CFP on The Everyday (Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 10:2)

2023-08-03

CFP on The Everyday (Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 10:2)

 

In the last few years, the Covid-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented experience of the everyday in us. We were all locked up at home somewhere in the world spending time with family or our own selves in isolation. In the absence of the ‘busyness’ of routine public activities, life showed down. In the tremendous fear of whether we would survive the disaster or feel anxiously for our family based elsewhere, we noticed the slow spiralling out of each day, sometimes at the level of the moment, in our lives. Slowness, an awareness of our body and movement, and a deep noticing of our surroundings and our loved ones – in short, a re-cognition of the everyday marked our ‘species’ life. We would like to take this contextual opportunity for a wider understanding of the everyday – a concept that began to grow consciously in 18thC Europe through the rise of capitalism, re-organised world-economy, and marked colonial expansion. We would like to critically explore the idea of the everyday in literature, art, culture, and our heterogenous and irreducible social lives.

 

For instance, we would ask: what happens when ‘everyday’ changes part of speech from adjective to noun and becomes a concept? How do we then think of the ‘everyday’ as experience and as idea in relation to our spatio-temporal being? Is it that the everyday is the perennial site of the ordinary and the boring and everything exciting must interrupt our everyday lives? Alternatively, can we see the everyday itself as a place where things happen? Henri Lefebvre’s multi-volume Critique of Everyday Life dialecticizes the everyday in a Marxist approach via political economy while Maurice Blanchot highlights how the everyday escapes from us even though we are ourselves made of the everyday. How has our epoch changed the way we think of the everyday? Has capitalism in its digital avatar redefined the everyday? Do we now feel that the gap between the everyday and macro-events is disappearing or has it already disappeared? If the everyday and the extraordinary become one and the same, it may overstretch the everyday or end its existence or perhaps do both. Is there only the everyday or no everyday at all in our lives?     

 

This issue invites essays on the idea of the everyday in literature, philosophy, and cultural discourses at large.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

Everyday in Literature

Everyday in Cinema

Everyday and Society

Politics of Everyday

History and Everyday

Everyday and Humour

Everyday Realism

Everyday and Philosophy of the Event

Everyday and Space-Time

Everyday Counting

Data-Capitalism and Everyday

Everyday Boredom

Everyday and Pandemic

Everyday and Slowness

Language of Everyday

 

Please send in your full papers (within 7,000 words, including notes and references and excluding bibliography, abstract in 250 words, 3-5 keywords, bio in 150 words) to sanglapthejournal@gmail.com by March 15 2024.

We follow MLA 7th edition: in-text citation with endnotes and an alphabetical WC list at the end.

We will get back to you after the peer-review by May 15, 2024. The issue will be published in June-July 2024.