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Showing posts with label Race / Ethnic Studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Race / Ethnic Studies. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Call For Papers on Verge: Studies in Global Asias Issue 11.2 Special Issue: The Asian Century: Idea, Method, and Media

 



What is the Asian Century? Are we living in it? Do its recent invocations—by writers and readers, politicians and pundits, journalists and academics—mark a return to earlier eras of relative Asian centrality on the world stage or announce a future we have yet to inhabit? Is it a paranoid, U.S.-centered discourse of Western decline or a triumphant announcement of Asian economic-semiotic arrival? Is the Asian Century an aspiration or a threat—and to whom?

The term “Asian Century” has more than one origin story. Narrators are multiple, located in both Asia and the West. In a 1988 summit, China’s Deng Xiaoping, alongside Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, may have coined the phrase by calling it into question: “In recent years, people have been saying that the next century will be the century of Asia and the Pacific, as if that were sure to be the case. I disagree with this view.” For Deng, skepticism about the inevitability of Asia’s rise was going to be crucial to the India-China partnership against the “developed” world; his skepticism hasn’t aged well. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared a “pivot to Asia” in “America’s Pacific Century.” Clinton’s emphatic recapitulation of the “Asian Century” revived Western tropes of Asian ascendancy that predated Asia’s contemporary economic rise by more than a hundred years, while betraying American anxieties about the decline of US hegemony. In fact, both Deng and Clinton were responding to a process that had been underway since at least the early-1970s: the “long downturn” or tendential decline in profitability of Western economies that ran alongside the “economic miracles” of many Asian economies, including Japan’s Cold War-era boom and India’s and China’s eventual liberalization. For some, the Asian Century was, or is, a solution. Now, in an era of mounting deglobalization, its contradictions are just as sharply felt as its curious staying power.

What distinguishes the current round of Asian Century discourse is perhaps its mutual construction by “Asians” and “Westerners” alike. When the Asian Century came into wide currency in the 1990s, replacing a then-regnant “Pacific Rim” and “Pacific Century” rhetoric, it remediated a long history of similarly totalizing visions that issued not least from the “Asians” themselves: from Japan’s monstrous pursuit of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere and Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorial imposition of neoliberal programs in the Philippines, to the advertisement of the “Singapore model” and even China’s “century of humiliation,” which continues to vouchsafe its nationalist ressentiment. As Wang Hui’s analysis of the politics of imagining Asia has shown, visions of the Asian Century betray contradictory regionalist and nationalist ambitions that are held in focus by the apparatuses of the state and the culture industries. Thus Asian Century discourse is typically inflected by a nation or speaker’s position vis-a-vis key market and state brokers. Given that the meaning of “Asia” looks different depending on the vantage of Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, or for that matter Saudi Arabia, what is the role of pan-Asian alliances and inter-Asian competition in constituting the Asian Century? Is Asia “one”—or only in the eyes of the West?

This special issue invites critical perspectives from scholars working in and across multiple languages and disciplines. We seek submissions that explore the Asian Century as idea, method, and media, and that examine its genealogies and itineraries from a range of contexts and histories, including of labor, empire, capital, war, technology, pandemics, dispossession, modernization, culture, and aesthetics. With “idea, method, and media,” we intend to inspire, but not circumscribe, the possible range of disciplinary approaches and primary sources that might be enlisted in responding to this call. Indeed, the idea of the Asian Century may very well be predicated on counter-articulations of its impossibility. While the Asian Century may appear at first as periodizing marker or geopolitical diagnostic, we propose that it can also be read across media and cultural forms, as an affective relation to the past, present, and future, as a structure of feeling, and as a visual and sensorial regime. Finally, in proposing the Asian Century as method, we seek to revisit and reimagine the interdisciplinary stakes of the longstanding conversation on “Asia as method.”

For example, what humanistic and social scientific methods can best track the concept’s intellectual and institutional emergence, circulation, and mediation, including well before the 21st century? How might regional Asian rivalries shape the supply chains and the capital flows of emerging trade blocs like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? How have cultural production and intellectual exchange furnished the cognitive and affective frameworks for these blocs, and for Asian visions of global expansion like China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, South Korea’s cultural exports, and Taiwan’s advanced semiconductor industry? Given the increasing salience of the Asian Century as a concept for periodizing the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, how might we trace its effects and iterations in and beyond political economy? What was the Asian Century, understood as visions and projections of Asia’s rise promoted by those who stood to benefit from such characterizations? What of the legacy and future of Third World decolonization and Indigenous struggles when Asian peripheries become, or have threatened to become, global powers? Rather than take for granted the rise of Asia as such, we seek to understand how and why Asia’s ostensible ascendance has seen not a lessening but rather a retrenchment of the conditions of planetary inequality.

Essay Submissions

Essays (between 6,000–10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form by May 1, 2024 and prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format of the Chicago Manual of Style. See section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide or chapter 15 of the Chicago Manual of Style Online for additional formatting information.

Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, address, institutional affiliations, and the title of the article with your electronic submission. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author’s previous work, for example, should be in the third person.

Please direct all inquiries to verge@psu.edu.

Contact Email
verge@psu.edu

Friday, October 27, 2023

Call for Book Chapters : Marginalities in South Asian Literature: Text, Context and Theory -Routledge Book Series

 CONCEPT NOTE

In the context of literature, the term marginality would encompass not only the issues related to the social, cultural, economic or geopolitical spaces that give rise to it but also the literature emerging from these contexts and the communities suffering and contesting it. Such literatures that address the experience of marginality create discourses and counter discourses. Our proposed book is therefore interested in the trio: text, context and theory. Defining the margin/marginality is complex. The “margin” is a space which is generally understood in relation to the centre which is powerful socially, politically, economically, culturally, geographically and linguistically. But the margin does not belong only to the realm of the fringe, it is a dynamic space. It is a space full of possibilities. While the margin may refer to people who live on the peripheries, whose voices are ignored, who may have no representation in mainstream societies, it can at the same time become a space of impending conflict, confrontation and tension because it can question the logic of the divide of the centre and periphery. The problem with the discourse of marginality, however, is that one may get trapped in it in a bid to simply overturn it. But the margin is much more than that. It may offer a sustained scenario of contestation for its rights and share of power, thereby paving ways for new possibilities. The representation of the marginal subject, therefore, is extremely interesting and complex, especially in literature, because literature has the possibility in it to move beyond this kind of binary dialectics and demonstrate the problematics involved in its interstitial, in-between, hybrid, spaces. Such complex readings will help us understand the structures of dominance, discrimination, hierarchy and marginality in a multifaceted way keeping in mind the politics of difference in a multipolar, multicultural world.

The evolution of capitalism after its beginnings in the Enlightenment period to a post-Enlightenment transformation in neoliberalism and globalization has now created marginalities on an expansive scale in more varied ways. While these enterprises, backed by political systems, have privileged certain regions and groups, they have also incapacitated others. Western standards and concepts of progress and development imposed on other societies and indigenous cultures have suppressed the local and the regional cultures in different neo-colonial ways. Again, there is another side to marginality in a society: one’s acceptance into various cultural communities is also determined by one’s birth and other determinations such as gender, race, caste, disability, religion, region and so on. Many of these categories decide whether one is an insider or an outsider in a particular nationspace. One has to negotiate between the dominance of the mainstream culture and the marginality of one’s own subculture. Marginality also brings about psychological uncertainties, having to move between discord and harmony, exclusion and inclusion. While this rivets our attention to the question of the marginal personality, more recent studies have addressed the problematic in terms of further specificities as to how marginality affects one’s access to resources, opportunities, knowledge, respect, rights, recognition and identity. Consequently, while talking of marginality, one cannot but talk of mobilizations and movements which challenge these oppressive systems and hegemonic structures, and thereby give rise to the question of agency and emancipatory discourses. We have kept in view this diverse socio-political terrain of marginality, and for our projected volume, we are interested in these multifarious aspects of the varied kinds of marginality as represented in the different genres of South Asian Literature. We are also interested in the studies on the Contexts and Theories relevant to the proposed area and problematics concerned.

 South Asian writing is populated by varied experiences of marginality specific to its history and localised realities. For instance, the figure of the muhajir, dalit, hijra or adivasi, some of whom find space in more universal social identity groups representing marginal experiences like race, religion, gender, caste, disability, region or tribe. Particular events in the history of the region like the Partition, Bhopal gas disaster, British rule and recent neoliberalisation-led economic developments have been moments where the tensions between dominant and other sub-groups have crafted the marginalised figure. Consequently, these historical contexts also alert us to the shifting terrain of the experience of marginality where the once dominant group can also become marginalised later, as is seen in the experience of colonisation for upper-caste identity. The ecological consequences of a shared history of multiple settlements and pursuit of economic development are evident in the change of the natural topography owing to deforestation and urbanisation. The negotiations between city dwellers, agrarian and forest-dwelling communities, are also therefore marked by framing of socio-political identity in the South Asian nation-state that creates and recreates the marginalised figure. 

 

The proposed anthology is therefore interested in contributions that would primarily analyse literary representations and cultural discourses in the following areas but not limited to these:

  • The experiences of social, political and economic marginalisation on the basis of caste, gender, disability, region, religion, tribe, ethnicity or race
  • LGBTQ+, sexuality and fluid identities
  • Marginal psychology, culture, hybridity, identity
  • Framing of the nation, transnation, border and narratives of exclusion and displacement and the framing of the citizen in the nation state
  • Marginalisation as a communal experience and the dynamics between individual, community and society
  • Economic development in the postcolonial neoliberal nation state and the accompanying ecological fallout
  • Ecology and environmental justice and the gendered perspective of ecology
  • Poverty as a marker of the vulnerability and precarity of marginalised identity
  • The dialectics of voice and representation in narratives of marginalisation
  • The subversion of canonical and aesthetic standards of literary stylistics in texts that represent the experience of marginalised identities.

 

Key information for prospective authors:

  1. Abstract with a title and keywords: 250-300 words
  2. Word limit of full papers including citations: 6000- 8000 words
  3. Style of citation: MLA 9th  edition
  4. Email your submission to: marginalities2@gmail.com

 

*The proposed anthology will be published by a reputed publisher

Deadline for abstract submissions: October 30, 2023

Abstract selection notification:   November 30, 2023

Deadline for full paper submission: January 30, 2024

 



Contact Email
marginalities2@gmail.com


Dr. Arunima Ray

Associate Professor

Department of English

Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi

New Delhi
 

Dr. Karuna Rajeev

Assistant Professor

Department of English

Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi

New Delhi


Dr. Goutam Karmakar

NRF Postdoctoral Fellow

University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Routledge Book Series Editor on South Asian Literature

&

Visiting Scholar

Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society

LMU München, Germany
 

 

 

Thursday, October 12, 2023

Call for Book Chapters: "#Disability, #Race, and #Masculinity: #Disabling and #Resisting the Disabling of #Black #Masculinity"






Vernon Press invites book chapters for a forthcoming edited volume on the subject of "Disability, Race, and Masculinity: Disabling and Resisting the Disabling of Black Masculinity."

Emerging as one of the branches of health/medical humanities, Disability Studies has been of interest to scholars and researchers from Literature, to Psychology, Medicine, Law and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The past few years have witnessed the rising importance of and interest in informing disability studies from multidisciplinary, intersectional approaches. Understanding the term ‘disability’ often ignites questions regarding how and why one’s (dis)ability is distinctly understood and construed by a composite of factors like race, gender and class. How do existing theoretical frameworks diversify the conceptual and contextual understanding of disability beyond its traditional sense, linked only with defects or disease in the biological body? How do biological-physical impairment and the broader range of disabilities (social, legal, etc.) at once overlap and stand apart?

This book proposes to bring into its ambit critical trajectories offered within and beyond the periphery of disability studies that shape the meaning of disability as a product of social injustice, not just medical condition. Disability thus becomes a mark of, a way to understand, and a new venue for critique of the formation of minority identity, interrogating the social construction and existence of identities subject to the politics of social control.

David Mitchell and Sharon Synder observe that, “stigmatized social positions founded upon gender, class, nationality and race have often been relied upon disability to visually underscore the devaluations of marginal communities.” Douglas Baynton reveals that discrimination in United States against people of color, women and immigrants has been justified historically by representing them as disabled. This book will incorporate chapters and articles that will broaden by bringing into conversation the critical scholarship and discourses on disability, race and masculinity. The chapters will offer comparative study of works/texts, thus presenting a new body of theory to several fields of critical scholarship; it will offer fresh research and critical approaches to primary materials rather than secondary research on the topic. After an introduction informed by a thorough review of existing scholarship, each chapter will further contribute to understanding, interpretation, and theorizing of the intersections of race, masculinity and disability and fill in gaps or create new, interrogative spaces.

Contributors will expand current disability studies and thus serve to initiate new alignments in future race, masculinity, and disability studies. This is a scholarly effort to transgress beyond conventional responses by interrogating the intersections of race, disability, and masculinity.

Chapters will address the following themes, but will not be limited to:

  • Race, Masculinity and Disability in Literature and Film
  • Law and Social Justice: Disabled/ing Black Masculinity in US Prisons
  • Politics of Spaces: Disability, Blackness and Masculinity
  • Human Rights and Black Masculinity: Negotiating Identity with (Dis)ability
  • Affect, Disability, and Black Masculinity
  • Resisting Disability: Reading Black Masculinity and (Dis)ability
  • Writing and Resisting Racial Disability in/through Life Narratives

Chapter proposal submission

An abstract of not more than 300 words, and five keywords must also be submitted along with a brief profile of the contributor to Dr Sucharita Sharma, sucharita.sharma@iisuniv.ac.in
Plagiarism report of the paper along with the full paper submission.
Kindly adhere to MLA 9th Edition style of citation.
The length of the full paper should be between 4000-5000 words.


The proposed deadlines are as follows:
Deadline for abstracts submission: January 30, 2024
Acceptance of abstracts: February 15, 2024
Full chapter submission:  April 20, 2024

Contact Information

Dr Sucharita Sharma

Contact Email
sucharita.sharma@iisuniv.ac.in

Monday, October 9, 2023

Two Day #International #Student #Seminar #Girl, (Un)Interrupted Identity, #Experience, #Agency, and #Representation -Jesus and Mary College University of Delhi New Delhi 1st-2nd November 2023

Organized by: English Literary Association Department of English Jesus and Mary College 

 Concept Note

Girlhood Studies emerged as a distinct field of study in the 1990s, in the Anglophone North, influenced by a growing discourse on gender equality, especially in fields like science, math, and technology. However, its roots can be traced back to the 1970s when second wave feminist scholars began critiquing the disproportionate focus on boyhood in youth research. In the West, Black Girlhood Studies has emerged to address the under-representation of Black girls in the field. Similarly, there has been powerful scholarship examining the cross-section of disabilities with Girlhood Studies. Recently, South Asian scholars have made critical interventions in the field by exploring the historical erasure of the experiences of girlhood in the region. They have highlighted how the figure of the girl has been overdetermined by the anxieties about, and for, the woman she would become. Seen always as only “becoming a woman,” and never allowed to be a girl, the South Asian woman, nonetheless, has been treated like a little girl who needs “protection.” Given these paradoxical operations of erasure, hypersexualisation and infantilisation, it is no surprise that girls and “girlhood” are missing from Indian novels. Obviously, “Swami & Friends” did not, indeed, could not have any sisters whose childhood predicaments and perplexities, pranks and play, merited any attention! Pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial girlhoods are now being investigated from many different perspectives. By using an intersectional approach, for example, Dalit and Adivasi girlhoods have emerged as distinct fields of research. 

About the Seminar

 This student seminar invites in-depth and extensive exploration of the conceptualization of girlhood in all types of literary (fictional and non fictional), performative and multimedial narratives. The seminar hopes to arrive at a richer understanding of the multiple experiences and constructions of “girlhood” through time, especially in its complex interplay with traditional or modern hegemonic discursivities, socio-cultural formations and politico economic imperatives. Also, this student seminar aims to establish Critical Girlhood Studies as a robust academic domain of research amongst young scholars. We invite undergraduate and postgraduate students to submit their contributions for an interdisciplinary student seminar that delves into the many dimensions of Girlhood Studies. 

 Coming of age and other narratives Subcultures and fandoms Social media and girlhood Disability and girlhood studies Capitalism, consumerism, and girlhood Performing girlhood Intersectionality of race, religion, ethnicity, caste, class, etc. Menstruation Queering and trancing girlhoods Media and representation Violence, risks, and betrayals Education, health, and rights Mobility and access Beauty standards and body dysmorphia Girl brides Play and sports 


 We welcome papers and presentations that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

  • Coming of age and other narratives 
  • Subcultures and fandoms
  •  Social media and girlhood Disability and girlhood studies 
  • Capitalism, 
  • consumerism, and girlhood 
  • Performing girlhood 
  • Intersectionality of race, religion, ethnicity, caste, class, etc. 
  • Menstruation Queering and transing girlhoods 
  • Media and representation 
  • Violence, risks, and betrayals 
  • Education, health, and rights Mobility and access 
  • Beauty standards and body dysmorphia Girl brides Play and sports 

 We welcome papers and presentations that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes: 


  PLEASE NOTE: 

This seminar will be held in the hybrid mode. The first day (1st November) will be held online on Zoom. 

The second day (2nd November) will be an in-person event at Jesus and Mary College, DU. Artwork: Young Girls by Amrita Sher-Gill  

Abstract Submission Deadline 19th October 2023

 Notification of Acceptance 29th October 2023 

Full Paper Submission Deadline You can submit your abstract using this GoogleForm: bit.ly/GirlSeminar 

Alternatively you can email it to: girluninterrupted2023@gmail.com 

Name and Contact information

 Paper Title - Full paper title for the presentation Paper Abstract - 250-word abstract 4-5 keywords Word Document; 12 Times New Roman; Double spaced Your submission should contain: Girl, (Un)Interrupted

 Important Dates

 This National Student Seminar is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students of all streams from different academic institutions across the country. The presenters will need to show their current ID as proof of academic affiliation. Presenters from outside Delhi may opt for presenting in the online mode on the second day. WHO CAN APPLY? CERTIFICATES HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT: All the registered participants will be issued e-certificates of participation/presentation. 


 FOR FURTHER QUERIES, PLEASE CONTACT: GIRLUNINTERRUPTED2023@GMAIL.COM San Martin Marg, Bapu Dham, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, Delhi 110021 Register here: bit.ly/GirlUninterrupted 

Saturday, April 22, 2023

PAMLA 2023 Panel: Changing Perspectives on Migration through Literature in Translation. October 26-29, 2023. USA

 

PAMLA 2023 Panel

 Changing perspectives on migration through literature in translation



This is a panel at the PAMLA conference in the USA

Migration has become a global phenomenon that indicates complexity and diversity. The mobility of people has also influenced how texts are migrated through translation and how it could influence cultural production. Translation, which facilitates “communication, understanding, and action between persons or groups who differ in language and culture” (Bassnett 5), plays a vital role in the migration diaspora. Texts like people, want to seek new opportunities, they search for a new life in a new place and time, as Moira Inghilleri points out in her book entitled Translation and Migration published in 2017, migration is a “continuous becoming”, it “necessitates movement” (1 & 3). Examining the mobility of people and texts from a socio-cultural model through translation is the aim of this proposed panel. The panel seeks to open dialogue to discuss how identities and experiences are negotiated and perspectives are shifted through literary representation. 

This panel welcomes researchers and speakers working on the intersection between migration, translation, and various literary forms. Panelists will discuss the intersection between migration, translation, and various literary forms. Narrations on migration from an interdisciplinary and diverse perspective are included in this panel under the theme of 'Shifting Perspectives'. This panel would explore the role of translated literature in supporting empathy, understanding, making visibility and achieving agency through the lens of migration and translation. Michael Cronin, a celebrated translation scholar, describes the migrants as “translated beings” who move from one language and culture to another (45). A migrant's response to the new linguistic situation is either “translational assimilation, which means trying to translate themselves into the predominant language” or “translational accommodation”, which uses translation as a means to maintain their native languages” (Cronin 47-48). Migrant-translated literature suggests physical, linguistic, and cultural border-crossings that shape migrant identities. The conceptualization of migration in the field of cultural literacy includes the movement of texts, the international exchange of knowledge, and cultural transformation through the lens of translation. Ultimately, migration can be seen as translation. This special panel will focus on how migrant literature translates into new cultural territories and capture their norms. Suggested topics may include: 

- Incorporating native cultures into the host culture.

- Cultural codes translated into linguistic codes by immigrants 

- In the context of ethnic translation as a function of communication in and across the diaspora, literature serves both as a means of communication and as a reflection of it. 

- Translating migrant literature presents translation challenges, i.e. switching codes 

This panel invites researchers to examine migration in relation to translation and literature in greater depth. Independent researchers and academics are invited to submit an abstract (200-300 words) and a short bio.

Contact Info: 

Dr. Khetam Shraideh

Saturday, January 22, 2022

CFP:American Historical Association Panel, "Working for the State in Peace and War: Gender, Race, and Labor in the 20th Century, Philadelphia, Jan 2023

 Working for the State in Peace and War: Gender, Race, and Labor in the 20th Century-Philadelphia, Jan 2023

What can centering the experiences of workers for the state tell us about the growth of the state; the impact of war on societies; and relationships between citizen and state? Who did the often undervalued and unrecognized labor that enabled large military and civil efforts?

Our proposed panel for the 2023 American Historical Association Conference (Philadelphia, PA, January 5-8, 2023) will cohere around an intersectional consideration of gender and race among government and military employees in the long twentieth century.

Thus far, presentations include a consideration of working men in the British Army Army Service Corps between 1914 and 1918; a consideration of Solomon Islander workers and the battle of Guadalcanal; and a consideration of cleaning women at the US Treasury Department at the turn of the twentieth century. We seek another paper considering non-military laborers in the long twentieth century and a scholar who can act as commentator. We are open regarding geographic focus, but we do have a strong preference for a paper that is located in the twentieth century. If interested, please send an email introducing yourself and your research interests to Hannah Alms and Tommy Stephens at halms@iu.edu and tstephe@iu.edu by January 31.



Contact Info: 

Tommy Stephens and Hannah Alms 

tstephe@iu.edu and halms@iu.edu

Ph.D. Candidates, History Department

Indiana University

Contact Email: