Home in the Making: Arts of Asylum Seekers in Israel CFP
Hello,
If you could please post this call for submissions to your mailing list I= =E2=80=99d be very grateful.
Thanks and best regards, Ofer Gazit
Home in the Making: Arts of Asylum Seekers in Israel
In contexts of forced exile and precarious legal status, what does it mean to invest time, resources and emotional labor in making art? Home in the Making focuses on the meaning of art for asylum seekers under Israeli state law. Scholarship on art making among asylum seeking individuals has grown significantly in the last decade, with important contributions in the fields of Arts Therapy, Art Education and Anthropology. Despite excellent work on the potential benefits of art making in dealing with trauma and in community building in major metropolitan centers in North America, Europe, and Australia, the conditions, practices, and meanings of refugee art outside these contexts remains underexplored.
Under Israeli law, the notion of refugee is particularly complex, with many Jewish Israelis identifying as decedents of Holocaust survivors and more than seven million Palestinians refugees fleeing war in 1948, 1967 and internally displaced under Israeli occupation. Over the last two decades, the Israeli government has stalled the consideration of tens of thousands asylum requests. Of the 28,000 asylum seekers who remain in Israel today, primarily from Eritrea and Sudan, the overwhelming majority are forced to live precarious conditions without refugee status and the social rights it carries. Focusing on this population, the essays collected in Home in the Making will decenter the discourse on refugees=E2=80=99 art in terms of th= e geographic location, disciplinary orientation, and the writers=E2=80=99 positionality, by foregrounding the voices, narratives and art practices of asylum-seeking individuals in Israel.
Weaving together first-person narratives of art practice, analytical accounts and ethnographic researches by scholars and artists in theater, literature, art history, dance and music, Home in the Making aims at providing an overview of the wide range of conditions, processes and motivations for art making among asylum seekers in Israel. What are the practical and aesthetic considerations asylum seeking artists bring to their practice? What networks and relations do artists create around their creative processes? How does art mediate reflections of personal histories, the everyday and potential futures? What is the role of fiction and world-making in refugee art? Finally, how does art reflect, make, and remake understandings of (imaginary or real) home in the eyes of the asylum seeker artist? In addressing these questions in the context of Israeli continued legal obfuscation of the refugee status process, we aim to highlight the role of art as a form of resistive, affirming and sustaining practice.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
=E2=97=8F Narratives of asylum-seeking in poetry and prose.
=E2=97=8F Theater, Dance, Performance and the refugee experience.
=E2=97=8F Intermedia, video and new media arts.
=E2=97=8F Jewelry, crafts and textile.
=E2=97=8F Visual arts and sculpture.
=E2=97=8F Critical Biographies of asylum-seeking artists.
=E2=97=8F Street art and graffiti.
=E2=97=8F Sacred and religious art and music.
=E2=97=8F Art as medium for communication and storytelling.
=E2=97=8F Refugee art as instrument of resistance and activism.
=E2=97=8F Gender in refugee arts.
=E2=97=8F Postcolonial readings of refugee art.
=E2=97=8F Refugee art as commodity
=E2=97=8F Refugee art worlds: art events, galleries and music festival= s.
Chapters in the volume will be up to 8,000 words long (including references) and must not have been previously published. Considering the wide disciplinary span of refugee arts, we invite scholars from art history, theater, dance, music, literature, history, African studies, migration studies, anthropology, sociology, art therapy, legal studies, and political science. We also welcome contributions from art practitioners of up to 5,000 words. The volume is in development and is subject to submission of a successful proposal to Routledge in the summer of 2022.
To submit a proposal for contribution, send a working title, a 300 word abstract and a 100-word biographical note to Ofer Gazit and Hamutal Sadan: homeinthemaking2022@gmail.com by March 1st, 2022.
Estimated timeline:
=E2=97=8F Abstracts due: March 1st, 2022
=E2=97=8F Authors notified: March 20th, 2022
=E2=97=8F Final proposal submitted to Routledge: June 1st, 2022
=E2=97=8F Potential contract: summer 2022
=E2=97=8F Chapters due to editors: November 2022
=E2=97=8F Final manuscript to Routledge: July 2023
Ofer Gazit is a lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He writes about transnational migration from a musical perspective, focusing on how musical categories can reinforce, subvert, or blur national and social boundaries. He currently leads a multi-year research project on the lives of West African migrant musicians in New York City, and recently completed the documentary film, A Change in Tones: The Life and Music of Solomon Ilori. His article =E2=80=9CPassing Tones=E2=80=9D was a finalist = for Best Research in Recorded Jazz by the ARSC (2021) and his monograph Jazz Migrations is under consideration by Oxford University Press.
Hamutal Sadan is a PhD candidate in History at the Tel Aviv University in Israel. In 2020 she completed her M.A. at Tel Aviv University, discussing the art of African asylum seekers and refugees in Israel during 2006-2020. Her research focuses on art in prison, transitional art, migration, and questions of censorship and power-relations. Since 2017 she has been volunteering and working in the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants (NGO), where she has been organizing artistic and cultural events, creating connections between the refugee community and the Israeli public. In 2019 she launched the Facebook community, =E2=80=9CArt of Refugees in Israel =E2=80=9D, which is a platform for refugee artists to share their art, gain media exposure and new opportunities. Most recently she has produced and curated an art exhibition for refugee artists from the Holot detention center in the south of Israel.
