3rd Text Africa invites abstracts for essays on the theme ‘Worlding: Time, Space and Newness,’ to be published in 2026. The deadline for submissions is 30 June 2025.

The term ‘worlding’ was introduced to postcolonial theory by Gayatri Spivak in her work The rani of Sirmur: An essay in reading the archives (Raja, 2019). Here, Spivak (1985, p. 247) addresses the ways in which Europe “had consolidated itself as sovereign subject by defining its colonies as ‘Others,’ even as it constituted them … into programmed near-images of that very sovereign self.” Spivak invokes the term worlding to draw attention to the purposeful colonial machinations of ‘constituting’ the so-called third world from the perspective of the ‘centre’. Spivak thus addresses ‘worlding’ as perpetrated by the Same. There is however, also a restorative mode of worlding, or rather re-worlding, described as “a generative, agentic … co-making of worlds” (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2022).

The current edition calls for essays on the practice of worlding in any visual arts genre where resistance to the current ‘given’ world takes the form of subverting what is commonly understood as linear time and three-dimensional spatial practices. The question arises as to which new worlds can be created, or how this world can be re-made, through acts of timespace inversion?

An example of a liberatory re-conception of timespace is encountered in John Akomfrah’s film The last angel of history (1995), where the task of the protagonist, the Data Thief, is to time-travel to the past to re-mix current and future time. This timespace work is described as an “ethical commitment to history, the dead, and the forgotten … [a] vigilance that … must be extended into the field of the future” and constitutes a “chronopolitical act” (Eshun, 2003, p. 288; 292).

The scope of topics covered by the intersection of time, space and newness pertaining to visual creative practice in Africa and in the African diaspora include, but are not limited to:

o Afrofuturist re-envisionings of space and time in creative practice.
o Liberatory spacetime in the visual arts.
o New worlds in imagination and ‘in the world’.
o Worldmaking as artistic practice.
o Critical artistic engagement with normalised conceptions of time and space.
o Time, space, newness and social justice.
o Newness and subversion.

This edition will be guest edited by Runette Kruger.

Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words to asaieditor8gmail.com by 30 June 2025. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be notified by the end of July. Full papers are due by 31 August 2025. Abstracts can also be submitted for visual essays, poetry, drawings, diagrams, and photographic projects, etcetera.

For enquiries about this edition:
Runette Kruger asaieditor8gmail.com
Mario Pissarra marioasai.co.za

References
Common Worlds Research Collective. (2022). Worlding. https://www.commonworlds.net/organizing-concepts/worlding
Eshun, K. (2003). Further considerations on Afrofuturism. The New Centennial Review, 3(2), 287-302.
Raja, M. (2019). Worlding. Postcolonial space: Resources on postcolonialism https://postcolonial.net/glossary/worlding/
Spivak, G. C. (1985). The rani of Sirmur: An essay in reading the archives. History and Theory, 24(3), 247-272. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/2505169