Call for Papers | Vol. 8, nº 1 | Sentient city. An atonal landscape | Closed

2020-09-28

Editors: Helena Pires (CECS, University of Minho, Portugal), Zara Pinto-Coelho (CECS, University of Minho, Portugal) & Cíntia Sanmartin Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil)

The body is part of our ontology. We are body, not only partly body (Ihde, 2002). In feeling, in thinking, in action. Perhaps this condition differentiates us from other ways of being, namely the organic (the animal being, the vegetable), endowed with a body, but without such a pressing need to inhabit or to relate with a place. We are being-there (Dasein, Heidegger, 1927) and our ontology is relational. The body protects itself, the body is in a constant flux, the body moves, tilling the covered territory (post-card book), while drawing an interior geography. E-motion (Bruno, 2007) – emotion and movement – dictates the doubly dynamic tone of our historiography. It will be said that the genesis of the city (Mumford, 1961) goes back to the imperative of protection and survival of the body, a function to which the vocation of myth and décor (function-myth-décor) (Pimenta, 1989) is added. The shelter city, the temple city, the garden city. In one place many feelings are accommodated (or are troubled). Fear (Bauman, 1989, 1999; Kovadloff, 2004), the beautiful (Han, 2016; Kant, 1790), nature-landscape (Cauquelin, 1989; Simmel, 1913), the happiness principle or the inter-est (Arendt, 2001/1958). And so many others. But also multiple things (already) felt (Perniola, 1993). The body becomes a (non) sentient place. Unstable in its (un) limits, mixed with all kinds of technological devices, the post-body interacts (we ask, even more than ever?) with the material-virtual architecture, with the mediascapes (McQuire, 2008) planted in the traveled space, immerses itself in the humidity, in the promiscuity of odors, in the chaotic orchestration of tones and acoustic landscapes, lets itself being guided by the haptic and cinematic experience (Friedberg, 2002) and also by the “aroma of time” (Han, 2016).

Is the city today a meaningless signifier or a pure imaginary production (Domingues, 2010)? Its “possible side” is perhaps still an excess. The perennial luminosity makes the objects and the details invisible and threatens the vision of heavenly landscapes. The polyphony of timbres and the variability of frequencies both inspire artistic and acoustic creations (see the case of concrete music), as well as colonize the interior time. More recently, the body has contracted radically, and in a special way in the urban spaces, closing itself within walls and inhibiting itself from touching, smelling, breathing and dialogic interaction. Meta-landscapes and technological extensions of feeling have become less risky and more inviting inter-trans-places as communicative forms of living. Are we living the beginning of the end of the urban experience (Felice, 2012)? How do organicity and post-urban landscapes still resist? A deaf song is awaiting us, lamenting the death of the sentient body-city? If the “escape” from nature originally motivated the building of the city and, at the same time, its rescue, under the form of a hybrid idea that encloses both harmony in its utopian form, as well as a terrifying vision of an indomitable and pre-human universe, we are concerned today about the (im)possibility of the body-place and its “fulfillment in becoming” (Henri, 2001).

Risking to temper this call with an appeal to an organicist vision of the (post) city, the editors invite you to write about the urgency of re (feeling) the (post) body- (post) place, not forgetting the smell of temporalities and paths, the kinesthetic landscapes, the (in) visible breakdowns of the territory over which the “body-without-organs” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, 1980) stretches, the very being intertwined with that of the lived place.

Taking dodecaphonism as a reference that inspires a certain boldness that we try to print here, we would like to flatten the “dominance of the eye” in our culture, placing it at the same level of (although rich in infinite diversity) of the other senses, claiming for each sensory mode – that we artificially confuse (with excessive concern for discernibility) with sound, smell, tactility, taste – the same demand and tonic gradation, inextricable as a whole. The debate about the significance of the senses in shaping our urban experience needs the contributions of Cultural Studies and of Communication, generally speaking, crisscrossing disciplinary boundaries, methodological approaches and geographical locations, in order to (re)constitute the concreteness of this experience and the conditions that nourish it and make it possible.

This issue of Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais/Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies accepts proposals that aim to address, from different points of view and methodologies, the following issues (among others):

  • the city-nature;
  • the city of bodies;
  • the lived city;
  • the city-flow;
  • the light city;
  • the cinematic city;
  • the cyborg city;
  • the city of objects;
  • the city-performance;
  • the skin of the city;
  • the (post) city;
  • the sentient city;
  • the sounding city;
  • the polyphonic city;
  • the rotten city.

 

KEY DATES

Full article submission deadline: January 31, 2021
Editor’s decision on full articles: March 22, 2021
Deadline for sending the full version and translated version: April 30, 2021
Issue publication date: June, 2021

LANGUAGE

Articles can be submitted in English or Portuguese. After the peer review process, the authors of the selected articles should ensure translation of the respective article, and the editors shall have the final decision on publication of the article.

EDITION AND SUBMISSION

Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais/Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed journal that uses a double blind review process. After submission, each paper will be distributed to two reviewers, previously invited to evaluate it, in terms of its academic quality, originality and relevance to the objectives and scope of the theme chosen for the journal’s current issue.

Originals must be submitted via the journal's website (https://www.rlec.pt/). If you are accessing Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais/Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies for the first time, you must register in order to submit your article (here).

The guidelines for authors can be consulted here.

For further information, please contact: rlec@ics.uminho.pt