Dear Sir or Madam,
We cordially invite you to submit proposals for articles for a collective publication: Reversing Orientalist Perspectives: Counter-visuality and Representations in the Work of Female Artists from Asia and Africa, to be released by one of the renowned academic journals or publishing houses.
Please send submissions (Title: Keywords: Abstract: Bio): kontrwizualnosc@gmail.com by December 1, 2025
Kind regards,
Marta Widy-Behiesse, Jan Rogala
About a collective publication:
The starting point for the planned collective publication is a reflection on the role of images and visuality in shaping discourses of identity, difference, and power in contemporary visual culture (Kallio-Tavin, Tavin 2018). The focus is on the representation of women from Asia and Africa, which has been perpetuated in Western visual tradition through the prism of Orientalism for centuries. Reductive and exoticizing representations – associated, among other things, with the figure of the harem – not only served to justify narratives of the alleged oppression and backwardness of “Oriental” societies, but also reinforced hierarchical arrangements between the “West” and the “Orient.” The state of research on this issue points to intense criticism of Orientalist clichés, initiated by Edward Said’s analyses and developed by feminist and postcolonial researchers (including Lila Abu-Lughod, Meyda Yeğenoğlu, and Reina Lewis). An important place in the discourse is occupied by works on the visual representation of women in art, film, and the media, emphasizing their instrumentalization as figures serving to construct Western identity. At the same time, increasing attention is being paid to the strategies of female artists from Asia and Africa who, through their artistic practices, critique imposed images, reconstruct historical and cultural narratives, and develop alternative languages of visuality. The proposed publication, “Reversing Orientalizing Gaze: Counter-visuality and Representations in the Work of Female Artists from Asia and Africa,” aims to bring together analyses devoted to this process. The idea is to show how artists from regions marked by colonial and orientalizing traditions of visualization attempt to rewrite their own histories, and how their works create a space of counter-visuality (Nicolas Mirzoeff) – a form of visual response that not only exposes the mechanisms of stereotyping, but also produces new models of representation. The monograph will facilitate an in-depth reflection on the significance of contemporary art by women from Asia and Africa as a field of struggle for visibility, emancipation, and the redefinition of cultural roles. The rationale for choosing this topic is twofold its relevance in the context of global debates on equality, identity, and the decolonization of knowledge, as well as the need to create a research platform for the analysis of artistic phenomena that have been marginalized in Western academic discourse.
