Call for Papers: Women Writing Race

Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature invites submissions for a special issue on conceptualizations of race in women’s writing to be edited by Katherine Adams, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tulsa. From its emergence as an outgrowth of European expansion into Africa and the Western Hemisphere, racial discourse has always operated in concert with the constitution of economic and sociopolitical power, position, and identity. Historically, racial concepts have served to stigmatize particular groups, justify oppression, and naturalize inequality. But they have also served as expressions of minority interests, group solidarity, and self-definition. How have women writers contributed to the work of inventing and conceptualizing race for political, social, economic, and personal use? What do such conceptualizations reveal about the gendered terms of racial projects? How has the scholarship on racial discourse and formation omitted women from the picture?

We seek manuscripts that focus on race as a category distinct from ethnicity, nationality, or regional and religious identification, and that explore how it is theorized, imagined, enacted, performed, appropriated, and reconfigured by women writers from a range of historical and geographical contexts. We welcome a variety of analytical approaches, including but not limited to postcolonial theory, critical legal studies, and theories of identity politics and strategic essentialism. We are especially interested in work considering writers within transnational and postnational contexts, or looking at racial self-definition as it engages the discourse on cosmpolitanism or forces of globalization. Please send submissions by 15 January 2009 to Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, attn: Katherine Adams, via email (tswl@utulsa.edu) or surfacemail (TSWL, 800 Tucker Drive, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK 74104).