Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image is calling for proposals for its ninth issue on Islam and images, edited by Patrícia Castello Branco (IFILNOVA), Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad (SOAS University of London), and Sérgio Dias Branco (University of Coimbra/IFILNOVA/CEIS20).
In recent times, due to significant political, mediatic and social, but also aesthetic and artistic factors, we have witnessed an awakening of interest in Islamic aesthetics and imagery.
Islamic art is intrinsically connected with religion, ethics, politics, and social structures, as Islam is, for Muslims, not only a religion, but a way of life. So, tackling the issue of “Islam and Images” is also, necessarily, a gesture that includes all these spheres that, in our Western secular culture, are often taken as separated fields.
This issue aims at discussing and analysing Islamic art and aesthetics, with a special focus on the “modes of sense perception” embodied in particular images, taken politically as forms of organization, encompassing forms of visibility, ways of doing and making, and ways of conceptualizing. In proposing this topic, we are particularly interested in: discussing the philosophical understandings of Islamic imagery production; their roots in the history of philosophy; the Islamic tradition of aniconism and anti-ocularcentrism; its influences on styles and movements in the history of art, namely abstract imagery; their development in contemporary societies dominated by new technologies of the moving image; the relationships between the classical and the contemporary, the manual and digital, artefacts and technologies; as well as the connections between Islamic art and secular art in Muslim-majority countries.
Particular themes of interest include (but are not restricted to) the following topics:
• philosophical roots of Islamic visual aesthetics. (e.g., Plato, Aristoteles, Al Ghazali, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Arabi, et al.);
• the philosophy of Islamic artistic visual practices;
• aniconism, abstraction and representation in Islamic art;
• aniconism and the status of photographic and filmic images;
• influences of Islamic aesthetics in Western art (classical and contemporary), particularly painting and film;
• verbal/visual divide in Islamic aesthetics and arts;
• haptical dimensions of aesthetic experience in Islamic visual works;
• different regimes of visibility in Islamic art tradition;
• aesthetic experience and transcendence in Islam;
• connections and interdependence between philosophy, theology, art, politics and society in Islamic traditions.
Plus:
• specificities of Islamic thought and aesthetics in the Iberian Peninsula;
• connections between Islamic and Christian aesthetics in the Iberian Peninsula;
• mysticism in Islam and in Christianity, the Sufi tradition and early Christian mystics, particularly in the Iberian Peninsula.
The submission deadline is April 30 (for 500-word abstracts). Prospective authors should submit a short CV along with the abstract. A selection of authors will be invited to submit full papers according to the journal guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee publication, since all papers will be subjected to double blind peer-review. Submissions are accepted only in English.
Cinema also invites submissions to its special sections: interviews, conference reports and book reviews. Please consult the web site of the journal for further details.
Feel free to contact the editors for this issue, Patrícia Castello Branco or Sérgio Dias Branco.
