Cultures of Piracy
Call for Essays: Special Issue of Anthropological Quarterly
Cultures of Piracy
Anthropological Quarterly is seeking submissions for a special issue exploring “piracy” defined broadly, from copying CDs to Captain Hook, from biopiracy to the coast of Somalia. Authors may consider one of the following, making sure that their work draws upon ethnographic research, and/or engages anthropology as a discipline:
- How do practices labeled “piracy” differ from other sorts of extraction, expropriation, borrowing, and theft?
- How does piracy conflict with or affirm narratives of law and governance? What, for instance, are piracy’s critical and utopian impulses?
- How is piracy mediated through various forms of public culture, and what are the components of its circulation within various publics?
- What are the spatial and temporal features of piracy – its histories and geographies?
- What are piracy’s economic and political entailments?
- What specific localities (the Straits of Malacca, Somalia and the Caribbean) or activities (p2p file-sharing and fishing) are in part constituted by notions of piracy?
Authors have considerable freedom; essays can be short (3,000 words) or long (10,000 words), grounded in ethnographic data, or purely theoretical. One of Anthropological Quarterly’s goals is to give ethnographers a range of possibilities for scholarly writing.
Our deadline for abstracts and titles is August 1st, 2010.
We request the completed work by October 1st, 2010.
Email submissions to aqsubmissions@gmail.com (preferably in .doc file format) and mail two hard copies to:
Alexander S. Dent – Associate Editor
Anthropological Quarterly
The George Washington University
2110 G St. NW
Washington, DC 20052
Email questions to asdent@gwu.edu
Shreds and Patches 