July 2018
Dear Contributors,
Join our digital flash mob to form a new, feminist theory of the avant-garde—what we’re calling the en dehors garde—in order to account for women, people of color, queer artists, people with disabilities, and others who come from the outside and create art in the margins. We’re not just composing a new theory, we’re generating that theory through a new, collaborative process.
Participation in the digital flash mob can be easy and brief. Send us a digital post(card) offering your thoughts, visions, or speculations about the en dehors garde. Please create within these productive constraints:
- Words: 140 characters up to 500 words
- Images: 300 dpi recommended
- Video: Send us a link to a YouTube or Vimeo video (3 minutes max).
- Audio: Upload your file to SoundCloud and send us the link (3 minutes max).
- We welcome other creative combinations of text, image, and digital media.
Use this submission form to send us your post(card). Include your name and email address, and indicate your preference for having your name, a pseudonym, or anonymous designation attached to your postcard. Then copy & paste your content, upload your digital postcard, or send us a link. You’ll be under no obligation to go back and revise or resubmit (though editors will review and approve each submission before publishing them on this site). Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2018.
Approved post(card)s will be displayed on a Pinterest style grid. Users can select and arrange post(card)s to form their own theoretical formations. In this way, everyone becomes a theorist of the en dehors garde.
In requesting digital post(card)s, we draw upon the precedent of Postcards, established in the feminist journal How(ever) in 1983:
postcards intends to suggest that short and pithy form of communication used increasingly among overworked women writers we know who need to express something urgently but can’t stop to write a longer letter. Because we have limited space but unlimited desire for dialogue, please contain your comments by typing them on a standard-size postcard. We are eager to hear from women poets and scholars who wish to address issues relevant to our concerns.
The postcard format quickly evolved: contributors did not limit themselves to typed postcards, but sent in journal entries, poems, excerpts from letters, conference papers, and publications. What will be different today, after 30 years of new forms of writing generated via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, when we solicit digital postcards, to be displayed as posts on a website in a randomly generated grid, with or without author attribution?
Why conduct this experiment in July? Summer is traditionally a time for vacation, relaxation, travel, and sending postcards. The postcard is an occasional form, something you take a few moments out of your day to keep in touch with friends or family. Compose your digital post(card) as a short break, time for reflection, gesture, speculative inquiry, or unpolished foray amidst whatever activities your summer day contains. In composing your post(card), we encourage you to think of theory of the en dehors garde as something that can be brief, occasional, and even pleasurable.