Call for Papers

Afro-Latinos in Movement:

Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas

Deadline: June 15, 2014

Editors: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau (Virginia Tech), Jennifer A. Jones (Notre Dame), Tianna S. Paschel (University of Chicago)

How do ideas about, and experiences of, blackness travel across the Americas? How does this circulation of representations of blackness - through popular music, the internet, print media, and scholarship - influence local ideas of race and nation?  How does (im)migration to and within the Americas shape and reshape understandings about blackness? Afro-Latinos in Movement - an edited interdisciplinary volume being prepared for Palgrave Macmillan's Afro-Latino Diasporas Series - seeks to answer such questions. A collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded chapters and original artwork, this book will examine African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latinos in the United States in order to explore broader questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism and diaspora in the Americas.

Afro-Latinos in Movement draws on previous works on race and blackness in Latin America and U.S. Latino communities, while also providing a uniquely hemispheric approach. The volume will build up from the U.S. context to critically examine how blackness, and more specifically afrolatinidad, is understood, transformed, and re-imagined across locales throughout the Americas. In this way, the volume emphasizes the multiple movements across geographic borders, and over time. Thus, Afro-Latinos in Movement will broaden and deepen the discussion on afrolatinidad in the Americas by providing a critical transnational approach to understanding blackness in the region.

Afro-Latinos in Movement will be arranged in three sections, each of which will emphasize the multidisciplinary aspect of this volume by incorporating a range of works including creative or biographical pieces. While the volume will highlight the circulation of ideas and identities across borders more generally, we expect that about half of the contributions will center on Afrolatinidad in the United States.

To that end, we invite manuscripts from both historical and contemporary perspectives that address topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• The role of social media and the internet in shaping afrolatinidad
• Afro-Latino cultural and political movements
• The impact of migration on understandings of afrolatinidad
• Representations of afrolatinidad in media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, digital media)
• Theoretical interventions on diaspora and transnationalism in the Americas

Submission Guidelines

We invite complete manuscripts from all disciplines for inclusion in this volume, including relevant creative works.  All submissions (creative or scholarly) must be original.

All submissions are due by 11:59pm EST on June 15, 2014 and should include:

• Author(s) curriculum vitae as separate attachment;
• Manuscript title;
• Name, institutional affiliation, discipline, position or title, and contact information of author(s) including email address and phone number;
• Abstract of the paper or creative piece up to 200 words;
• Keywords (maximum of 6);
• All tables and illustrations;
• Brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly or professional biography of each author;
• Scholarly papers should be 5000 to 8000 words, inclusive of references;
• Poems, short stories, creative essays and biographical entries should be a maximum of 5000 words;
• Artwork should be sent jpeg format, compressed to no larger than 25 MB (larger formats will be used for publication).

Manuscripts should be submitted via electronic attachment (word or PDF file preferred) to: AfroLatinosinMovement@gmail.com with 'Volume Submission' in the subject line. CVs should be included as a separate document. Manuscripts may be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be reviewed continuously until the submission deadline. Final decisions will be issued to authors no later than July 30th 2014. Manuscripts will be published in English only.

Submitted manuscripts or artwork should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts will be reviewed by the editors for inclusion. Submissions will be continuously reviewed until the deadline. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page.

If you have any additional inquiries regarding the Call for Papers, submission guidelines, or volume series, please direct all inquiries to: AfroLatinosinMovement@gmail.com