WUNRN
CALL FOR PAPERS ISSUE 4 – Complicities, Connections, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism / Deadline – 15 August 2014
Feral Feminisms, a new, independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, open-access online journal, invites submissions for a special issue entitled “Complicities, Connections, & Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism,” guest edited by Ghaida Moussa, Shaista Patel, and Nishant Upadhyay. Please direct inquiries and submissions no later than August 15, 2014, by email to the guest editors at Ghaida Moussa (gmoussa@yorku.ca), Shaista Patel (patel_shaista@yahoo.com), and Nishant Upadhyay (nishantu@yorku.ca).
Indigenous and/or critical race scholars and activists have raised questions about the anti-colonial and decolonization politics of diasporic people of colour living in white settler colonies. Some key discussions include whether people of colour are settlers, what their place is in the structure of white settler colonialism, and what kinds of anti- and de-colonial alliances they can form with Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies. Many of these conversations are heavily informed by the critiques of anti-racist scholarship put forth by the Mi’kmaw scholar Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) in their article “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Critiquing anti-racist scholars for failing to ground their critiques in the original and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples of the lands they now occupy, Lawrence and Dua argue that people of colour are complicit in ongoing processes of settler colonialism and nation-building. While several theorists of colour engaged with this article by examining and challenging their own complicity in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, some also challenged Lawrence and Dua’s arguments by critiquing their conflation of settler colonialism and immigration, and by questioning who is autochthonous to the land and what it means to claim rights based on indigeneity (Sharma and Wright, 2008/09).
With careful attention to semantics and with a firm caution to not metaphorize decolonization (Tuck and Yang, 2012), this special issue of Feral Feminisms calls for submissions that center indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, that explore the ways in which anti-racist theory and practice uphold and sustain colonial discourse, and that imagine social movements, communities, and scholarship that work within a social justice framework in ways that resist the reproduction of colonial dynamics. We encourage submissions that pay close attention to the ways in which multiple histories, violences, borders, spaces, time, race, gender, class, sexualities, and genealogies are mobilized to uphold white settler colonialism. We are also interested in exploring sites of solidarity, resistance, and hope between Indigenous peoples and people of colour. We invite contributors to displace the nation-state by engaging with critical feminist transnational perspective(s) and modes of knowledge production. We also take our cue here from Indigenous feminist writings that theorize Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty as challenges to the borders of white settler colonial states. Conjointly, we trace the lineages of these conversations to the contributions of Black feminists, feminists of colour, transnational feminists, and trans/queer theorists who disrupt the violence of settler colonialism by challenging the gendered and heteropatriarchal organizing of bodies in these white settler states.
Possible questions for exploration for this issue include:
- What are some of the common grounds between Indigenous
peoples and people of colour in struggles against racism, gender-based
violence, poverty, exclusionary immigration policies, labour
commodification and exploitation, police violence, the prison-industrial
complex, ableist policies and structures, invasions, and wars, that need
to be urgently (but ethically) examined?
- How are histories and presents of Indigenous peoples in
white settler colonies entangled with those of Indigenous peoples of
former European colonies, those living within present-day American
invasions (outside of the Americas), or those who have been forced on this
land through generations of slavery?
- How can we trace and resist histories, legacies and
violences of anti-Black racism in settler colonial contexts?
- How can we centre gender and sexuality in critiques of
settler colonialism and white supremacy?
- How can we challenge ableism within the nation state as
well as in the academy and engage with critical disability theoretical
interventions in the making of the settler nation state as well as racial
formations?
- How does trans theory help understand the making of
gender and exclusionary violences in white settler states?
- What place do migrants/refugees fleeing political,
economic, and social wars – some instigated by the “West” and some from
within the postcolonial nations – have in white settler societies?
- In what ways do extant imperial and colonial forces
operate differently towards these communities in terms of necropolitics
(Mbembe, 2002) in determining who is invited into the realm of social life
and who, instead, is confined to social death? More urgently, how does
“social” death come to be, at its extent, implicated in genocide and
concrete loss?
We welcome submissions from all fields that relate to Indigenous studies, social and political theory, critical race theory, anti-racism theory, settler colonialism, postcolonial theory, transnational theory, art and literature, critical disability studies, gender, feminist and women’s studies, trans and queer theory, and equity studies. We extend a hearty invitation to community members and social justice activists who engage in these discussion through their community work or activist endeavours. And, we clearly recognize that these categories of authors overlap and intertwine as resistance and survival are breathed in all spaces that we inhabit and travel in, and thus welcome contributions that challenge “academic writing” and the academic-industrial complex.
Special Submission Instructions: With your submission, please include a blurb (max. 300 words) stating your connection to the work you are submitting. While the blurb will not impact decision-making, it is meant to invite contributors to engage with the relationships between epistemology and knowledge production by evaluating their own social location as knowledge producers. To take the task of decolonizing knowledge seriously, it is imperative to question processes of knowledge production, creation, and distribution. Further, these blurbs will help the editors to better reflect on the submitted pieces and seek to place them in critical conversations with each other.