*CFP* "ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA AND PUNCTUATION", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE NEUTRAL JOURNAL

The Neutral is excited to announce the call for papers for issue #2 on the theme of Period. We hope you will distribute this call to graduate students and interested faculty. Please see text below or attached PDF (French translation included). The Neutral is a new, peer-reviewed media studies journal based out of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. The Neutral is committed to a diversity of disciplinary approaches and media objects of study. It is published online at:

A period is a temporal marker: it designates both the span of a duration and the instant of an end. In physics, a period is the recurrent temporal loop of a wave’s frequency; in history, it represents events artificially bounded by dates for narrative purposes; in gynecology, it is the colloquial expression of menstruation; in grammar, it terminates the sentence. For geologists, a period stretches to the length of a hundred million years and is subdivided into epochs. Hypothetical geologists, working a hundred million years from now, will be able to identify our epoch, now labelled the Anthropocene, thanks to traces left by climate change, extinctions, and radioactive isotopes in the paper-thin sedimentary layer that will represent our era. That the Anthropocene projects geologists into the future, far past the end of the world it simultaneously predicts, demonstrates some of the paradoxical logic bound up in its anthropocentric periodization.

The end of the world is unevenly distributed, occurring at different times for different beings and things. For instance, the world has already ended for a species of Hawaiian tree snail, Achatinella apexfulva. The last individual of the species died in captivity at fourteen years of age on New Year’s Day, 2019. On this day both the snail and the species it constituted came to a point, full stop. The extinction of this tree snail can be attributed to the introduction of an invasive species by the invasive species par excellence: Homo sapiens. The end of the world for the tree snail is therefore a part of the anthropogenic extinction event—thought to be, as Elizabeth Kolbert suggests, only the sixth such moment in the history of life on planet Earth.

Humanity is not living through the simultaneous, universal doomsday predicted by so many eschatological enthusiasts, but rather the uneven punctuation of species, narratives, epochs, and even islands. Many indigenous and colonized people, for example, are already living in a post-apocalyptic world. Though the Anthropocene is useful for representing the planetary scale of human influence, its imagination of the end is consistent with many human predictions and depictions of a universal apocalypse: namely, it presents “the end” as globally homogenous and simultaneous. We know, however, that western capitalist corporations are overwhelmingly responsible for environmental effects suffered predominantly by marginalized people in the Global South and elsewhere. In Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene Rob Nixon asks, “Doesn’t lumping together under the sign of the human the average twenty-first-century Liberian and the average twenty-first-century American as agents of planetary change risk concealing more than it reveals?” (2018, 8). Though the West imagines an evenly distributed “end,” how might we reconceive the heterogeneity of the period, of “ends”? What can the study of media reveal about our current environmental period?

In light of these questions, The Neutral seeks submissions that deal with mediated imaginations of periods—as temporal significations that mark everything from the end of a sentence to the span of geological epochs—with a view to complicating traditional ideas about apocalypse generally, and the Anthropocene specifically.

Some potential avenues of investigation include:

• Our understandings of such broad concepts as “the earth,” “nature,” “climate,” and “media” have become increasingly partisan and increasingly fixed—climate science is truth and the self-made destruction of the human is total and imminent, or climate science is untruth created and promulgated for the purposes of anti-industrial, anti-capitalist fear mongering. How has media worked to industrially, formally, and narratively construct and dismantle the ahistorical, western and anthropocentric teleologies of both of these perspectives? 
• Can attempts to re-articulate the idea of the Anthropocene steer us past some of its pitfalls? Are there merits to some of the proposed alternatives to the Anthropocene—such as: Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and the Capitalocene—or are these geo-logisms just obscene? 
• How might the temporal and non-anthropocentric critiques of media archaeology (Jussi Parikka’s Geology of Media, for example) be brought to bear on the strictures of the geological record? Have historically underserved media forms offered potential avenues of inquiry that suggest signposts around our mediated obsessions with destruction and its immanence? 
• Serialized storytelling presents complications for the rhetorical period and periods in media. Whether the problem of what constitutes an ending of or in a series, the issue of periods of quality or weakness in a series, or the turning of a period into an ellipsis through cliffhangers, easter eggs, or post-credits scenes, the expansion of serialized storytelling in moving image media challenges classical conceptions of narrative structure and cohesion. How might our conceptualizations of seriality and narrative structure need to adapt to this transformation of the period into other rhetorical forms of narrative closure (or lack thereof)? 
• The body as a bearer of time: Surely, any marker of time is bound to chronicle time incompletely. The menstrual period, as a marker of duration and cycle—a stretch of days with monthly returns—is only a fractional account of the indefinite time of ongoing bodily operations. How is time catalogued or uncatalogued in the corporeal realm? In what ways do geological periods become inscribed on the body?  How is the concept of the period, in both marking out and terminating stretches of time, experienced through bodies on screen? How does the body mediate periods for us?

Please submit completed essays:

Between 5,000-7,000 words in length, including endnotes and citations

As a word document in Chicago style

To theneutralcinemajournal@gmail.com with the subject line “Period Submission”

With name and affiliation included in body of email only

By June 1st, 2019