CFP: Liminalities
Special Issue on Cartographies: Skins, Surfaces, and Doings
Anne Harris, Monash University and Stacy Holman Jones, California State University
Northridge
What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward
an experimentation in contact with the real…. The map has to do with
performance (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, pp. 13-14).
It is also a mapping of the body’s inner surface, the surface of sensations,
intensities, and affects, the “subjective experience” of bodily excitations and
sensations (Grosz 1994, p. 37).
This means building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of
singularities. It means pointing outward to an ordinary world whose forms of
living are now being composed and suffered (Stewart 2007, pp. 4-5).
Maps are, in one way, surfaces – representational objects that can be used and
understood as aesthetic artefacts and utilitarian guides. They are also however
embodiments of transformation, distortion, and adaptation between three-dimensional
and two-dimensional worlds. Maps are living, breathing, doings; interventions with
no commitment to objective ends, and as such may be understood through a postrepresentational lens.
Maps are assertive objects in dynamic relation to their users, and affective actors in/of
changing landscapes. This interstice invites encounters with maps and mapping as
re/orienteering tools, geographic deviations, dynamic partners in ‘getting lost,’ and/or
navigational accomplices.
What are the geographies of getting lost, disoriented, ‘falling off the map’? What is
the role of bodies and embodiment in processes of becoming lost and found? How
might maps perform enactments of “a layered body, a body of many surfaces”—
surfaces that may be permeated, punctured, land/marked, scarred—and “laid one upon
the other” (Halberstam 1995, p. 1)?
In this special issue, we are interested in the doings of cartography, or what Stewart
calls a “refrain…a scoring over a world’s repetitions. A scratching on the surface of
rhythms, sensory habits, gathering materialities, intervals and durations” (p. 339). We
invite explorations of cartography as geographical skins, as entanglements with or
along or through surfaces; as repeated scratchings, habits, and durations; as
performative enactments of both affective and artefactual lives. Authors might engage
with cartographies as “lived circuits of action and reaction,” maps of “something
coming into existence” (Stewart 2007, pp. 339-340), which may or may not be textbased, and should in any case take advantage of the digital format of this journal.
Some examples might include, but should not be limited to:
Mapping the sensual, both affective and corporeal
Kinaesthetic maps
Cartographic digital technology
The selfie as identity mapping
Cartographic anxieties
Pain maps
Furry, fuzzy and posthuman cartographies
Sovereignty – mapping of land and bodies, and bodies-to-land
Treasure maps
Olfactory maps
Violent cartographies
Sonic (sound) maps
Facial recognition, mapping
Cartographies of race, gender & sexualities
Human Genome mapping
Morbid anatomy and bodily cartographies
Sonar (underwater) mapping
Corporeal / cartographic porosity
Fantasy / science fiction maps
Cartographic errors and mishaps
Bioarchaeological tracings
The rhetorical cartography of activism
Ironing, vacuuming and the cartographies of home
Dermal cartographies
Dance, choreo-cartography and other artforms as mapping
Email queries and submissions to anne.harris@monash.edu and sholmanjo@csun.edu
Completed manuscripts should be submitted on or before December 30, 2014.
References
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stewart, K. (2010). Afterworld: Worlding refrains. The affect theory reader. M.
Gregg & G.J. Seigworth (Eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.