CfP: Dark Academia: Definitions, Theories, and Prospects
We are seeking essays and papers for an edited collection which engages the concept of ‘dark academia.’
At the center of the dark academic sensibility lies a
paradox: though dark academia enjoys the cosmetic trappings of the pursuit of
higher knowledge, it is at its core a celebration of the university as a place
of occultation and performativity. The dark academic’s taste for mystery,
history, and a distinctly Anglophone, Romantico-Modernist canon – coupled with
an equally distinct early 20th century sartorial and lifestyle model – runs
inevitably into exclusivity, elitism, and reactionary nostalgia. Indeed, the
case can be made that these very elements are in fact constitutive of dark
academia, as such.
At the same time, one could argue that in its recognition of something sinister and obfuscated/obfuscating at the heart of the aesthetic it valorizes, dark academic discourse contains the seeds of a critique of these very problems and the modern university itself. Across social media, dark academia is frequently invoked as a community-building common interest for self-proclaimed oddballs or introverts who love learning – a characterization that would seem to put it in direct tension with its actual content. What can we make of this tension? Is dark academia inherently, irredeemably reactionary? In its original, social media incarnation – running as it often does to showing off outfits of the day, retro accessories, beautiful architecture, and carefully curated playlists – does it become, simply, a consumerist phenomenon? Or can we use it to think radically? If radical, does it become something other than dark academia? Whither light, gray, and chromatic modes?
What might dark academia – and its current popularity
– tell us about the contemporary moment of noisy, perhaps diversionary,
cultural warfare over the university and education more generally: “wokeness,” the
“fearless pursuit of truth,” the sophistic invocation of “reason” in defense of
the unreasonable, and the insistence on keeping schools open in the face of a
pandemic? Can it direct us back to considerations of class, resistance,
hegemony, epistemology, and art as a critical practice?
We are particularly interested in definitions,
conceptualizations, delimitations, and troublings of the idea of ‘dark
academia’ as both an aesthetico-political project and a narrative genre. We are
interested, too, in writing on all forms of art and literature, including both
art/literature associated with dark academic aesthetic taste and art/literature
that narrativizes or thematizes the dark academic. We are also interested in
cultural and media critique.
Possible topics and styles include but are not limited
to:
- Definitional
and conceptual proposals that seek to delimit dark academia from other
phenomena
- The
campus novel, research noir, and other fictional depictions of university
life
- Analyses
of digital and social media objects involving any aspect of dark academia
(TikTok, tumblr, Pinterest, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)
- Theories
of reception engaging dark academia’s archive (Modernism, Neoclassicism,
Romanticism, etc.)
- Musicological
and sartorial analyses of dark academia
- Environmental
humanities perspectives
- Performance
studies perspectives
- Religious
studies perspectives, including those that link academia, theory, and
knowledge to esoteric, encrypted, or occult aesthetics and practices
(e.g., The Secret History, The Tunnel, writings by
the CCRU)
- “Bad”
reading and dark academic presentations of the “canon”
- Connections
between dark academia and the COVID-19 pandemic
- Critiques
of dark academia, from ethical, political, and aesthetic angles, in
particular those which engage anti-Eurocentric thought.
- Theory-fictions
and autotheory engaging dark academic tropes
- The
aesthetics of nostalgia and the modern university
- Critiques
of the modern university which may shed light on the rise of dark academia
- Intellectual
genealogies, archaeologies, palimpsests, or traces which attempt to ground
dark academia in prior materials
- Explanations
of why dark academia doesn’t exist at all
- Light
academia
- Genre
analyses, making explicit dark academia’s relationship to other literary
constructs (the Cthulhu Mythos, Weird fiction, horror, speculative
fiction, detective and crime fiction, the philosophical novel, etc.)
Contact
Info:
Please send a proposal of approximately 250 to 350
words and a short biographical statement to both editors, Cody Jones and Nell Pach by April 1, 2022. Accepted proposals will be notified by May 1, and drafts will
be due by September 1. Feel free to reach out with questions or proposal ideas.