Call For Papers on “Pacific Futurisms & Open Call for Contributions

SUBMISSIONS DUE November 1, 2024
Pacific Arts, the journal of the Pacific Arts Association, invites submissions for volume 25 (Summer 2025) on the theme “PACIFIC FUTURISMS”.

The volume asks what are, or have been, the future-imagining aesthetic practices of Oceania (the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and more)? What might be an aesthetic and praxis of weaving ancestral knowledges into Indigenous Pacific methods of cultural expression? Papers might engage with artists creating anti-colonial art that addresses the problems of the past, present, and future.

We are also interested in how futurism might be considered in a historical lens, for instance how artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries imagined their futures in the face of missionization, militarism, occupation, and displacement. This critical cultural and historical framework is generative for bringing into existence anti-colonial futures that look to the past for guidance and protocol.

This special section builds on the PAA Symposium that took place in Honolulu in June 2024 during the Festival of Pacific Arts. Pacific Arts invites submissions from scholars, thinkers, artists, curators, and cultural practitioners to add to this timely discussion.

Topics on visual and material culture may include (but are not limited to):

– Moana Futurisms, Solwara Futurisms, and more
– Artistic explorations of speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy
– Spiral, circular, ecological time
– Genealogy, ancestral presents/presence, land – Popular culture
– Collections, display, museums

In addition to the special theme described above, Pacific Arts, the journal of the Pacific Arts Association, has an ONGOING OPEN CALL for submissions on the arts of Oceania and its diasporas focusing on visual arts, material cultures, and heritage arts. The scope is temporally broad, highlighting both historical and current topics while engaging with a wide range of creative mediums, forms, and subject matter.

Pacific Arts encourages interdisciplinary approaches to examining the political, social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental stakes in the production and study of Indigenous visual and material cultures in Oceania, past and present.

Please send full-length submissions and an abstract to pacificarts by NOVEMBER 1, 2024 (submissions after this date will also be considered). Submissions should follow the Pacific Arts style guide. Pacific Arts is a peer reviewed open access online journal published by the University of California/eScholarship and encourages broad participation and circulation.

Pacific Arts is accepting reviews of books, media, and exhibitions that relate to visual and material cultures of Oceania.

Authors, artists, museums, and publishers interested in having their work reviewed and anyone interested in writing a review should contact pacificarts.