*CFP* “COLONIAL, ANTI-COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL MUSEUMS, COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS”, SPECIAL ISSUE, LUSOPHONE JOURNAL OF CULTURAL STUDIES

The encounter between audiences and art objects, in a specific space, has a long and complex history. It is a hermeneutical challenge, which changes over time, in accordance with the needs of the epoch and the objectives of each society and culture. In this encounter between art, time and audiences – which is both complex and fleeting – museums, collections and exhibitions project different representations of the world and narratives of the lives of human communities, which observe the standards of a wide array of different, and often conflicting, curatorial strategies.

Museums, collections and exhibitions are always regulated by political and programmatic objectives and are therefore open to multiple interpretations. Museums, collections and exhibitions always observe a regime of truth, regardless of whether they are founded by nation states, or by revolutionary or counter-revolutionary forces, and whether they are in support of the established regimes, or aim to alter the established order. This regime of truth is the core condition for the possibility of representations that a specific community makes of itself and its epoch, while also formulating possibilities of meaning in order to help us understand what it means to be human.

*CFP* “QUEER FIRE: LIBERATION AND ABOLITION”, SPECIAL ISSUE, GLQ JOURNAL

Modes of imprisonment not only pervade historical and contemporary life but, more substantively, structure the grounds of sociality. Calls for justice, then, must have at their fundament abolition, and abolition must be understood as the complete obliteration of modes of imprisonment so as to create a world which would sustain life through forms of justice not conceived through violence. This would entail a radical reorientation to life and living. This reorientation must attend to gender, as gender is one of the chief forms of imprisonment—in the double sense that gender, it can be asserted, is a kind of prison; and the institutions of prisons have at their centers the regulatory (re)production of the gender binary.

In Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got, the very first chapter in the collection Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade provocatively suggest, “Impossibility may very well be our only possibility.” They go on to ask, What would it mean to embrace, rather than shy away from, the impossibility of our ways of living as well as our political visions? What would it mean to desire a future that we can’t even imagine but that we are told couldn’t ever exist? (42). This special issue of GLQ, titled Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition, seeks to begin with these questions of im/possibility, futurity and presence, and knowledge and practice to explore the ways in which queerness converges with abolition.