Please note: submissions are now closed

On deft fingers, we keep the wobbling world aloft, pushing through the air. It spins on its axis, occasionally brushing past our fingertips only to be caught again. We’ve come up with all kinds of ways to navigate: maps, compasses, armillary spheres, globes, internets of things. The important thing is that the world is always moving—always just ahead of us. This year, travelers crashed to earth or hung in mid-air. How do we map a future world while we are standing still in the present?

For our Fall 2020 issue, The World Aloft, Dilettante Army strives to find other worlds in this one. We want to see the world laid out before us, shimmering at the horizon, full of strange creatures and new gardens. But even on a flood plain, our eyes travel where we can’t; while images circulate and money flows, fleshy bodies are halted at borders.

Dilettante Army seeks submissions that explore the freedom of maps and the limits of mobility, the things worth preserving in the world-as-is and the creation of new paths through old impasses. Possible topics include: cartography, borders, world-building, kinship networks, body clocks, the order of time, delaying tactics, escapism, people of recent invention, precarity, the jet set, novel arrangements, improvisations, and wobbling. 

Submission pitches should be emailed to editor Sara Clugage (sara@dilettantearmy.com) by August 13, 2020. Before submitting, please read our submission guidelines for more information on what we publish.

Image: Ala ad-Din Mansur-Shirazi, manuscript showing Taqi al-Din and other astronomers at the Istanbul Observatory, c. 1574-1595, Istanbul University Library, F 1404, fol. 57a (Ṣehinṣename, Book of the King of Kings), detail