Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies
Sep 03, 2019 → Nov 16, 2019
Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies
Title of Special Issue: racialization.spectacle.liberation.
Guest Editors: Chriss Sneed and S.M. Rodriguez
“There is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concreate, and objective. And there is also an opposite temptation: to imagine race as a mere illusion,
a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate. It is necessary to challenge both these positions, to disrupt and reframe the rigid and bipolar manner
in which they are posed and debated, and to transcend the presumably irreconcilable relationship between them.”
Description: Racialization – a term linked with Omi and Winant’s articulations within Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1994) – describes the processes
by which racial meaning is imbued upon practices, groups, relationships, and other social phenomena. When the analytic is considered intersectionally, the tool allows for
evaluations of “the racialized” alongside other social formations often codified through the languages of identity or status-position.
As such, one must note how the complex, contextual, and descriptive qualities of racialization exist as and are fundamentally linked to residual fragments of distinctly unequal power
relations which materialize across globe. These relations – co-constituted by sexuality, gender, class, region, territory, and more – are embedded in and re-inscribed at structural and
institutional levels; they are demanding, consequential, and often contradictory in nature.
Spectacle, is a multiply-defined thing: an event, a performance, a something of “curiosity or contempt.” A spectacle is also that which makes something else visible.
Similarly active, liberation is a word in transition – a noun defined only through reference to the process of setting something else free. In considering racialization with spectacle and
liberation in an un-spaced manner, this special issue seeks to interrogate the curious amalgamations which are produced with each element affixed.
We aim to curate an intellectual and creative space which interrogates the use, critique, and centering of racialized spectacle in or against liberation movements;
the liberation from the spectacle of racialization; or even the spectacular liberties of race-making in an era necessarily complicating the hegemonic Black/White binary of racial analysis.
This issue seeks to map the curious entanglements of identity, inequality, and claims to social rights, provoking a conversation which grapples with the ruptures and generative properties
that racialized matterings reveal, inspire, historicize, and/or make undone.
Authors are encouraged to think and express creatively, as the issue will feature academic non-fiction, as well as select creative non-fiction and poetry.
Themes of Consideration:
• Queer of Color critique of global gay rights movements
• Race in feminist and gender justice movements
• Trans analytics, aesthetics, and after-lives
• Mestizaje, racialized embodiment, and the nation-state
• Racializing the spectacular & racial spectacle
• Narrative and praxes of liberation
• LGBTQTTSGNC bodies and racialization
• Black life, politics, and power
• Global assemblages of race and/or racialization
• Transnational movement(s), solidarities, and tensions
• Racialization and sexuality
• Decoloniality: debates and dilemmas from minoritarian publics
• Subaltern solidarities
• Local/Global tensions in racial or feminist identities
• Racial capital
• Counter-archives and queer (of color) futures
Abstracts are due November 15, 2019 to and
Initial abstracts should be roughly 400 words and must be accompanied by a 200-word biography. Early submissions are welcome. We encourage submissions from people who
identify as Subaltern, community organizers, activist-scholars as well as junior and senior academics. Invitations to submit a paper will be based on a review of the abstracts received by the due date.
Papers of Interest will be requested by December 15, 2019
Paper Submissions are due March 1, 2020 to and
Papers should be between 5,000-8,000 words (inclusive of bibliography, and any and all other materials) and written to appeal to a wide range of disciplines.
Papers must satisfy Wagadu guidelines:
• The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration.
• The submission file is in Microsoft Word.
• Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
• The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are
placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end. Use endnotes sparingly (we prefer that you don’t).
• The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements.
• All articles will be subject to anonymous review.
• Suggested word limits are 5000-8000 words.
• Abstract length: 150-200 words.