Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.40.0111142002050.28096-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: CYBERMIND@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: SPOON-ANN: Call for Submissions (fwd)
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 20:02:20 -0500
Journal sounds extremely interesting - Alan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 17:49:27 -0400 From: Lydia Perovich <fauxprophete@hotmail.com> To: spoon-announcements@lists.village.virginia.edu Subject: SPOON-ANN: Call for Submissions [Spoon-Announcements is a moderated list for distributing info of wide enough interest without cross-posting. To unsub, send the message "unsubscribe spoon-announcements" to majordomo@lists.village.virginia.edu] Dear friends, I am starting a web magazine that would show that post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic approaches etc. ARE relevant to our everyday political struggles more than ever. The magazine/journal would publish personal narratives, fiction, reports, columns, comments, political analyses, history/herstory re-examination, manifestos, ANY genre or mix of genres that differs from the so-called pure theory that critics claim is the only environment in which post-structuralism, in all its political irrelevance, can function. Writing would employ post-structuralist tools and would be theoretically informed, but would be primarily preoccupied with how the 'real life' is narrated and manufactured, with writers' dealings with their personal ghosts, with daily political events, with minutiae of gender and race negotiations... We would question the vocabularies produced by mainstream politics, mainstream academe, mass media, and science, and try to reclaim a piece of public space currently occupied by realpolitik and citizens' conformism, one the one hand, and alternative Left movements that reduce the pursuit of justice to problems of economic distribution, on the other. My focus at this point is on issues of displacement, immigration, being-elsewhere and feeling-nowhere-at-home, as well as feminisms (a case of gender-displacement, one could say), but other perspectives are also welcome. First submission that I received is from an ex-professor (thesis advisor) who wrote about how she settled some personal accounts with her father's haunting memories through Levinas, Kristeva, and Spivak. Another work that recently caught my attention in this regard is post-structuralism's 'utility' in issues of adoptees' identity. Traditionally, this BC prof writes, not knowing who your BIOLOGICAL family is, is considered a great deprivation, a lack, an inability to develop a sense of history and continuity etc. Well, she says (an adoptee herself) post-structuralism and feminism can show us that that need not be so, that the sense of belonging and wholeness may be 1) an illusion with anyone, adoptee or not, or 2) not dependent upon knowledge of what your biological, 'real' family (or ethnicity etc) is. The title of my MA thesis was Embracing or Rejecting an Identity: Foucault, Gender, Nationality, and it dealt with contemporary relevance of Foucault's politics of disidentification. But my contribution for the first issue would be about the city that I have been living in as an immigrant for the last two years -- how it writes itself, how it writes its others. Not only there need to be a more assertive approach in creating post-structuralist political communities (that enjoy their inoperativeness), but we also need to keep ourselves busy with recovering (inventing?) our ancestors, especially silenced mothers and sisters. There will be a section in the magazine dedicated to giving voice to the ghosts like Adle Hugo (a real story of what happens when a 'madwoman' leaves the 'attic'), who couldn't cope with Fathers, have been Foreigners, missed the right crossing to Normalcy, and found Home at a wrong place (in the state of obsession, in her case). I am looking forward to receiving your suggestions and submissions. The first issue would appear on-line by the end of this year, or at the beginning of 2002. All questions and submissions (in form of a MW attachment) should be directed to my email fauxprophete@hotmail.com. Thank you, Lydia Perovich Halifax, NS Canada www.fernwoodbooks.ca _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp