Call for papers:  ?Revolutions and Heterotopias?

Journal of Transnational American Studies Special Forum

Guest Editors David Sartorius (University of Maryland), Lessie Jo
Frazier (Indiana University), & Micol Seigel (Indiana University)

Given the anniversaries of the 1959 Cuban and 1979 Nicaraguan
revolutions, the centennial of Mexico?s 1910 Revolution and the
bicentennial of its independence, the years 2009-2010 are an especially
propitious time to reflect critically on the significance of revolutions
and heterotopias in the Americas.  In acknowledgement of these multiple
revolutionary anniversaries to be celebrated in the years 2009-2010,
this special forum will offer reflections on revolutions in the
Americas, particularly the political imaginaries that inspired them and
that they simultaneously unleashed and repressed.  Revolutionary
imaginations have not limited themselves to the ?no place? of utopia,
but have issued resolutely pragmatic calls for ?other? (hetero-)
?spaces? (-topias) in culture and politics. Heterotopias lie within the
realm of possibility, while still the purview of great hope.  They help
to ground the revolutionary theory they serve and inspire, preserving it
from deracination.

Papers submitted to this collection might treat the Cuban, Nicaraguan,
or Mexican revolutions, but they need not be limited to either the
twentieth century or to political upheavals.  The editors welcome work
on less state-centered events, movements, practices, and ideals that
have imagined or generated heterotopias.  Submitted papers could also
offer wide-ranging discussions about revolutions, literal or figurative,
that have been and continue to be carried out by historically
marginalized subjects ? women, indigenous peoples, queers, and migratory
and diasporic subjects ? and about the ways in which space and place
have helped to configure these revolutions, from the national to the
transnational and across the range of public to private.

By juxtaposing these historical, geographic, and thematic engagements, the
editors seek to generate dialogue about radicalism in, and radical
difference across, the Americas?epistemological and pedagogical revolutions,
sea changes in ways of ?knowing? and administering knowledge (for example,
through particular archival practices), chasms between theoretical concerns
in Latin America vis à vis the United States.  Replacing a conventional
Latin American Studies approach with a hemispheric one, we offer scholars an
opportunity to reframe these questions.  The ?Americas? focus, still aimed
at a particular part of the world, does not entirely resolve critiques of
area studies that have productively informed transnational American Studies
and other transnational scholarship, but it highlights the shifting frame of
analysis.  We welcome submissions that take up the very question of
frames?submissions that might, in the case of revolutionary processes,
address the tensions between those contained within (and directed against)
national states and those that aspire to global scope.



Submissions should not exceed 8,000 words, must follow the Chicago Manual of
Style, and include an abstract (not to exceed 250 words). All manuscripts
are submitted electronically, and we prefer DOC or RTF files (although PDF
files are allowed if all fonts are embedded and they are created using
Adobe's PDF Distiller instead of PDF Writer).  Please email submissions to
frazierl@indiana.edu.  Submissions will be peer-reviewed and are due
November 30, 2009.

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