Submission Deadline: De-Canon + Fonograf Ed. Hybrid-Lit Anthology

De-Canon resumes its mission of “de-canonizing” by teaming up with Fonograf Editions to publish an anthology of hybrid-literary works by women and nonbinary BIPOC writers. This anthology will explore multimodal forms of writing that navigate the restless intersections of writing, visual art, and other media, and that innovate in their contemplations – and complications – of language and form.

Submissions are open from October 1st to December 15, 2021.

What is hybridity? What does it mean, and why does it matter now, to pay heed to hybrid modes of writing and art, to confluences of aesthetic mediums, to processes that make visible the seams and in-between spaces of the realms we ‘make’ in? How does the hybrid form potentially re-define “writing”? And, what fuels a writer/artist to construct forms of their own hybrid making, to blend or reconfigure or dissolve the established lines between modes of ‘voicing’?

In this anthology we wish to investigate how and why the hybrid space resonates as it does, notably for BIPOC women and nonbinary writers, who may use such modes to elasticize and elude definitions, defy and blur boundaries, and thus reimagine paradigmatic possibilities. We see the medium of language as a complexly riddled and rife material of the 21st century, one that is multi-textu(r)al (textual and con-textual), made of more than words, interwoven, punctured, fragmented, grafted, possessing power to construct and deconstruct, fed into by many rivers of experience: our marginalizations and migrations, diasporas and displacements, invisibilities and hyper-visibilities. We are interested in how writers of hybrid natures and minority backgrounds are devising ways of working with language that both subvert and re-form the dominant narratives that language (notably: English) has been used, historically, to uphold. Our exploration of hybrid forms is also an exploration of the creative possibilities of language, filtered through varying modalities, from image to sound to object, and how this results in new richnesses of reading and perceiving.

We are especially interested in works that reach beyond the textual to engage multiple sense faculties and cross-disciplines: sight, sound, somatic experiences; performance, multimedia, music, installation, and more. We are interested in intersections of literature and visual art, image and text, text and sound, photography and writing, text and orality, book and object, performance and print, and many other experiments. We are also interested in process or creative scholarship that speculates and contextualizes about hybrid literary forms. We define “hybrid” as meaning work that is multimodal and inhabits intersections, but still uses language as a primary material. (Per this parameter, we also understand that language might not always employ words.)

Writers whose work is accepted should anticipate an editorial process that will include conversations about how their work translates to the page, as it would appear in a print anthology published via Fonograf Editions. We are also excited to work collaboratively with writers whose work is accepted to imagine a secondary mode to unveil their work: we anticipate exploring “hybridity” in the ways we will share this project, beyond its book form, with the public. Our current tentative publication/release date is Fall 2022.

If you have further questions about whether your submission qualifies as “hybrid”, please contact us at: decanonproject@gmail.com

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We are looking for:

• multimodal literary writing and artwork (“literary” meaning language is a primary material)
• essays and creative scholarship on hybridity and multimodal writing/artwork
• collaborative work / collective authorship as a form of hybridity

Works might take the shape of:

• image and text works (poetry, prose, lyric essay)
• visual-textual works
• concrete poetry
• asemic writing
• photography and text
• photo essays
• visual art and text
• maps, diagrams, other visual graphics that employ text
• video poetry
• poetry and sound works
• comics, zines
• audio writings, recordings
• book objects
• documentation of art book or visual-literary installations and projects
• visual + literary works that utilize online or new media modes
• essays and creative scholarship on hybrid literary forms

[See More Details Here]