CALL FOR PAPERS: (DE)GENDERING THE POSTCOLONIAL

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de genere: journal of literary, postcolonial and gendered studies has just issued its first call for papers. Please make note of it and pass word to anybody who might be interested in contributing to an exciting new publication.

The online open-access academic journal de genere offers a space for interdisciplinary research and critical debate in gender and postcolonial studies. The journal will be published biannually, with issues focusing on research on and around ‘genres’ and ‘genders’, moving within both juxtaposed semantic fields, and within literary, media and artistic forms and formations. The aim is that of mapping and investigating the transformations brought about by the emergence of the “unexpected” subjects of Western Modernity.

(de)gendering the postcolonial
Postcoloniali e generi – postcoloniali degeneri
Eds. Marta Cariello and Serena Guarracino

For the first issue of de genere, we intend to open the discussion on a broad range of topics which we hope will recur in future issues, in order to set a framework of intervention for the dialogue this newborn journal intends to activate. Postcolonial and gender, both in theoretical elaboration and through literary and artistic practices, have been in an ongoing conversation after the inception of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty called Third World feminism (1988). Yet in the intervening years gender has become a more multifaceted concept (see Butler, Muñoz, Preciado), although gendered bodies are still radically informed by their own location as well as by transnational power discourses. At the same time, while postcolonial literature and art have both, in a sense, gone ‘mainstream’ (as Sandra Ponzanesi’s recent monograph shows), neocolonial imaginaries shaped by contemporary international politics have renewed the challenges of neo-orientalist hegemonies (Appadurai, Balibar, Gandhi, Yegenoglu).

We welcome contributions investigating the ways in which the postcolonial emerges as a gendered discourse, and how contemporary gender elaborations take into account the complex layerings of postcolonial temporalities. Our intention is to map (albeit tentatively) the ways in which gender and postcolonial theories and narratives interface without necessarily coalescing. Their intertwined and/or divergent trajectories can be traced in theoretical frameworks as well as in literature and artistic practices, addressing the following issues and related topics:

  • The postcolonial gendered body in literature and the arts
  • The sexual politics of postcolonial writing
  • Gender and postcolonial: intersecting theories, divergent practices?
  • Narratives of transition: resignifying identities in migration
  • Whiteness and blackness as gendered narratives
  • Genre/gender: a postcolonial écriture féminine?
  • Performing gender, performing race
  • The threatened male body / the male body as threat

For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com

Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 30 June 2015.

Articles will be due on 15 September 2015.

For submission guidelines and further info: http://www.degenere-journal.it

Suggested reading list

  • Ahmed. Sara. 2014. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Alexander, Jacqui M. and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Eds. 1997. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. London and NY: Routledge.
  • Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Balibar, Etienne. “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1991. New York: Verso, 15–28.
  • bell hooks. [1984] 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge. South End Press.
  • Butler, Judith. 2003. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
  • Curti, Lidia. 2006. La voce dell’altra. Scritture ibride tra femminismo e postcoloniale, Roma, Meltemi.
  • Djebar, Assia. [1980] 1992 Women of Algiers in their Apartment. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
  • Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Gender in Literature. Virtual issue of the Journal of Gender Studies (July 2013): http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/access/Literature-VSI-June-2013.pdf
  • Hawley, John C., ed. 2001. Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. New York: State University of New York Press.
  • McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Eds. 1997. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30.
  • Moore, Lindsey.  2008. Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film. New York and London: Routledge.
  • Muñoz, José, E.. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Preciado, Beatriz. “Moltitudini Queer” (https://incrocidegeneri.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/beatriz-preciado-moltitudini-queer-note-per-una-politica-degli-anormali/), testo originale in Multitudes 56 (2014)
  • Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2014. The Postcolonial Cultural Industry. Icons, Markets, Mythologies, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
  • Suleri, Sara. 1992. “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” Critical Inquiry 18.4: 756-769.
  • Yegenoglu, Meyda. 1998. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Young, Robert J.C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Routledge.
  • Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage