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Special Issue: The Manifesto’s Transformations

Rhetorica Scandinavica

 

With the special issue ‘The Manifesto’s Transformations’ Rhetorica Scandinavica wants to address one of the most discussed and contested cultural artifacts: the manifesto. It would not be an exaggeration to say that manifestos are important in our time. Manifestos revitalize class struggles in poetic bestsellers, describe utopias on the web pages of tech giants, describe fair trade principles on coffee packaging in the supermarket and circulate in the darker corners of the internet in the aftermath of mass shootings. Today you can smell like a manifesto, look like a manifesto, and play tennis like a manifesto.

                      In the classic Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (1999) Janet Lyon argues

convincingly that the forms and functions of the manifesto were inextricably linked to modernity’s ideas about universal subjects meeting in a common public sphere. Now, 25 years later, the foundations for modernity’s thoughts about the universal subject and shared public spheres have been challenged by issues such as digitalization, platformization, intersectionality, and decolonial critique. Despite these challenges, the manifesto appears to be thriving. New approaches to the genre do exist. Puchner have analyzed the political manifesto (2006), Somigli the artistic (2003), and Winkiel have pointed out the blind spots within manifesto theory regarding racialization (2008). Furthermore, one could mention the feminist endeavor by Sara Ahmed as presented in the Killjoy manifesto (2017) as well as a recent special edition of Culture, Theory and Critique (2023), focusing on how current manifestos are ”affected by socio-political forces and mutates across wider economic, cultural and epistemic structures” (Chrysagis og Kompatsiaris 2023: 3). Having said that, lacunas still exist in the humanities and in rhetorical criticism when it comes to understanding the current explosion in numbers and functions of manifestos. These lacunas are even more surprising because the manifesto, with its many challenging forms and constitutive ambitions, is an obvious interconnection for a range of theoretical problems within the field of rhetoric, such as ethos, affect, agency, public spheres, genre, and style.

                      With this special issue, we invite investigations of rhetorical aspects of manifestos in the 21st century. We are interested both in how the manifestos of our time transform the formats of classical manifestos and in how manifestos transform the times we are living in. We are particularly interested in articles that examine, reflect upon or challenge the diversity, creativity, “misfit-ness”, and inventiveness of the manifesto. Potential areas of investigation could be:     

 

  • Current Scandinavian manifestos and their role in constitution or revolutionizing ideas about ‘the scandinavic’, the nation, public sphere, culture
  • Relations between manifestos and technology, e.g. manifestos of technologies or about the ways techno manifestos form dystopic or utopic visions of our future   
  • The manifesto as a brand
  • Posthuman manifestos
  • The manifesto and/as politics in late modern public spheres
  • The personal manifesto / the manifesting personality: ethos, persona, character
  • The manifesto and/as genre
  • The forms and functions of climate manifestos
  • The manifesto as a tool for (or against) marginalized voices, e.g. focusing on intersectional perspectives
  • The self-contradicting rhetoric in manifestos
  • The multi-modal, digital and circulated manifesto
  • The manifestos constitutive potential or lack thereof
  • The manifesto and (the new) style: pronouns, figures, tropes

 

Do you want to contribute?

The articles for the special issue will be selected based on the received abstracts. Send your abstract (300-500 words) about the intended article’s content plus theoretical and methodical point of departure to Daniel Madsen (dama@hum.ku.dk). Scandinavian authors are invited to write in Scandinavian languages; English contributions are welcome as long as they discuss issues, themes or artifacts that relate to Scandinavian contexts. The deadline for abstracts is 23/4/25. The deadline for complete articles is 20/11/25.          

 

For more details, see the style guide from Rhetorica Scandinavia:

https://www.retorikforlaget.se/for-skribenter/

 

 

About the Journal:

Rhetorica Scandinavia is an academic and interdisciplinary journal whose purpose is to publish and thus highlight Scandinavian rhetoric research. It is the only scientific journal in Scandinavia that specifically addresses rhetorical research and its relevance to other academic fields and society. Rhetorica Scandinavica is an international peer-reviewed journal, where articles are always reviewed by (at least) two external editors. Articles are anonymized before review.

 

The Editors of the Special Issue:

Daniel Nikolaj Madsen, Københavns Universitet

Kira Skovbo Moser, Aarhus Universitet

Stefan Iversen, Aarhus Universitet