6.0 On the Uses of Absence

Summer 2024

Themes in this issue

Absence

Negativity

Queer/trans studies

Aesthetics

Black studies

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Can we speak of a turn to absence? Across the contemporary academic conjuncture, theory is reapproaching the absent in its varying figurative and fleshly forms – revalorising the presence of absence as a critical matter. Whether in queer theory, trans studies, Black studies, Eastern European studies, or literary studies, enduring scholarly investments in re-presenting and re-presencing the absented body have become supplemented by an affirmative interest in staying with absence as such. This scholarship locates absence at the heart of myriad resistances against exploitation, appropriation, undoing, and normativity. For its seventh issue, Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis has invited scholars and artists alike to submit work on the uses of absence in and outside of theory today. As an object of study, a critical figure, and rhetorical tool, absence is given a shape, meaning, form; it is put in writing, where it has a function, a flavour, and a politics. Absence, in other words, fails every time to be purely nothing. How, then, to think the contradiction and the provocation of a contemporary aesthetics of absence?

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Introduction: In the Presence of Absence

JAKOB HENSELMANS
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‍Can we speak of a turn to absence?, we asked in our call. Across the contemporary academic conjuncture, theory is reapproaching the absent in its varying figurative and fleshly forms, is revalorising the presence of absence as a critical matter. That is, enduring scholarly investments in re-presenting, re-presencing and fabulating the absented figure or body (in the canon, the archive, and media; in history, in institutions; in theory and writing) have become supplemented in recent critical work by a theoretically affirmative effort of staying with absence as such.

Together with Sifra Meijers, Jakob Henselmans is the editor-in-chief of Soapbox. His first book, Reading/Form: Two Essays on Brinkema and Cinema, was published earlier this year by the University of Murcia Press, and he has published peer-reviewed essays on psychoanalysis, cinema, and aesthetics. He lectured in Film Studies at Leiden University. Currently, he is one third of the Queer Formalism Research Group, and is finishing a master’s thesis at the University of Amsterdam, on sex, form, and queer theory.

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A bocca chiusa

BENNI CIAPPINI

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The H is muted and so are we, at times. Zip is a game that requires a locked mouth. Acqua in bocca is an Italian saying that invites to not, under any circumstances, spill the tea. Apostrofo digs and cries but does not question. There is a missing, possibly forgotten letter in the alphabet, yet can it actually be found? Is it a letter at all? Will The Mouth let Its water go, and will Magliaro keep washing his hands hidden from the public? “A bocca chiusa” is a mixed-styled text, going from research-based pieces to pure fictional ones, that delves into omission, both the one engraved in linguistic structures and the omission that can be encountered in daily happenings. The choice and the imposition, the habit and the strategy. This puzzle of shorter parts investigates how silence and the Unsaid can’t always stay unnoticed, and how they are, on the contrary, active forces with palpable consequences.

Benni/Benji Ciappini (she/they) is a word chewer with a background in photography and design, currently based between Italy and The Netherlands. Benni is curious about language, especially Italian, their mother tongue, and its power to influence the way we act (or not) upon our surrounding. Lately, they have been discovering the pleasure and impact of telling stories as a medium. For the rest, nothing is certain and, as a consequence, most of it is possible.

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On Literal Limitations and/of Figurative Absence

LUCY WOWK

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“On Literal Limitations and/of Figurative Absence” is an experimental essay that traces an account of emergent absent-figures in the philosophical-aesthetic field. Specifically, I attend to questions of absence within structures of the world as totality and within conceptions of blackness as an ontological limit. I inquire into how the absent-figure is put to work on two levels: first, in a generalized philosophy as that which must be cast outside theory/world in order to render it a functionally logical whole, and second, in contemporary forms as that which, in being named, is made to confront theory/world as interruption and deformation. I conceive of the multiple valences of figure, engaging in an experimental form wherein various registers of figuration function: as numerical abstraction, as bodily form, and as assumptive consideration. Ultimately, my work explores the act of making-present the absent-figure as coming up against literal points of limitation in the structures built by post-Enlightenment onto-epistemologies that persist within, and undergird, even the most radical anti-racist discourses. Beyond a turn to absence, negation, or reparation, is there anything left of critical thought?

Lucy Wowk is interested in the genealogy of aesthetics and how it bears on mediations of the human as a singular concept. Currently, Lucy studies in Social and Political Thought at York University and teaches creative and critical thought at Toronto Metropolitan University and Sheridan College.

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On Abstraction in Melancholia

MARIJA CETINIĆ

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This is an essay on the antagonism between paintings in a film. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia stages, this essay argues, a contradiction in the medium of film itself and its repeated and relentless drive to disavow the stillness of painting for its own temporal economy. Central to the film is a scene in which Justine swaps out a bourgeois display of art books depicting Kazimir Malevich bookplates with those containing Bruegel the Elder, Caravaggio, etc.: the swapping out of abstract art for the figurative. The attempt to please her sister with the display of figurative art and to thereby accede to a realism without negativity is flimsy and failed. It fails not only because the disavowal leaves a remainder, but because, as this paper tries to demonstrate, the figurative paintings are themselves always already involved with the very abstraction that might undermine them. Such an enactment of negativity multiplies across the film and almost always involves the problem of concrete figuration, for which abstraction is not the solution but its constitutive dialectical condition.

Marija Cetinić works as Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, coordinates the MA Comparative Literature, and is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is a founding member of the research group Sex Negativity and runs the seminar series “We Have Never Had Sex.” At Sandberg Institute, she teaches in the MA Critical Studies. At Perdu, centre for poetry and experiment, she is a member of the programming collective. Her current research is on negativity and feminisation.

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Grammars of Refusal: (Self-)Erasure, Violence, and Silence in the Poetry of Salima Rivera

JOE ALICEA

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This essay explores the interplay of silence, self-erasure, and resistance in the poetry of Salima Rivera, a Chicago-based Puerto Rican poet and activist. Through an analysis of two poems, “Lolita” and “Louie the Mongoose—Killer of Snakes,” within the contexts of Puerto Rican nationalist history and diasporic poetics, I examine how Rivera uses silence, violence, and death as forms of refusal. These approaches disrupt normative expectations for marginalized authors to present unified, coherent voices on behalf of their communities. “Lolita” reflects on Lolita Lebrón’s 1954 armed protest against U.S. colonial rule, framing her silence and the sonic explosion of her gun as challenges to gendered notions of voice and agency within nationalist discourses. In “Louie the Mongoose,” Rivera portrays Luis Rosa’s 1981 sentencing, exposing the precarity of collective solidarity under systemic oppression. Drawing from Puerto Rican nationalist histories and theoretical frameworks on silence and listening, this essay engages Rivera’s articulation of an “I’ll-take-care-of-you-if-you-take-care-of-me” politics to reveal how her poetics fosters relational dialogue and reimagines collective subjectivity. By positioning Rivera’s self-erasure as an intentional act of resistance, this study addresses gaps in Puerto Rican literary scholarship and proposes silence as a transformative force within diasporic and marginalized literatures.

Joe Alicea is a Chicago Rican writer and literary critic specialising in Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural production. He holds degrees in Philosophy (BA), English (MA), and is presently a Ph.D Candidate in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He served as the curator and wrote the introduction for the Salima Rivera folio featured in the March 2024 issue of Poetry magazine. Currently, he is moving back and forth between Santa Cruz and his hometown of Chicago as he completes his dissertation on Puerto Rican literary and cultural production in Chicago from the 1960s to the early 2000s.

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Re-presencing the Absent(ed) Body of Labour Power: The Subject as Object in Heike Geissler's Seasonal Associate

LUDVIG LINDGREN

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Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (2014), an autofictional account of the physical and spiritual erosion of workers under late-stage capitalism, is as much a labour memoir for the twenty-first century—detailing the author’s own experience at an Amazon fulfilment centre in Leipzig—as it is an exercise in language and form to both represent and re-presence the absent(ed) body of labour power. Through a close-reading of the narrative structure in Seasonal Associate, this paper explores this very exercise, with particular attention to the autofictional self and Geissler’s choice of the second person pronoun to facilitate it. Specifically, by addressing herself in the second person, Geissler divides, if not duplicates, her autofictional self into a you and an I—thus allowing herself to occupy the narrative as both subject and object, at once historically absent and fictionally present—as she recreates what she has already experienced and walks herself through it. The thesis of this contribution is that this arrangement functions not only aesthetically to represent the constraints of capitalism—call it labour subsumption and alienation (Marx), the necropolitics of contemporary capitalism (Mbembe) or slow death and lateral agency (Berlant)—but also constructively, by embodying its contradictions, to resist them.

Ludvig Lindgren is a Research MA student in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. With a background in Philosophy and German literature (B.A. 2021), his research interests lie at the intersection of the two, with a particular focus on form, literary theory and intellectual history. He is currently writing his thesis on the representation of animals in modern Scandinavian poetry.

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As if Writing was not Dreaming

MARTA LOPES SANTOS

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Lay next to me, close your eyes. What do you think about when you think about dreaming? In “As if Writing was not Dreaming,” I begin by considering sleep as a refusal of the capitalist clock. When sleep is reclaimed as rest outside of social reproduction, our slumbers might become a time for getting in touch with our dreams. The semantics of dreaming is here expanded to consider not only our nighttime adventures through our subconscious minds, but also what it means to dream of a different future, especially when the concept of dreaming is hijacked by advertising or promises of social mobility. Threading sleep, insomnia, refusal and different dream associations, I ask how our dreaming can connect us to one another, particularly as we attempt to imagine more hopeful futures. At the same time, I question what the role of the written word can be in the middle of this, and what can happen if we write down our dreams.

Marta Lopes Santos is a writer and researcher based in Amsterdam, where she recently completed an MA in Literary Studies. She has been researching labour, dreams, futures, collectivities, rest and refusals. Her writing has previously appeared in Soapbox Journal, Pala Press and Literature & Aesthetics. Recently, she co-founded the publishing project Sleepy Press. martalopessantos.com.

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The Weight of Absence in the Age of Nothingness

PETRICĂ MOGOȘ

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This contribution explores the post-socialist era in Eastern Europe as an “age of nothingness,” shaped by erasure, vertigo, and the collapse of collective meaning. The fall of socialism left a void where utopia once stood, replaced by neoliberal precarity and individualism. Memory politics weaponised the past and delegitimised alternatives, while the region grappled with existential uncertainty. Drawing from critical theory and cultural sociology, this paper discusses how nothingness manifests in artistic and political practices across the region. The situation is not defeatist: on the contrary, it is hope that prevails. We are reminded that this looming absence can be used to critique the neoliberal ethos and to call for a reimagining of futures beyond the disorientation of the post-socialist condition.

Petrică Mogoș is a researcher, writer, and co-editor of The Future of, a magazine reclaiming lost ideas, and Kajet, a journal exploring Eastern Europe through a critical lens. In an attempt to decolonise the imagination of the region, his work approaches the complicated relationships between East and West, periphery and centre, as well as the legacy of the past and the possibilities of the future. A PhD candidate and lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Petrică also co-runs Dispozitiv Books with Laura Naum, a laboratory dedicated to experimental publishing and critical inquiry.

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Archiving Economic Afterlife: A Dialogue Between 3D Scanning and Drawing

KSENIA KOPALOVA AND PAT WINGSHAN WONG

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The paper explores the afterlife of mass-produced collectibles—Snoopy toys from 1999 McDonald’s Happy Meals. Distributed globally, they attracted collectors who believed in their future economic value and fans for whom they held personal significance. Today, after 25 years, these once-coveted Snoopy toys are abandoned and sold in flea markets, car boot sales, and via online marketplaces for second-hand goods. The paper is focused on an artist-made digital archive of 3D scans of these toys acquired from sellers and collectors across Hong Kong, the UK, Russia. The 3D models were reworked through creating custom textures, which attempt to highlight the gaps, mistakes, and absences in the economic environment around these objects and the patchy, changing, irregular, disappearing personal stories behind them. We argue that exclusion of such objects from the mainstream consumerist cycles generates poetic absences that endow these objects with subversive potential. With their existence within an alternative mode of economic circulation, they challenge capitalist consumer behaviours and open up possibilities to reconnect with these objects, re-use them more poetically and more personally, also highlighting the potential of absence, mistake, and glitch in the processes of archive-making.

Ksenia Kopalova is an illustrator and a researcher with a background in sociology, currently working as a Lecturer in Illustration at the Arts University Bournemouth. She is a founder of .RAW, an online magazine drawing cross-disciplinary connections in the arts and humanities. Ksenia’s current professional interests revolve around the idea of illustration as knowledge-making. Her personal projects mainly explore memory- and place-making strategies, as well as intersections of the digital and the physical.

Pat WingShan Wong (aka Flyingpig) is an artist and researcher whose research-led projects explore the interplay between people and urban transformation, particularly in the context of capitalisation and its impacts on both the real and digital worlds. She founded @spread_pages, a contemporary illustration platform that explores illustration as a research method, and she is part of the artist duo @foreseen_agency, which creates speculative narratives through cross-disciplinary research in art and technology. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University.

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Digesting the Self

ILJA SCHAMLÉ

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In this essay, the writer’s wounded intestines are explored as a space of absence. The act of writing emerges from the lived experience of illness, particularly through the body suffering from Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The phenomenological experience of IBD enables relational embodied understandings, which are auto-poetically explored throughout the essay. It shares an intimacy with the rectum, which is a potential revolutionary force. What does it mean to be sick in the rectum, and how might this sickness reconfigure notions of body, gender, and resistance? To address this question, the text engages with the works of Mario Mieli and Sarah Ahmed, with the political connections that emerge through chronic illness, and with their intersections with gender and capitalist liberation movements. The fragmented body is reclaimed not as a site of wholeness, but as a place of an ever-shifting terrain of pain and pleasure. The bacterial metamorphosis becomes a narrative thread, emphasizing that these transformations become possible only through a disorientation of the self.

ilja schamlé is a community organiser, cook, and artist whose practice moves through the worlds of food, ecology, and health. She works from her fleshy metabolic experiences and the ingestion of the other, wondering how psychosomatic and psychoanalytic perspectives might fabulate new stories of the self. Their writings, community projects, herbalist learnings, and cooking performances transform their wounds into capacious spaces. They are currently studying at the Dutch Art Institute and are an active co-organiser at Massia residency space.

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Sexual Difference, Queer Theory, and the Place of Feminist Celibacy

TESSEL VENEBOER

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Recent psychoanalytic theory contends that gender theory neutralises sex by prioritising multiplicity over sexual difference and the problematic nature of sexuality. In this article, I draw on the historical occurrence of separatist feminism in the forms of political lesbianism and feminist celibacy to argue that the refusal of “compulsory sexuality” in the feminist-separatist movement makes similar claims about sexual difference—the nature of sex as perversion and “devoid of instinct”—as the psychoanalytic “sex” does. If the feminist celibate can refuse sex on both a social and a psychic level, sex must first be denaturalised and dissociated from intuition. I consider some of the metaphysical assumptions implicit in the politicisation of the absence of sex. The article takes the “sex resistance” tactic proposed by the Women Against Sex movement in the 1980s as its case to show how the theoretical thinking that emerged as part of the separatist moment constructs a particularly antagonistic feminist subject.

Tessel Veneboer is a PhD candidate in English at Ghent University. She is writing a dissertation on Kathy Acker and the relation between sexual politics and literary form. Her critical work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Journal of Lesbian Studies, the b2o Review, New Formations, and Textual Practice.

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Please show me the way to the next ephemeral dyke bar (oh don't ask why, oh don't ask why): On Queer Utopian Longing

PAREL JOY

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With queer bars constantly appearing and disappearing, queerness often exists in ephemera more than it gets to exist in continuous, physical spaces. Yet, these physical spaces are essential to imagining a future for ourselves as a community, as places where we can be aware of the past and use it to imagine a better future through what José Esteban Muñoz calls “queer utopian longing.” Applying Muñoz’s writing on ephemera and queer utopias to Joelle Taylor’s C+nto and Othered Poems, this piece takes a hybrid form between article and poem, analysing queer nostalgia and lamenting the loss of real and fictional queer spaces, all while continuing to look forward, into a queer future.

Parel Joy is a writer and poet. Her pamphlet The Queen of Cups and Other Poems was published by SPAM in 2022 and she runs DykeHouse Press, which has published 3 zines of dyke poetry so far. She has translated works by jimmy cooper, Porsha Olayiwola and Bryan Washington, among others, from English into Dutch. She is currently finishing her research master’s degree in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. www.pareljoy.xyz

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Afterword: Aesthetics of Absence/Monsters of Love

EUGENIE BRINKEMA

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You fucked all afternoon and then he left: the room, the city, the country. This part is important: you remained behind.

After a purr of a nap, some washing up, a fierce appetite emerges, so you too leave the room to wander twilit streets in search of somewhere to eat, and, though bloom has slunk back to its familiar pallor, still, you have a soft smile about the lips, still, you can recall the pressure of specific touches on territories of skin, and you are, without wanting to think too much about it and perhaps hesitant to say it aloud, rather in love and even happy. And then you feel it: the new air through which you walk. Measurably, you know what time the train departed and that that time has passed. He is definitely gone. But you know it in another way as well: something particular, concrete, and total has appeared, and staying in this place without him you are dwelling in a different space, one reconfigured by being where he is no longer. You do not walk timeless general streets, you walk the recently created, ineluctably specific streets of the place where he is not. World unfolds before you as a cartography of absence.

Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Status-Only Graduate Professor in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the relationship between aesthetic form and violence, affect, sexuality, and ethics. She is the author of The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both with Duke University Press, and is currently writing a book about colour.

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EDITORIAL BOARD

Andrea Neelissen

André Augusto Soliva de Almeida Cassula

Anna Dijkstra

Anna Parsons

Anna Winter

Anouk Slewe

Ashleigh McCulloch

Dee Kočiūnaitė

Deniz Hakman

Dominika Mikołajczyk

Emma van den Boomgaard

Fern Ling Chettle

Franek Dziduch

Hugh Raggett

Izabela Kaczyńska

Jakob Henselmans

Julia Kobielska

Lucia Holaskova

Maria Cecilia Vieira Carvalho

Martina Tono

Per Movig

Sifra Meijers

Stepan Lastuvka

Yağmur Sağlam

Xudong Yang

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ADVISORY BOARD

Jeff Diamanti

Joost de Bloois

Niall Martin

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

Alice Machado & Paolo Barbieri

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PRINTING AND BINDING

Wilco Art Books

Other Printed Matter

Cover of a Soapbox edition

6.0 On the Uses of Absence

Summer 2024
Cover of a Soapbox edition

5.0 The Swamped

Fall 2024
Cover of a Soapbox edition

4.0 At The Interface

Summer 2023
Cover of a Soapbox edition

3.0. In Lieu of an Ending: Impasse

Spring 2022
Cover of a Soapbox edition

2.0. Contamination

Spring 2021
Cover of a Soapbox edition

1.2. Off the Grid

Fall 2019
Cover of a Soapbox edition

1.1. Practices of Listening

Fall 2018

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Call for Papers: 5.0: SWAMPED! Muddied Environments and the Ecology of Being Bogged Down

January 17, 2023

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Call for Papers: 5.0: SWAMPED! Muddied Environments and the Ecology of Being Bogged Down

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For the upcoming issue of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis, we invite young researchers and established scholars alike to submit academic essays or creative works that critically engage with the theme of swamped. We are inviting extended proposals (500-1000 words) that follow consistent and complete formatting and referencing style to be submitted to submissions@soapboxjournal.net by February 21st, 2023.


While it may first be thought of as a space of stagnation, the swamp is also a transition zone. A space in which water and land merge, swamps have long represented an area in which the earth resists being controlled, and have functioned as areas of resistance in many Indigenous epistemes and folklores. Swamps, then, are areas that resist human control, and epitomise agency of the natural world, doing so too on a conceptual level (Wilson 1). At the same time, it has been co-opted semantically, as the term “swamped” has become associated with systems, both of society and signification, that are overwhelmed - whether in terms of a job market being swamped, or in the politically loaded draining of “the swamp” as a network of corruption. Where the former strand of signification uses the swamp to highlight agency, the latter points out a lack of it. As a result, swamps have become spaces of contestation and transition both as physical environments, and as linguistic ones. How do these strands of meaning diverge, and where do they come together?


Swamps as they exist in cultural imagination(s).

Swamps speak to the imagination. They feature prominently in folklore and provide fertile soil for myriad mythical creatures: from the nine-headed hydra in ancient Greek mythology, to the South-African grootslang, to the numerous global configurations of the will-o’-wisp. These narratives largely hinge on the swamp’s liminal positioning that makes it hard to traverse, inhabit, or otherwise tame. To this day, when swamps are featured in pop-culture, they are often mythologized to house the monstrous or, at the very least, the off-beat (e.g. Shrek, or the Man-Thing in Marvel comics, or the entire cast of characters in Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!). 

In addition to housing imagined creatures, the swamp is also a famously rich archeological site where we can find many well-preserved traces of past human life. Most notable are the so-called bog bodies, eerily intact corpses that date back as far as the holocene. These findings add to the swamp’s mythical appeal, but are also hypothesised to, in some cases, originate from it. A particularly large amount of bog bodies dating back to the iron age were found in Northern Europe, and the bulk of these corpses bear traces of ritualistic human sacrifice. This has led historians to believe that, at the time, the swamp was seen as a transition space, not just between land and water, but also as a gateway between different worlds (Randsborg). 

So, the swamp is charged with a rich cultural history and subject to wide-ranging meaning-making practices. We invite you to delve further into this and open it up. What stories do we tell about swamps? Which narratives are remembered? And, what does that ultimately say about us? 

The swamp as it appears in political rhetoric.

Since its first use in 1881 by Helen Hunt Jackson in her polemical text, A Century of Dishonor, the concept of the swamp as an area to be overcome has resurfaced repeatedly as a powerful metaphor in the arena of political discussion and rhetoric (most often in the context of US federal politics). Arguing against the so-called ‘Indian Appropriations Act’ of 1871, which rendered Indigenous peoples as wards of the state and, therefore, eligible for forcible relocation, Jackson argued that such panacean responses were immoral and did not address the needs and concerns, of Native peoples, nor did it strive towards the reparations that Indigenous nations deserved. Rather than debate the specifics of individual policy decisions, Jackson argued that ceasing to cheat, rob, break promises, and extending ‘the protection of the law to the Indian's rights of property’ (342) would be the most appropriate first course of action. To illustrate this, Jackson presented the following scenario:

When pioneers in a new country find a tract of poisonous and swampy wilderness to be reclaimed, they do not withhold their hands from fire and axe till they see clearly which way roads should run, where good water will spring, and what crops will best grow on the redeemed land. They first clear the swamp. So with this poisonous and baffling part of the domain of our national affairs — let us first "clear the swamp”. (341).

This metaphorical call to clear, or to drain, the swamp was then exercised by socialist and left-leaning politicians and political commentators such as Winfield R. Gaylord and Victor L. Berger who petitioned for draining the swamp of capitalism (Gaylord 8, Berger 107). In 1966, civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin employed the phrase in A Freedom Budget for All Americans, a policy proposal that, among other things, sought to eradicate poverty (14-15). Ronald Reagan’s use of the phrase in 1982 when authorising the Grace Commision (which investigated inefficiency within the Federal Government), dragged the phrase across the political aisle. Where it had once illustrated a progressive politics, it henceforth became tethered to conceptions of government waste, cronyism and distrust in Capitol Hill, a claim bolstered by the fact of Washington, D.C.,’s construction on supposed marshlands between the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers. From Reagan’s usage  onwards, calls to drain the swamp were almost exclusively directed towards Washington, D.C., as a locus of political venality. The phrase’s most recent, and perhaps most memorable, usage was by former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly uttered the phrase at rallies, during interviews, and in countless tweets. 

The invocation and the power of this phrase can be seen across various areas of cultural and political discourse and analysis; its intent and meaning wavering from progressive to reactionary throughout its history. So begs the question, what does it mean to drain a swamp? Metaphorically speaking, what is the impact of identifying spaces as swamps to be drained? Who does the draining, or the promise of draining, serve? In reality, what are the implications of identifying and draining a swamp? Who does the draining itself? Think of the thousands of people displaced by Benito Mussolini’s draining of the Pontine Marshes, and the many more thousands of workers who were subject to backbreaking manual labour and exposure to malaria and disease (Snowden 155-6). What bubbles to the surface when we delve into the history, use, and the real-world implications of this charged phrase?


The affective experience of being swamped.

But to be swamped is also to feel swamped; to be overwhelmed with work, a sensory overload, stress and clutter. Infrastructures can be swamped; systems too; and spaces can swamp you with stimuli. How does one endure a state of swampedness, feel one’s way through it, resist it or find rest in it? Can objects or texts be swamped? To disconnect, go offline, turn to self-help books, and take time off work – all these are responses to feeling swamped. But then: who can afford to respond like this, and who is unable to withdraw? Or can information overload – to stay with the swamp – be creatively productive or critical? This is the muddy matrix that feeling swamped opens in theory; a space of excessive encounter between ecologies and affects, where swamps become metaphors, and metaphors swamp. 

Thought on the feeling of being swamped and its social-political relationalities are everywhere: from Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep to Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. So too the desire to escape overwhelm has recently been re-conceptualized in edited volumes like Politics of Withdrawal. But “swamp” as a metaphor has not yet passed the floodgates. We invite you to think with this swamp, feel through its conceptual implication. 


We encourage submissions relating to the themes above, as well as, but not limited to, the following: 

  • Critical engagements with/investigations into environments that could be described as marshlands, wetlands, fens, bogs, moors, etc. 
  • Practices of re-wilding and re-swamping.
  • Cultural ethnographies of muddied environments.
  • Environmental humanities and ecocritical approaches to swamps.
  • Investigations into swamps as liminal, transitional, or mutable sites.
  • Swamps as sites of decay (e.g. die-off and algal bloom) and repair (e.g. as fertile sites of regeneration).
  • Socio-cultural explorations of what it means to feel swamped, its implications, and who this affect can belong to.
  • Socio-economic approaches investigating issues such as: 
  • Who is relegated to the swamp?
  • Who has access to the swamp?
  • What are the social impacts of swamped environments on individuals and groups?
  • Investigations of the function of swamps in political rhetoric.
  • Pieces that investigate swamps as veiled, uncharted, or otherred locales or those that approach swamps as spaces to be traversed.


We invite extended proposals (500-1000 words) to be submitted to submissions@soapboxjournal.net by February 21st 2023. Following conditional acceptance, an initial draft version (3000 words) will be due two weeks after receiving the acceptance email. The editing process will take place throughout Spring/Summer 2023. If you have any questions regarding your submission, do not hesitate to contact us at info@soapboxjournal.net. Editing and peer review guidelines will be sent to authors individually upon acceptance of their submission. For full submission guidelines, see our website.


Guidelines for creative submissions are more flexible and can be finished works, but please keep in mind spatial limitations: there is usually room for one longer or two shorter pieces in the print version. A sense of the formatting possibilities can be garnered from previous issues (open-access pdf versions are available on our website).


We also accept submissions for our website all year round. We encourage a variety of styles and formats, including short-form essays (around 2000 words), reviews, experimental writing and multimedia. These can engage with the theme of the upcoming issue but are not limited to it. Please get in touch to pitch new ideas or existing projects that you would like to have published by reading our submission guidelines and filling in the form.



Works cited.

Berger, Victor L. Berger’s Broadsides, Social-Democratic Publishing Company, 1912.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press 2011.

Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2014. 

Gaylord, Winfield R. “Gaylord Makes a Statement.” Daily Northwestern [Oshkosh: WI], 10 Oct. 1903, p. 8.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Hesselberth, Pepita., and Joost de Bloois, editors. Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Arts, Theory. Rowman and Littlefield, 2020.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United State’s Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1881.

Randolph, A. Philip, and Bayard Rustin. A Freedom Budget for All Americans: A Summary. A Philip Randolph Institute, 1967.

Randsborg, Klavs. Roman Reflections: Iron Age to Viking Age in Northern Europe. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Snowden, Frank M. The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962. Yale University Press, 2006.

Wilson, Anthony. Swamp: Nature and Culture. Reaktion Books Ltd, 2018.




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Call for Creative Work - 5.0: SWAMPED!

October 2, 2023

For the upcoming issue of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis, we invite young artists to submit creative works that critically engage with the theme of swamped. We are inviting proposals or finished works to be submitted to submissions@soapboxjournal.net by October 10th, 2023.

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Swamps speak to the imagination. While it may first be thought of as a space of stagnation, the swamp is also a transition zone: an area in which water and land merge, a space where the earth resists being controlled. In addition to its geographical referent, the swamp also covers less tangible—though equally murky—semantic ground. It has become associated with systems, both of society and signification, that are overwhelmed—whether in terms of a job market being swamped, or in the politically loaded draining of “the swamp” as a network of corruption. Where the former strand of signification uses the swamp to highlight agency, the latter points out a lack of it. How do these strands of meaning diverge, and where do they come together?

Guidelines for creative submissions are flexible: poems, short-stories (up to 5000 words), visual art pieces, collages, drawings, comics, anything as long as it's printable! Feel free to take a look at our previous issues for inspiration.

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Open Board Positions 2023

We are currently looking to expand our team. Soapbox is a student-run journal focused on promoting voices that creatively engage with concepts and cultural objects in the broadest sense, through publishing academic, artistic, and interdisciplinary works. Soapbox is a collaborative effort in gaining experience and experimenting with running a small publishing platform. All members take part in actively shaping what Soapbox is by weighing in on editorial decisions and take part in any aspects of publishing (both online and in print). 

In general, the time commitment expected is between four and six hrs/week, including a weekly two-hour meeting. The journal is run on a voluntary basis. For all roles, applicants should be based in the Amsterdam area and available for weekly meetings for at least the remaining academic year (until June 2024).

If you're interested, please email info@soapboxjournal.net with the particular role(s) you are interested in and a few words of motivation.

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Deadline: Sunday, October 15th


IT 

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