Hashtags across Borders: Considering #Instapoetry as a Transglobal and Translingual Literary Movement, European Journal of English Studies (EJES) Volume 27 (2023)

Guest editors: Anna Nacher (Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie), James Mackay
(European University Cyprus), JuEunhae Knox (University of Glasgow-)

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the two issues of the journal to be
published in 2023. Potential contributors are reminded that EJES operates a two–stage review process. The first is based on the submission of detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) and results in invitations to submit full essays from which a final selection is then made. The deadline for essay proposals for this volume is 30 November 2021, with delivery of completed essays in the spring of 2022, and publication in Volume 27 (2023).

Procedure
EJES operates a two–stage review process.
1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30
November 2021.
2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external
specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short–listed
proposals to submit full–length essays for review with a spring 2022 deadline.
3. The full–length essays undergo another round of review, and a final selection as well
as suggestions for revisions are made. Selected essays are then revised and resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2022 for publication in 2023.
EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for
spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html

“Instapoetry” is a label used, often derisively, to describe short original illustrated poems
shared on Instagram and other social media sites. The genre has been hailed both as a
publishing miracle and also as the third generation of electronic literature: certainly, it is the most popular form of poetry in the 21st century in numerous countries. Less often noted, but highly significant, is the way that the removal of gatekeepers has created a direct route to market for young, diverse, working class voices. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another mainstream literary movement in English that has been so conspicuously led by young women of colour, with its most successful voices being Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav, Nayyirah Waheed, Cleo Wade and Najwa Zebian. The global reach of the Instagram platform has also created a unique cross–pollination that reaches across national and linguistic barriers. The millions of individual poems in this genre, linked by hashtags such as #poetsofinstagram,

#instapoem, or #writersofinstagram, contain examples in English, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and many other languages. While literary movements have spread across these languages before, the process has usually relied on translation: there is no precedent for such immediate global reach. At the same time, contemporary social media platforms are becoming the gatekeepers to a widely shared social reality that transgresses national boundaries but simultaneously realigns relationships of power and dominance.

In this special issue, we investigate Instapoetry as a simultaneously global and local
phenomenon. While the Instagram platform began in the United States, we areinterested in what happens when the global publishing conditions of Instapoetry meet the local poetic traditions of specific countries.
We invite discussions of the technopoetics of the network–based literary movement which analyze the complex relationship of the rhetorical and performative aspects of instapoetry. In particular, such investigations might investigate the platform–based (and algorithmically amplified) nature of literary circulation within differing cultural contexts, along the lines of the attention and affective economies of platform capitalism.

Contributors from all over the world, and from any of the disciplines covered by ESSE, are welcome. Specific questions that potential contributors might wish to consider include:
● Instapoetry as a vehicle for feminism and other forms of social justice discourse in
differing cultural contexts
● Instagram considered as a global near–monopoly, and its potential to McDonaldise
world poetry
● Instapoetry in the English language classroom
● Potentialities for subversive uses of the platform
● Reappropriation of classical poetries on the Instagram platform
● Using hashtags to read the global influence of Instapoetry
● Cultural gatekeeping, canons of taste, and the ways that Instapoetry challenges
academic concepts of “proper” poetry
● Technopoetics of dissent in the distributed reading/writing practices of social media
platforms
● The business model of professional Instapoets as influencers in a gig economy, and
the ways that this reflects a casualization of cultural labour in the contemporary world

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short
biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to all three editors by 30 November 2021:
Anna Nacher (anna.nacher@uj.edu.pl)

James Mackay (j.mackay@euc.ac.cy)

JuEunhae Knox (jueunhaeknox@gmail.com).

This issue will be part of Volume 27 (2023). All inquiries regarding this issue can be sent to the three guest editors.