The Arab Avant-Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East
Edited by Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson and Benjamin J. Harbert

We are currently soliciting chapter proposals for an anthology on the largely under-researched area of avant-garde music affiliated to the Arab world. All definitions of experimentalism and any disciplinary (or anti-disciplinary) approaches will be considered as we are hoping to produce as varied a volume as possible. The Arab avant-garde is to be taken as boundary work from both perspectives of pulling from the outside of tradition and of pushing from the inside of tradition; in other words, both iconoclasm and radical traditional expansion are equal targets. That said, discussions of the avant- garde as repeated practices of established boundary work or investigations into conventional vanguards are also welcome.

The Arab Avant-Garde, as a title, mobilizes two already complicated concepts whose alignment asks a number of challenging questions. Firstly, there are the issues of invoking the avant-garde – a term with particularly Eurocentric resonances – within a supposedly “other” geopolitical imaginary. Here one might wish to: draw on or challenge the models of alternative modernities; posit crucial lineages of radical innovation within or via the Arab world; critique or reaffirm the presumed stabilities of “tradition”; or insist upon shared global projects of cultural rejuvenation that do not prioritize points of arrival or departure.

Then there are issues of place to consider. To what extent is the Arab avant-garde partially constructed from “outside” as, for example, a marketing category and what are the political repercussions of this? What might we mean by “Arab” anyhow, and where, amidst this term, could we place stateless minority groups such as the Kurds or settled diaspora groups? How do the fraught histories of nationalisms and other unities frame the Arab avant-garde? And where might all this be situated, in terms of origins, performance or suitable places for scholarly attention, to name but a few crucial locales?

In order to address these intricate problematics, we encourage work from diverse disciplinary traditions, including and traversing: music, history, cultural studies, ethnography, Middle East area studies, sociology and subcultural geography. We would happily welcome straight academic essays, as well as more experimental submissions, interviews and translations. Word lengths to be negotiated.

Deadline for short abstract: 5.May 2008

Please email the abstract to: arabavantgarde@norient.com

Call For Papers: New Edited Collection
Closing Date: July 1st 2008

Sounding Science Fiction will be an edited collection that examines the way that sound, in all its aesthetic and technological forms, is deployed to audio-sense a science fiction encounter, world, or universe. The collection will be concerned with sound design and sound signification, and with affect and feeling, so that questions of form, style, narrative, authorship, production, subjectivity, and embodiment, will all work their way into the book. Science fiction film and television, live cinema, music video, computer games, advertising, weblogs, digital art, mixed media installations, radio, and music, are all potential sites of investigation and analysis.

The questions that energise this call for papers centre on:

• How does one sound science fiction?
• How do the sounds of science fiction affect/move/interpolate audiences?
• What semiotic, ideological, spatial, phenomenological, psychoanalytical relations are in play when one sounds science fiction?
• What is the relationship between science fiction sound and image, or sound and space, or sound and exhibition context?
• When one hears (but does not see) science fiction, what images are brought to the mind, what feelings of the ‘future’ are created?

Essays could take any number of approaches to the topic, but could include:

• Otherworldly sounds
• Hearing the uncanny
• Sound as prophecy and enlightenment
• Alien sounds and otherness (sex, race, gender, class)
• Sound design (and full future world immersion)
• Sound effects/affect
• Composition/composers
• Sounding future weapons/warfare/cities/movement/travel/invasions/space
• Sounding Global (catastrophe)
• The interiority of science fiction sound (existential sound)
• Sound as trauma, loss, dystopia
• Sounding science fiction paranoia
• The carnality of science fiction sound
• Posthuman sound
• Sounding cyborg
• Contrapuntal music and the science fiction image/artefact
• Sounding scientific/rationalist (in dialogue, speech, voice-over)
• Live science fiction sound
• The sound image
• The ‘moment’ of sound (close textual analysis of a key sequence)
• Authoring science fiction sound: key auteurs of sound design Cultish science fiction sound

Sounding Science Fiction’s multi-disciplinary and multi-site focus will build on the work done in single case studies such as William Whittington’s Sound Design and Science Fiction (2007), and on edited collections such as Philip Hayward’s Off The Planet: Music, Sound And Science Fiction Cinema (2004), which take film/cinema as their central/sole text.

Proposals of approximately 500 words can be sent electronically, preferably as a word attachment, to:

Sean Redmond
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies,
Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand