[Discussion] CFP: Globalization and the Image (12/1/02; journal issue)

[gonul@bilkent.edu.tr]

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 
(kmk25@po.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
kmk25@po.cwru.edu

http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/faculty/koenigsberger.htm

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