Call for Papers or Proposals
Posted: 05/15/2025
Posted by: Association of Print Scholars
Expires: 09/01/2025
ARCHIPELAGO (Fall 2026)
Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich; Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia
New York,
United States
Abstracts due: 09/01/2025
“Antillean art,” remarked St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, “is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.” Walcott’s Nobel lecture, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, offers a compelling meditation on the interplay between art, history, and the archipelago as a space of fragmentation, multiplicity, and interconnectedness. In dialogue with Walcott’s reflections, Italian philosopher and politician Massimo Cacciari has framed the rise of early Cycladic culture in the Aegean Sea as the archetype of sociocultural relationality in Europe, inviting a reconsideration of the Archipelago as a model of geographical, as well as political negotiations.
As the eighteenth century witnessed the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the anchoring of European empires across Atlantic, African, Indian, and Mediterranean archipelagic complexes, the insights of Walcott and Cacciari challenge us to rethink how eighteenth-century art and architectural practices in archipelagic spaces were shaped by tensions between isolation, connection, empire, displacement, autonomy, and exchange. While offering an opportunity to reconsider the intertwined histories of colonialism, slavery, and territorialism, focusing on archipelagic structures can help “decenter” Western narratives. An archipelagic perspective is also critical to understanding how island societies navigated and negotiated their cultural identities and agency outside, or in spite of, colonial structures.
This issue of Journal18 explores how archipelagic thinking informs the study of eighteenth-century art, architecture, and material culture. How might concepts of creolization, diaspora, and tidalectics, in the words of Kamau Brathwaite, reshape our understanding of artistic production and circulation? In the fragmentation of archival repositories, what can eighteenth-century objects and built environments made within archipelagic spaces reveal about the experiences of the people who lived there? How did eighteenth-century objects negotiate relationships between islands, oceans, and continents? How did artistic and architectural practices in the archipelago both reflect/reinforce and resist colonial power?
We encourage contributions that explore the metaphorical and material implications of the archipelago in artistic practices, cartography, and networks of exchange and use. We welcome interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to object study in the form of full-length articles or shorter pieces focused on single objects, interviews, or other formats.
Issue Editors
Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich
Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia
Proposals for issue #22 Archipelago are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: September 1, 2025.
To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to the following email addresses: editor@journal18.org, cd2bv@virginia.edu, and vogiatzaki@arch.ethz.ch. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by February 1, 2026. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.
As the eighteenth century witnessed the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the anchoring of European empires across Atlantic, African, Indian, and Mediterranean archipelagic complexes, the insights of Walcott and Cacciari challenge us to rethink how eighteenth-century art and architectural practices in archipelagic spaces were shaped by tensions between isolation, connection, empire, displacement, autonomy, and exchange. While offering an opportunity to reconsider the intertwined histories of colonialism, slavery, and territorialism, focusing on archipelagic structures can help “decenter” Western narratives. An archipelagic perspective is also critical to understanding how island societies navigated and negotiated their cultural identities and agency outside, or in spite of, colonial structures.
This issue of Journal18 explores how archipelagic thinking informs the study of eighteenth-century art, architecture, and material culture. How might concepts of creolization, diaspora, and tidalectics, in the words of Kamau Brathwaite, reshape our understanding of artistic production and circulation? In the fragmentation of archival repositories, what can eighteenth-century objects and built environments made within archipelagic spaces reveal about the experiences of the people who lived there? How did eighteenth-century objects negotiate relationships between islands, oceans, and continents? How did artistic and architectural practices in the archipelago both reflect/reinforce and resist colonial power?
We encourage contributions that explore the metaphorical and material implications of the archipelago in artistic practices, cartography, and networks of exchange and use. We welcome interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to object study in the form of full-length articles or shorter pieces focused on single objects, interviews, or other formats.
Issue Editors
Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich
Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia
Proposals for issue #22 Archipelago are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: September 1, 2025.
To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to the following email addresses: editor@journal18.org, cd2bv@virginia.edu, and vogiatzaki@arch.ethz.ch. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by February 1, 2026. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.