaging (webcams and reality television, for instance)?

The Image as a Rhetoric of the Global: In the context of the internet's
transnational reach, has the World Wide Web's emphasis on graphic
representation and iconicity fostered or forced innovations in writing? Can
a rhetoric of the image or the icon penetrate where traditional written
texts cannot? How do imagistic strategies in various media (again, including
television and the WWW) produce "the global" as a new kind of "imagined
community," in Benedict Anderson's phrase?

Full essays by 1 December 2002 to Kurt Koenigsberger, Department of English,
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7117
(kmk25po.cwru.edu).

________________________
Kurt M. Koenigsberger
Assistant Professor of English
Associate Director
Society for Critical Exchange
Case Western Reserve University
222 Guilford House
Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7117

(216) 368-6994
kmk25po.cwru.edu

Reference:
CFP: Globalization and the Image (special issue of genre). In: ArtHist.net, May 7, 2002 (accessed Mar 28, 2024), <https://arthist.net/archive/25008>.

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