Creative methods are increasingly considered a source for new knowledge production, while the past has increasingly become a site of fascination and nostalgia for contemporary audiences and scholars alike. The popularity of media such as TV including Empress Ki (2013), Stranger Things (2016), Bridgerton (2020), Oppenheimer (2023), novels like Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles (2011) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and podcasts like The Rest is History (2021—) demonstrate a hunger for representations of an imagined past. The past has also become highly politicised: it may seem like a safe haven in times when the future seems blighted by climate crisis, war and illness, while nationalists use an imagined golden age to justify conservatism and violence.
Yet, historical revisionism might also offer a way of giving voice to marginalised perspectives at the intersections of gender, sex, race, ability, sexuality, religion and embodiment. What, then, does this mean for contemporary artists, arts-workers and communities to return, revise or intervene in narratives about the past? In what ways can techniques like fictionalisation and anachronism draw attention to the links between past, present and future? What are the ethics and methodological responsibilities of representing the past in multiple media? In what ways can other versions of the past disrupt dominant knowledge systems and power structures?
Proposed chapters should interrogate these questions with examples across the creative arts, media, cultural studies and museum and gallery studies. Chapters should focus on examples drawn from creative practice and/or creative works or exhibitions. We are particularly interested in chapter proposals that problematise acts of construction, invention and anachronism and understand the epistemological value of such work.
Book editors: Ariella Van Luyn, Alina Kozlovski, Chris Muller
Title and 250-300 word abstracts for chapters of 5000-6000 words due: 3 March 2025
Please submit to avanluyn@une.edu.au
Book proposal developed and submitted: mid 2025
Developed chapters due: End 2025