[Reader-list] Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier

[Monica Narula]

  Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier

I. Introducing the Sarai Reader

Sarai (www.sarai.net), an interdisciplinary research and practice  
programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,  
invites contributions to Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier

We also invite proposals to initiate and moderate discussions on the  
themes of the Sarai Reader 06 on the Reader List (http:// 
mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list) with a view to the  
moderator(s) editing the transcripts of these discussions for  
publication in the Sarai Reader 07.

For an outline of the themes and concerns of Sarai Reader 07, see the  
Concept Outline below (section II). To know about the format of the  
articles that we invite, see 'Guidelines for Submissions' (sections  
III and IV) below.

This year, like last year, the Sarai Reader has been invited to  
participate in the 'Journal of Journals' magazine project of  
Documenta 12. (see http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1).  
Content from Sarai Reader 07 will be selected by the Sarai editorial  
collective to be published online on the Documenta 12 Magazine webpage.

The Sarai Reader is an annual publication produced by Sarai/CSDS  
(Delhi). Previous Readers have included 'The Public Domain: Sarai  
Reader 01', 2001, 'The Cities of Everyday Life: Sarai Reader 02',  
2002, 'Shaping Technologies: Sarai Reader 03', 2003, 'Crisis/Media:   
Sarai Reader 04', 2004, 'Bare Acts: Sarai Reader 05', 2005 and
'Turbulence: Sarai Reader 06', 2006. All the Sarai Readers are  
available for free download at http://www.sarai.net/journal/journal.htm

The Sarai Reader series aims at bringing together original,  
thoughtful, critical, reflective, well researched and provocative  
texts and essays by theorists, practitioners and activists, grouped  
under a core theme that expresses the interests of Sarai in issues  
that relate media, information and society in the contemporary world.  
The Sarai Readers have a wide international readership.

Editorial Collective for Sarai Reader: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula,  
Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan, Awadhendra Sharan, Shuddhabrata  
Sengupta, (Sarai, Delhi) and Geert Lovink (Institute of Network  
Cultures, Amsterdam)

II. Concepts and Questions for Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers

Frequently at frontiers we are asked, 'Anything to declare?' The  
wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border official  
is to say that you have 'Nothing to declare', and quickly move on.  
Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or at  
least to get by with saying very little.  A degree of reticence is  
the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.

Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier, seeks to turn this ethic of reticence  
on arrival at a boundary, at any boundary, on its head. This time,  
the Reader will consider limits, edges, borders and margins of all  
kind to be sites for declarations, occasions for conversation,  
settings for the staging of arguments, debates, recounting and  
reflection. We invite you to consider the frontier as an open door, a  
chute into something new, or the rediscovery of that which has been  
obscured, a hidden tunnel that crosses under a mountain, a porous  
membrane of liminal possibilities, a zone of contact and contagion.
We want to think of the frontier as the skin of our time and our  
world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary  
experience in order to generate a series of subcutaneous reflective  
possibilities. For us, the frontier is a threshold waiting to be  
crossed, a space rife with the possibility of seductive transgression.

The feeling of being on the edge of something has persisted for most  
of our lifetimes. The twentieth century was an exhausting journey  
into a receding future, and the first decade of the twenty-first  
continues to entrance us with the seduction of what seems to be  
forthcoming forever. We are all pioneers now, chasing and being  
chased by the shifting border-posts of the frontiers given to us by  
history. Yet our enterprises of pioneering do not necessarily carry  
with them any longer the confidence of self proclaimed 'avant  
gardes'. We are scouts sent in to scan the lay of the land of the  
territory of uncertainty. Our reports are the dispatches that  
chronicle, not our conquest of, but our continuing bewilderment  
about, the times we inhabit.

We are not talking here only of actual, physical borders (though of  
course we are interested in physical and political borders) which are  
usually the residues of war, but also of the borders between  
different temporal registers, between languages, between different  
ways of doing things, between different bodies of thought and  
conviction. Looked at this way, the frontier is more a condition than  
a site, more a way of being and doing things, than a constellation of  
border posts on the ground.

The DMZ of the present, straddling the recent past and the immediate  
future, is the most striking frontier of all, inviting us to consider  
the continuities and ruptures, revolutions and restorations that  
litter the landscape of all our histories like bunkers and  
watchtowers on either side.

We could also consider the borders between faith and doubt, between  
technology and technique, between history and memory, between art and  
science, between literature and reportage, between the empirical and  
the speculative.

We are interested in all forms of expression that straddle these  
spaces, especially in those that make forays into those zones of  
exception, such as prisons, detention camps, sites of remand and  
quarantine that maintain human beings at the edge.

Here we see the relentless production of states of exception by power  
in a way that constantly redefines the boundaries of what might be  
considered normal. With each passing day, the normal condition of the  
world comes to resemble yesterday's state of exception, and today's  
state of exception seeks to lay the foundations of tomorrow's  
normality. This tension between the exception and the rule is another  
kind of frontier, which we hope will provoke new investigations.

Today, we live in cities that expand by evacuating people from  
centres and relocating them onto empty hinterlands. The shifting  
locus of infrastructural renewal in megacities constantly generates  
new urban frontiers. Here, in these liminal spaces which resemble  
maps and grids more closely than they do actual spaces for  
habitation, the question of what it is to be urban in the time of  
evictions is asked with a violent, daily urgency.

A rough list of questions and concepts that Sarai Reader 07 wants to  
take on could be as follows:

1. The tension between exceptions and rules as the necessary mark of  
a frontier of the human condition today. Ways in which architectures,  
instruments and devices to do with the regulation of social,  
political and personal life, of ethics and politics, re-define the  
boundaries of our being and consciousness. The tightening and  
loosening of the armour of society and politics.

2. Reconsidering lines that cannot be crossed - in political, social,  
ethical and aesthetic terms. The idea of taboos, transgressions and  
the forbidden, especially in the light of what has come to be termed  
as 'political correctness'.

3. The shifting frontiers and outposts of legality in everyday life.

4. The borders between practices - such as software and art, or  
performance and contemporary social ritual, or between forms - such  
as between cinema and the internet, between digital and analog  
technologies, or between different registers of reflection - such as  
history and literature.

5. Connections and contacts, especially between things and ideas that  
would seem at first to be distant or adversarial in relation to each  
other. Hybridities, Contagion and infections - between belief systems  
(sometimes generating heresies), languages and ways of doing things

6. Reflections on the idea of the 'urban frontier' wherever it may be  
found. Here by 'urban frontier' we mean those new and transforming  
edges where the limits of the urban condition are being tried and  
tested through eviction and resettlement.

7. Architectures of separation, exclusion, inclusion and connectivity.

8. Mobility and obstacles. Is the internet any longer a borderless  
space?

9. The border between the real and the virtual, the physical and the  
mental, role-playing and reality

10. Activities that involve unusual kinds of border crossing -  
smuggling, immigration, illicit and unconscious trade, globalization  
from below

11. The border as a feature of a fluid political geography - walls  
(like at the Mexico US Border), fences (like on India-Bangladesh- 
Pakistan borders), demilitarized zones (like in Korea), buffers,  
enclaves, outposts and other unstable units of space.
Histories and accounts of frontier areas, and of shifting borders.

12. Frontiers of the imagination. Space Travel, Science Fiction,  
Utopias, Alternative Realities and their continuing presence in our  
lives.

We want to invite practitioners and others, some of whom may be  
audacious even as others may be tentative, wherever in the world they  
may be located, whether in the domains of theory, research,  
contemporary art, media, information and software design, politics or  
commentary to join us in the making of Sarai Reader 07.

You are invited to contribute through essays, dialogues, arguments,  
interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works,  
diary entries, research reports, commentaries and manifestos that can  
evoke the idea of the frontier in all its myriad dimensions.

SARAI READER 07 and documenta 12

This year (like last year) the Sarai Reader has been invited to  
participate in the 'Journal of Journals' magazine project of  
documenta 12. "documenta (with a lower-case 'd') is an exhibition of  
modern and contemporary art which now takes place every 5 years in  
Kassel, Germany. It was founded by Arnold Bode in 1955 .The more  
recent documentas feature art from all continents and are perceived  
to have been some of the most significant contemporary art  
exhibitions to have taken place internationally. documenta 12  
features a ‘journal of journals’ project that invites leading  
critical and reflective publications from all over the world to  
participate in a collaborative curatorial and editorial exercise to  
generate a global frame of contemporary discourse."
For details, see http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1

III. Guidelines for Submissions

Word Limit: 1500 - 4000 words

1. Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic or literary - or a mix  
of these, in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online  
discussions or diary entries. All submission, unless specifically  
solicited, must be in English only. Submissions may also be only  
images or images and text. The Reader is printed in black and white.

2. Text submissions must be sent by email as .rtf, or as word  
document or open office attachments. Articles may be accompanied by  
black and white photographs or drawings submitted in the first in  
the .jpeg format accompanying the text (if any) and then in .tif  
format if there is decision to print. Ftp server details will be made  
available if needed.

3. We urge all writers to follow the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) in  
terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details  
about the CMS and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see  
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html

For a 'Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style',  
especially relevant for citation style, see http:// 
www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html

4. All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text  
introducing the author, and an email address they are willing to make  
public.

5. All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of the  
Sarai Reader before the final selection is made. The editorial  
collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it  
for publication in the Sarai Reader on stylistic or editorial  
grounds. All contributors will be informed of the final decisions of  
the editorial collective vis a vis their contribution.

6. Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the  
authors. Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the  
material accepted for publication on the public domain in print or  
electronic forms, and on the internet.

7. Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are  
guaranteed a wide international readership. The Reader will be  
published in print, distributed in India and internationally, and  
will also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the Sarai website. All  
contributors whose work has been accepted for publication will  
receive two copies of the Reader.

IV. Where and When to send your Contributions

Last date for submission: 15th May 2007. Please write and send as  
soon as possible, preferably, latest by the 30th of March, 2007, a  
brief outline/abstract, not more than one page, of what you want to  
write about. This helps in designing the content of the reader. We  
expect to have the reader published by August 2007.

Please send in your outlines and abstracts, and images/graphic  
material, to reader at sarai.net


Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net