CFP SPECIAL ISSUE of South Atlantic Review:

 

Submission Guidelines: https://samla.memberclicks.net/sar

 

Black Transnationalism and the Discourse(s) of Cultural Hybridity

 

To be and exist as part of the African Diaspora is increasingly synonymous with cultural hybridity. One is simultaneously African/American, Black/British, African/Arab, Afro/Brazilian. The question of a national identity, when grappling with the varied stigmas of "blackness" is a vexed one; indeed, African ancestry can weave an even more tangled web around hybridity and patriotic allegiances when the site of the metropole becomes fluid and diverse. "Striving to be both European and African," for instance, "requires some specific forms of double consciousness," Paul Gilroy asserts in the opening lines of The Black Atlantic. Gilroy further describes the challenge of negotiating multiple identities, particularly when "occupying the space between them or trying to demonstrate their continuity." It is within the interstices of these seeming mutually exclusive terms that "African" and "European" acquire specialized meaning(s); but for Gilroy, as well as others, this intersectional encounter of cultural identities is a moment fraught with ambiguity, one that signals for some a "provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination."

 

We are seeking essays for a special issue of South Atlantic Review that explore how critics, scholars, and authors organize, divide, and clarify such ambiguity when conveying black identity and experience from transnational perspectives. More specifically, we are interested in criticism that unravels how narratives of black transnationalism-ranging from literature, poetry, and autobiographical works to film, poplar media, and personal letters-unearth complex articulations of multivalent black ontologies. These essays should interrogate the fluidity with which the socio-conceptual terms "African" and "European" inform the racial and ideological boundaries that shape such expressions of black cultural hybridity. Forms of expressions that necessarily straddle the often unstable bifurcation of Western/European culture, African/Black experiences and the gray areas in between include, but are not limited to the following topics and themes: stories of (im)migration; the African American Great Migration novel; the discourse of displacement and deracination; defining race and nationhood; narratives of colonial dislocation or decentering; the Caribbean as transnational crossroad; Afro-Asiatic identities in the Pacific; stories of Black Diaspora communities; and other iterations of black transnational experiences.

 

The special issue on Black Transnationalism and the Discourses of Cultural Hybridity ultimately seeks to ponder and to offer cogent analyses of trans-migratory patterns of global citizens who self-identify as "black" and the materiality of said identities that are trafficked through, around, and across borders. In what ways do these narratives of black transnationalism function as "provocative" and/or "oppositional" forms of artistic and political expression? How does the literature of transnationalism vocalize divergent framings of blackness and insist upon their validation?

 

For consideration, please send a 250-500 word proposal and an abbreviated (2 page) CV to: Kameelah Martin ([email protected]) by June 1, 2015. Completed essays in (MLA format) will be due on October 15, 2015.

For more information, please contact: EVENT INFO:
The Africa-America Institute

email: [email protected]