Deadline for Proposal Submission:
February 1, 2019
Please submit all works through our online editorial manager and briefly state that your submission is to be considered for the special issue.
This special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies invites contributions of scholarly, creative, and visual works that share diverse modes of decolonial feminist praxis in relation to the lifeworks of philosopher María Lugones. Lugones’ conceptualization of “playfulness, ‘world’-traveling and loving perception,” and her analysis of the “coloniality of gender,” frame our conversation on decolonial feminisms. 2020 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the inclusion of Lugones’ essay, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in the anthology edited by Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras. We offer this call as a way to consider the historical, theoretical, pedagogical, and praxical engagements with the term “Women of Color” as it travels across times and spaces.
Lugones writes, “I recommend to women of color in the U.S. to learn to love each other by traveling to each other’s worlds. In making this recommendation, I have in mind giving a new meaning to coalition and propose “Women of Color” as a term for a coalition of deep understanding fashioned through “world”-traveling.” We see Lugones’ sustained engagement with “Women of Color” as an opportunity to study the local and global genealogies of praxis by people who are resistant to the racialized and gendered regimes of modernity-coloniality, as well as an opportunity to trace the travels of her thought and the legacies of her resistance. We also understand this conversation about the planetary modes of articulating “Women of Color” as coalition building.
The stakes for ‘world’-traveling and coalition making is re-articulated in the foundational article “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” This text illuminates an urgency and conceptual reach for envisioning the transformation of the social through love, learning, coalition and resistance. Thus we read Lugones’ decolonial feminism as entwined, critical, life-loving responses to what Audre Lorde would call “the societal deathwish” of coloniality. In bringing these two constellations of Lugones’ thought together, we seek to produce a space of engagement that shares and evokes multiple resonances, conceptual terms, images, and imaginaries for decolonial feminist worlds.
We invite contributors to consider the following questions:
- How does Lugones’ decolonial feminisms meaningfully engage with the term “Women of Color” as a praxis of coalition?
- What is facilitated when “Women of Color”thought travels to different spaces – across public, institutional, temporal and disciplinary boundaries? What frictions and possibilities occur as it crosses borders?
- What are the politics of translation that complicate traveling across ‘worlds,’ in the philosophical sense that Lugones evokes, as well as in regard to geographies and geo-politics of knowledge? What are the hierarchies of knowledge, including vocabularies, academic architectures, and the neo-liberalization of the sharing of knowledge – including intellectual property regimes and the curation of knowledge by academic publishing industries – that act as barriers to travel and coalition building?
- What are specific instances and cases of decolonial feminist praxis? Where, when, and by whom do these praxical engagements occur? How do they intersect with the genealogies of the phrase “Women of Color”?
We invite submissions by scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists engaged in theorizing the relation between material struggle and decolonial imaginaries. Some approaches to consider include the following topics, questions, tensions, and current conversations surrounding “Women of Color” and decolonial feminisms:
- ‘World’-traveling as coalition building
- Invocations of “Women of Color” as historical and contemporary praxical act of world-building
- Extensions of Lugones’ thinking: including traveling with ‘world’-traveling; playfulness; loving perception; streetwalker tactics; faithful witnessing; complex communication; active subjectivity
- Knowledge systems and tongues; oral history, poetry, visual art, other media as decolonial feminist world-building
- Decolonial feminist world-building in different global locations
- Multiple coalitional possibilities as decolonial praxis (i.e.,such as ‘Women of Color”feminisms; decolonial feminist thought; African, African diasporic and black, Afro-Latinx, Arab, Southwest Asian and Muslim, Asian-American, Chicanx, indigenous, Latinx,Latin American, Native, Pacific Islander, South Asian, Southeast Asian, feminisms);
- Decolonial “queer”-ness, queer women of color, and trans (of color) decolonial theorizing and its enactments of world traveling
- The coloniality of language, wild/untamed tongues, languaging, and decolonial possibilities
- Material and imaginary modalities and the politics of translation, opacity, legibility
- Dreaming, praxis and its pedagogical possibilities
- Decolonial feminist praxes, aesthetics and/or methodologies
- Diasporic, transnational, and migratory subjects and subjectivities
To encourage a bridging of coalitional thinking, ‘world’-traveling pedagogies, and the decolonial feminist remaking/widening of the self-in-relation to others, this call seeks a range of co-authored, collaborative, and collective works including but not limited to the following creative-critical forms:
- Scholarly essay/article (10,000 words including endnotes and references)
- Photography/photo essay
- Activist report
- Manifesto
- Visual art
- Sound/audio works (provide audio transcript)
- Digital art/works
- Lexicon/vocabulary
- Interview / dialogue
- Multimodal work
- Poetry/fiction
- Testimonio
Scholarly essays should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes and references, with an abstract of no more than 250 words. All article manuscripts, poetry, essays, and multi-media submissions must be submitted through Frontiers’ editorial manager. All submissions will be subject to external review. Citations should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 16thedition, with “humanities style” endnotes. For more details please see Frontier’s submission guidelines.
Lorde, Audre. “Eye to Eye: Black Women and Anger.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, 145-175. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984. Lugones, Maria. “Playfulness, World-travelling, and Loving Perception.” In Haciendo Caras, Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives of Feminists of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldua, 390-402. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990. Nasty Liberty by Ester Hernandez | Cover Art and Statement Volume 39, Number 2, 2018 All correspondence can be sent to the guest editors at frontiersjournal@utah.edu