Dear ASAP Members, Colleagues, and Friends,
We hope you and your loved ones are keeping safe and in good spirits during these difficult times. As you know, ASAP recently made the difficult decision to postpone its Spring 2020 international symposium in Jamaica and its Fall 2020 conference in Salt Lake City, USA. The Association will, however, be persisting in its other activities during this time, and we are thus writing to update you about current and forthcoming issues of the peer-reviewed ASAP/Journal and its open-access online platform, ASAP/J. Our commitment to fostering dialogues between scholars and practicing artists across the contemporary arts worldwide remains unflagging; please stay tuned for further news from us.
In spite of various coronavirus-related publication changes in scholarly publishing, ASAP/Journal Volume 5, No. 1 is in the mail. This general issue features an interview with artist AnnaMaria Pinaka by Nadia de Vries, a dialogue between Loren Britton & Goda Klumbyte on trans*relational abstraction in computation and art, and articles on Tanya Tagaq and colonial archives of Indigeneity; apocalyptic allegories; slam poetry networks in Southern Africa; early video art and public television; the fiction and criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose, and storytelling in the fiction of David Mitchell.
As ever, a print subscription of ASAP/Journal is available with membership, and we thus encourage those of you who are in a position to do so to renew your ASAP membership for 2020, if you have not already done so. If you are currently a member, thank you for supporting our mission and if your membership has expired, please consider renewing your membership. We understand that this may be impossible for many of our members facing economic uncertainty. But if you are able to do so, your membership fees will allow us to better support our virtual events, and to continue building ASAP for the years to come. You can join/renew here: https://asap.press.jhu.edu/membership/join.
Also, through the end of May Johns Hopkins University Press is offering free access to ASAP/Journal on Project Muse, along with its full catalogue of excellent journals.
ASAP/Journal 5.2 will be published later this spring. This general issue features an interview with Ann Hamilton by Brian McHale, a dossier on Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics guest edited by Huey Copeland and Sampada Aranke, and a dialogue with the performance group Manifesto Poetico by Johanna Skibsrud. The issue features articles on Vaporwave and internet nostalgia; the music of Julius Eastman; the reality TV Show Terrace House; Chantal Akerman’s cinematic signature; and the racial genealogy of contemporary craft movements.
We are currently finalizing the contents of the deliberately untimely “Humor Issue” for its publication in September. This is our first—and, who knows, perhaps only—effort at presenting arts criticism in humorous forms, and we consider it to be an exciting complement to our more prescient recent issues on, say, “Apocalypse.”
Our current calls for papers for special issues on “Autotheory” and “New Worlds of Speculation” are available here. Please note that the deadlines have been extended on account of the pandemic: the editors of the “Autotheory” issue will now be accepting submissions through June 1, 2020; and the editors of “New Worlds of Speculation” will now be accepting submissions through July 1, 2020.
Our open-access online platform ASAP/J continues to publish book and exhibition reviews and born-digital content, most recently the “Crisis Harmonies” series, edited by Senior Editor Michael B. Gillespie. Please contact ASAP/J editor Abram Foley and Reviews Editors Alexandra Kingston-Reese and Molly Warnock if you wish to pitch a review or online feature.
We’re very proud of the contents of these print and digital publications and look forward to sharing them with you. You can follow both platforms of the journal on Twitter.
Thanks, and with all the very best,
Ignacio Sanchez-Prado, ASAP President
on behalf of ASAP and the ASAP/Journal editorial collective