Call for Papers – Race, Racialisation, and Racism
Posted on 23/07/2024
Call for Contributions to a special issue of New Formations.
Issues of race, racialisation, and racism have never been more salient to contemporary politics, and yet have never been as complex and multivalent in their interactions with class, nationality, religion, sexuality, gender and locality. Elite cosmopolitanism forms an increasingly visible element of some right-wing populist formations. The rapid endorsement and co-option of the Black Lives Matter movement by corporate elites, and the self-alignment of sections of the movement with those elites, throws into relief the question of how best to tackle intersections between racism, state violence and economic exploitation. Antisemitism and Anti-antisemitism now manifest in different parts of both right-wing and left-wing coalitions. New forms of ethno-nationalism and xenophobia seem less reliant on eugenic or epidermal racism than their twentieth-century antecedents. Concepts like ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘allyship’ circulate ever-more widely in popular culture, while at the same time, in the US and elsewhere, ‘critical race theory’ has become a target for reactionary political forces. These developments have complicated the boundaries between racism, xenophobia and nativism and their relevance to critical analysis and anti-racist action. In this context, what do we mean by ‘race’, ‘racialisation’, ‘racism’ and ‘anti-racism’ today?
Topics for contributions could include, but are not limited to:
• Is racism to be understood as a primarily institutional, psychological, economic, semiotic, or political phenomenon?
• Seventy years after the publication of Fanon’sBlack Skin, White Masks, is the synthesis of psychoanalysis with anti-colonial theory still useful?
• What is the ongoing contribution of Cultural Studies to this conversation?
• How far have neo-materialist, bio/necropolitical, and historicist theories of race and racism taken us?
• Can racial eliminativist sociological and philosophical critiques open up a radical space to escape the reproduction of racial reification and its pernicious effects?
• How does the tradition of ‘Black Marxism’ and the recent revival of interest in ‘racial capitalism’ relate to the legacy of ‘post-colonial’ theory?
• How might all such critical traditions respond to novel forms of neo-colonialism, such as China’s ‘Belt and Road’ project?
• To what extent do developments in US Black Studies such as Afropessimism, Afrofuturism and anti-blackness challenge established understandings of race and anti-racism?
• In what ways does ‘aesthetic education’ mark the limits of the sociology of race?
• Does the conceptualisation of colonialism as the foundational phenomenon of the modern era illuminate more than it obscures?
• Does ‘decolonisation’ have a political and organisational component, or is it merely a politics of consciousness?
• Do studies of migrancy, borders and transnational labour flows engender new ways of thinking racial subjectivity and place?
• What is the legacy today of ideas such as ‘political blackness’ and communist anti-imperialism, or the forms of solidarity that they engendered?
• How should we conceptualise the relationship of white people to the experience of racism and its contestation?
• In what ways do new digital technologies, molecular engineering, AI, and global communication networks challenge and transform the praxis of race and ant-racism?
• How are these issues being played out, experienced and explored beyond the sphere of the ‘Black Atlantic’, in Asia, South America and elsewhere?
This issue of New Formations will explore all of these issues at the level of theory and concrete analysis, and will welcome contributions to this aim from across the critical humanities and social sciences that are consistent with the journal’s established interests and orientations.
Confirmed contributors include: Shahdha Bari, Maitrayee Basu, Sarah Bufkin, Radhika Gajjala, Jeremy Gilbert, Barnor Hesse, Anamik Saha, Michael E. Sawyer, Ashwani Sharma.
Deadline for receipt of abstracts: August 28th 2024 (end of day).
To submit an abstract for consideration, please email newformationsjournal100@gmail.com, with the subject line ‘Race, Racisms and Resistance Abstract’. Please include a proposed title, a 200-300 word abstract and a bio note.
For any general queries, please send messages to the same address, and / or contact the journal editor Jeremy Gilbert (contact via http://www.jeremygilbert.org).
Abstracts will be reviewed and potential contributors notified of outcomes by the end of the first week of September 2024.
Deadline for first drafts of accepted articles: January 31st 2025. Publication will take place during 2025.