Call for Papers for Edited Volume
Remembering and Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Dialogues
Proposal Deadline: September 3, 2019
Editorial Committee: Alison Crosby, Malathi de Alwis, Heather Evans, Honor Ford-Smith, Shahrzad Mojab, Carmela Murdocca
Contact Information: memorializingviolence@gmail.com
Introduction and Scope:
In recent decades, a growing body of feminist scholarship has attended to the ways that we remember and memorialize our collective pasts, particularly those inscribed with political violence and social injustice (Doss 2010; Hirsch & Smith 2002; Lehrer et al. 2011; Radstone & Schwarz 2010). Feminist scholars from diverse disciplines and positionalities have illuminated how remembrance and memorialization practices are spaces of contestation over racially gendered histories, ideologies, subjectivities and imaginaries (Dean 2015; de Alwis 2009; Edkins 2003; Jacobs 2010; Razack 2012; Sturken 1997).
Such contributions have made important interventions in a predominantly white Euro-American and liberal feminist canon of cultural memory literature that has burgeoned since the 1970s. They have called attention to the exclusionary and hegemonizing tendencies of traditional memorials, while also accounting for remembrance and memorialization through storytelling, oral histories, filmmaking, testimonies, photography, poetry, performance, artistic productions, rituals, ceremony, monuments, and archives, etc. as dynamic spaces through which communities affected by political violence resist, mobilize and enact agency (Ford-Smith 2014; Gómez-Barris 2009, 2016; Riaño-Alcalá 2015; Suarez & Suarez 2016; Taylor 2003).
These interventions are unfortunately often siloed, precluding broader theoretical and methodological conversation. And although there exist a number of regional investigations of remembrance and memorialization initiatives in the aftermath and afterlife of political violence (Bilbija & Payne 2011; Jelin 2003; Taylor 2003), rarely do they center intersectional feminist analyses of Indigeneity, racialization, gender, sexuality and class in theorizing how those initiatives formulate within and move through complex transnational flows and circuits.
The volume will offer timely insight into how established and emerging feminist artists, activists and scholars are thinking transnationally about the remembrance and memorialization of racially gendered colonial, imperial, militarized and state violence. We invoke a broad and critical understanding of the transnational that attends to the particularities and specificities of place-based struggles and different experiences as the grounds from which to explore connections, similarities and coalitional possibilities (Alexander 2005; Alexander & Mohanty 2010; Grewal & Kaplan 2000; Trotz 2006). We ask what a transnational feminist lens might reveal about the contested space of remembrance and memorialization, and its role in shaping our social and political realities. We also ask what the lens of remembrance and memorialization may conversely illuminate about our transnational feminist engagements and commitments, scholarly, artistic, activist and otherwise.
Call for Papers:
We welcome chapter proposals and creative work (that can be in print form) on a range of themes and topics, including but not limited to:
- Forgetting, silence and silencing;
- Performance as a framework for understanding remembrance and memorialization practices;
- How experiences of mourning, grief and loss can mobilize political communities locally and transnationally, and/or reveal inherent interconnections among and through seemingly disparate contexts;
- The complexities that arise as memorials and related narratives travel;
- What subjectivities are produced through memorialization practices, and what happens as they move across time and space;
- Ways that communities and activists generate anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist critiques through remembrance and memorialization practices, and the intergenerational dimensions of such;
- Representing the unrepresentable, and the ethical considerations therein;
- How to confront violence through the lenses of remembrance and memorialization while resisting, subverting and transforming its fetishization and spectacularization;
- How artistic and curatorial practices function as forms of remembrance and memorialization, and/or challenge what it means to memorialize violent pasts;
- How transitional justice and human rights regimes shape and constrain the global remembrance and memorialization landscape.
Those whose submissions are selected for the volume will be invited to participate in a workshop in May or June 2020 at York University in Toronto, Canada (funding permitted). The workshop will be an opportunity to receive and offer feedback on paper drafts prior to final submission. It will also serve as a venue through which to collaboratively build our conceptions of transnationalism, and in particular how they inform our theorizations of remembrance and memorialization, and of memory more broadly.
By putting into dialogue contributions from a variety of locations, contexts, disciplines, and methodological approaches, we hope to begin mapping genealogies of critical transnational feminist theoretical engagements with remembrance and memorialization, to generate innovative conversations and to facilitate ongoing collaborations.
Submission Instructions:
Please submit a 500-word abstract (including a working title for the proposed chapter), along with a short biography (250 words max.) to memorializingviolence@gmail.com with the subject line “Edited Volume Submission.” Final chapters will be approximately 8,000 words, including footnotes and bibliography.
This call for proposals has been developed in consultation with a leading academic publisher. Following the initial selection of proposals, a full book proposal will be sent to the publisher for review. Upon acceptance, chapter authors will be sent detailed guidelines. Chapters must be original and should not be submitted for publication elsewhere.
Deadline for Proposal Submission: September 3, 2019
Notification of Acceptance: September 30, 2019
For any further questions, you may contact memorializingviolence@gmail.com.