Call for Submissions: “Questionnaire: The Animacy of Objects”

Deadline: August 15, 2023

American Art, the peer-reviewed journal co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press, seeks to publish papers demonstrating cultural perspectives that recognize objects as animate beings. Authors are invited to submit brief essays in reply to this question, posed by co-organizer heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation): How does acknowledging and engaging with objects as animate beings—recognizing them as relatives and respecting that they carry a form of peoplehood—expose the knowledge they hold and carry, knowledge that is otherwise invisible and unrecognized?

Contributors are encouraged to interrogate how the Western discipline of art history, and particularly the focus of this journal—the role played by art and related visual culture in the ongoing transnational and transcultural formation of “America” as a contested geography, identity, and idea—would benefit from these perspectives. Toward this goal, essays are welcome from scholars who are working both within and beyond North American topics, as well as those coming from other disciplines and fields, including artists, art historians, linguists, cultural specialists, and others working on philosophical questions related to the animacy of objects. Diverse orthographies are welcome and will be accommodated whenever possible. Please click here for more information.

The journal’s standard guidelines on originality, quality, and submission format apply; click here for details. Please submit manuscripts of 1,500–2,000 words (including notes) with 1–4 images, to [log in to unmask] by August 15, 2023. Selected articles will be workshopped with authors, rigorously edited and fact-checked, and published in American Art in 2024. Inquiries are welcome.