CfP: Special Issue on Border Festivals with Journal of Festive Studies
Journal of Festive Studies Issue 8 Call for Papers
Deadline: January 15, 2025
In addition to our guest-edited section described below, we always welcome submissions on a rolling basis, with no deadline for consideration. Please do think of us if your research or professional background touches on festive practices!
International borders affect you every day. They play a role in determining whether you are a birthright citizen or an unauthorized migrant. They showcase a nation’s ability or inability to guarantee your wellbeing. They factor into immigration, asylum, and national security debates. Media and political analysts often portray borders as places where pathos, illegality, and poverty thrive innately. Yet, they are also places where ordinary citizens make historical claims, or defend, criticize, and even parody immigration and security policy.
While many of those border enactments are rightly serious or even melancholy in tone, some recurring rituals like border festivals foreground whimsical or celebratory narratives. This issue seeks submissions that critically engage with border festivals—recurring ritual enactments performed at, across, or in close proximity to an international boundary line that foster cross-border communication, create opportunities for practical governance, or occasion the memorialization of shared histories. It also provides a platform for scholarly and creative submissions that critically engage how borders and boundaries can be invoked metaphorically through music, literature, performance art, and/or the built environment.
Situated at the crossroads of de-centering the state and embracing the everyday-ness of borders, geographer Chris Rumford’s appeal to “vernacularize” border studies using concepts such as “borderwork” and “seeing like a border” provides an excellent starting point for this invitation to take the study of festive borders and boundaries seriously. His concept of “borderwork” emphasizes “bottom-up” activity and specifically the everyday meaning-making labor, or the bordering practices, of citizens and non-citizens (Rumford 2006, 2008, and 2013). “Seeing like a border” is premised on the idea that borders should be understood as the business of everyone, not just the business of the state. While considerations of state practices are still (and should remain) vital to the study of border festivals, it is safe to say that dominant, static, top-down approaches are incomplete.
Reflecting on anthropological theories that link festive practices to “expected” moments of life transitions (Van Gennep 1960; Turner 1987), David Picard draws attention to the ways in which festivals can also play a role in mediating unanticipated crises such as “the shock of migration” and “environmental disaster”—two global challenges that shape the contemporary study of borders. Indeed, existing studies of border festivals, traditions, commemorations, and enactments elaborate this point on a much larger scale. Methodologically diverse and ranging from festival traditions in the Senegambia and the trans-Volta (Ghana/Togo) that emphasize the “centrality of the margins” (Nugent 2019), to the meticulously choreographed Wagah ceremony that transpires at the India/Pakistan border (Menon 2013), to cultural performances that delineate the Kashmir conflict (Aggarwal 2004), to the long-standing celebration of George Washington’s Birthday on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border (Peña 2020), to the religiously-inflected and festive revival of historical social groupings between China, Mongolia, and Russia (Billé and Humphrey 2021)—they have underlined how a range of actors make national and ethnic affiliation identity claims public, stage historical memory, recover from natural disasters, and even shape practical governance through stylized acts of crossing and gathering.
Moreover, borders may also be critically invoked in the design and production of “borderless” or “borderlands” celebrations (e.g., No Border Fest, Borderland Music Festival). What stands out across these theorizations (and what makes them the key to study of border festivals) is their inbuilt foundation in performance theory and especially performativity. This special issue invites us to think creatively about the idea that borders are always in the making both at and beyond international boundary lines. In both contexts, they are actualized festively through embodiment and stylized rituals that ffect change in the social world. As the first of its kind, this issue aims to create a generative space for the future study of border festivals. We are looking for a variety of submissions ranging from previously unpublished methodological reflections, artist statements, illustrations, documentaries and interactive media to research reports and evidence-based papers that engage festive border commemorations of any kind.
Some possible themes for exploration include:
conceptualizing borders and boundaries as festive
intangible heritage and cultural memory across borderlands
organization, logistics, and finance
cross-border cooperation and practical governance
global challenges: climate change, mass displacement, public health
participation, reception, conflict, and political efficacy
festive landscapes and built environments
embodiment, choreography, and evolving repertoires
pleasure through collaboration
In line with the interdisciplinary nature of the Journal of Festive Studies, we welcome submissions of original research and analysis rooted in a variety of fields including (but not limited to): social and cultural history, anthropology, archaeology, cultural geography, architecture, technology, musicology, museum studies, literary studies and performance studies. In addition to traditional academic essays, we invite short essays and creative contributions that incorporate digital media such as timelines and maps, photographic essays, digital exhibitions, interactive media, documentaries, illustrations, creative audio, and interviews that engage with festivity.
We invite you to submit an abstract and short bio by January 15, 2025. The submission deadline for completed article manuscripts is August 1, 2025. Please make sure to consult the journal submission guidelines.
If you have any further questions, please contact Elaine A. Peña at penae[at]wustl[dot]edu.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, the publisher of the Journal of Festive Studies, is committed to open access. All H-Net content, including journals, monographs, and reviews, are freely available to both authors and readers. There are no charges to submit or publish in the Journal of Festive Studies.
References
Aggarwal, Ravina. Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Billé, Franck and Caroline Humphrey. On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2021.
Menon, Jisha. Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.
Nugent, Paul. Boundaries, Communities, and State-Making in West Africa: The Centrality of the Margins. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2019.
Peña. Elaine A. ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington’s Birthday at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020.
Picard, David. 2016. “The Festive Frame: Festivals as Mediators for Social Change.” Ethnos 81, no. 4 (2015): 600-616.
Rumford, Chris. “Towards a Vernacularized Border Studies: The Case of Citizen Borderwork.” Journal of Borderlands Studies 28, no. 2 (2013): 169-180.
Salter, Mark B. “Places Everyone: Performativity and Border Studies.” Political Geography 30, no. 2 (2011): 66-67.
Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” In Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation, edited by Louise Carus Mahdi, Steven Foster & Meredith Little. pp. 5–22. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1987.
Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: University Chicago Press, 1960.