FYI...Stefanie
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From: Steve Martinot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
A CALL for Papers and Submissions
TRACES: A Journal of Critical Studies in Racialized Cultures
P.O. Box 11704
Berkeley, CA 94712
We are looking for contributions in any of the enumerated genres, that
generally accord with the ideas in the following prospectus.
Art Cultural Critique
Philosophy Poetry
Testimonials Photography
Fiction Sundry Deconstructions
What We Face
As the century ends, we face the end of Civil Rights Movements,
and the growth of political processes that seek to reinvent
"whiteness," to preserve white dominance, and to forget its
history. These processes include the new immigrant scapegoating,
the prison industry, anti-affirmative action, devastating welfare
reforms, police impunity, institutionalized drug-law violence,
domestic violence, and the resurgence of genetic arguments
concerning achievement, intelligence and behavior -- as well as
the foreclosure of funding for artistic and cultural forums for
racialized populations.
Concomitantly there has been growing recognition that race and
gender are social constructs and not inherently biological. Race
and gender are now seen as produced by social processes of
racialization and genderization that reflect the Europeans'
initial encounter with peoples they removed from ancestral lands,
and then with Africans brought to work on those seized lands. As
Europeans racialized those designated as non-white, they
simultaneously racialized themselves as white and male. This is
a relational factor that has been usually ignored in our
histories and anthropologies.
Historically, economically, culturally, and socially, then, race
has come to serve as a marker for white (male) privilege, socio-
economic stratification, gratuitous systems of assault and
harassment, and multiple forms of exclusion. Today, in the era
of transnational communities, diaspora, and migration, racism and
misogyny maintain a continuity in public and private
institutions, as well as in cultural discourses, representations
and practices. Ironically, we encounter an insistence on a
principle of "color-blindness" in the face of all this.
We also face a new version of multiculturalism that pretends the
minoritized are somehow on the same cultural, economic and
political plane as whites. These versions of multiculturalism
forget that minority or subaltern status itself is always imposed
by an excluding group that thereby creates itself as a
"majority," whose violent ascent to power they veil. "Minority
status" thus exemplifies the process of racialization and
genderization itself. Racism cannot be reduced to mere opinions
or antipathies. Racism and misogyny name systems of social,
cultural and economic oppression that in turn construct the
opinions and antipathies that make them work. Thinking of
whiteness as an implicitly universal norm, and closing their eyes
to their own racial and gendered formation, whites are able to
think of the United States as universally egalitarian, humane,
and democratic. Today, these conceptualizations of the nation
state travel all over the globe as the "muses" of planetary
capitalization, industrialization, and the commodification of
people and products.
The Civil Rights Movement did little more than demand inclusion
in, and recognition from, the public and private institutions
that had previously excluded on the basis of race and gender.
The social movements that have addressed racial, gender, sexual,
class and land issues have produced struggles for social justice
and a multicultural politics beyond civil rights. Consequently,
what we face is a choice between a past history and a future
history, between repeating the past, or inventing a future that
will transcend the "white nation" and reach for the
transnationality of the nation and the multicultural core that
"whiteness" was imposed on.
What is at stake today is how the United States is to become a
just and democratic society. In choosing our futures we must
find new ways of articulating the narratives of social movements
that until now have largely engaged in dialogue with a "white"
center, rather than with their own formation of autonomous and
self-determining coalitions that are anti-sexist and anti-racist.
It is time to develop a broad, in-depth investigation of the
construction of whiteness itself and the constructions of white
racial identities, that is, to found what could be called a
Critical White Studies which would be complementary to the
ongoing Critical Race and Gender Studies of the past few decades.
How can we begin to critically and institutionally articulate
these spheres of interest? In recent years there has been some
innovative thought addressing the question of whiteness as
racialization, its historical production and construction as well
as its centrality to the institutional structures of the United
States and beyond. How can these endeavors be brought together?
In addition, one must also ask: How have the structures of
racialization and genderization developed in other countries? To
what extent are corporate economics, corporate structures,
planetary despoliation, and environmental crisis conditioned by
racializing and gendering processes, or to be seen as their very
legacy? What would "white" society and culture look like if it
was divested of its hierarchy, normativity, and self-
universalization? What would Euroamerican socio-cultural thought,
literature, and philosophy look like if their participation in
the construction and preservation of whiteness and white
identities could be understood, seen and transfigured? How can
these be addressed as themselves a kind of anthropological
problem, and no longer the standard by which other cultures are
to be measured?
Ultimately the fundamental assumptions of a culture or a nation
are not easily questioned. One runs the risk of a critical white
studies revalorizing whiteness by focusing on it. However, in
articulating the ongoing work of Critical Race and Gender Studies
with a simultaneous critique of whiteness, we want to further
that critique of racialized cultures which in effect de-
universalizes whiteness, gives form to different ways of
speaking, bridges gaps that need bridging and marks out
boundaries that need marking. We aim at a mode of rethinking
that adds itself to current anti-hegemonic politics and to
alternative modes of rethinking cultural constructions for our
future.
The Purposes of the Journal
TRACES is a journal of philosophical, political, and artistic
discourse, cultural critique, and literature. It has as its
fundamental goal to probe critically the unspoken assumptions of
the nation and forms of colonization. What is meant by
democracy, egalitarianism, freedom, rights, and difference?
Our intention is to shine a flashlight into the many dark corners
and old machinery of nation-making and institution-building so
that we can see our world more fully and identify what must be
transformed and transcended. Convinced that racisms and sexisms
continue to form a core of exclusionary political and social
practices, producing dehumanization and increased commodification
of people, the journal will seek to address contemporary events
through an identification and critique of those assumptions that
preserve this nation as a racialized and misogynist culture, and
to ask what are their implications in the era of globalization.
How is whiteness being reinvented in the present? What enables
the values and practices of whiteness to presist and reproduce
themselves?
Art, poetry, literature, personal testimony, philosophy, and
abstract analysis are some of the primary vehicles we invite in
order to craft a reinvention of critical and imaginative
languages. Philosophical and literary languages will be embraced
because they make possible new ways of thinking, and enable the
search for new and alternative worldly narratives. Popular
languages ("street talk," "everyday talk," and "folk talk") will
be embraced as the very field on which suppression, repression,
resistance, and liberation contest each other, and enact,
sometimes in microscopic or seemingly invisible ways, the many
structures of culture. Artistic language will be embraced as
that which goes beyond or against the grain of all given
languages, seeking to think what cannot be thought in any of
them. Ultimately, we expect to expand our coverage of themes to
diverse linguistic communities beyond English. As such, we
invite submissions in all the languages used in the Americas,
which we may translate and/or publish in bilingual format.
We recognize that to resist the division of languages is to
resist the languages of division, of racialization, gender, and
nation-making; it is to ask how we can move toward a de-
hegemonization of politics. What would that look like?
It is necessary to recognize that nothing of a progressive and
just political character will be accomplished until the
centrality of racism, sexism, and the social, political, and
cultural structures through which whiteness, racism, and misogyny
are institutionalized, is understood and confronted. How to give
form to a new social cohesion in this country? How can such forms
have impact in the formation of civil societies in an era of
multiculturalism and globalization?
TRACES will seek to open a political space for thought,
intellectual debate and polylogue across the boundaries of
language genres and "ethnic" enclaves -- a space in which to
arrive at an anti-racist politics beyond the superficiality of
simply calling for an end to racism, or white skin privilege, or
whiteness, as if they were merely ideologies to be given up.
Cultural structures cannot simply be overcome like that. And in
the United States, where intellectualism has often been
imprisoned and degraded by the institutions that claim to promote
it, and where those institutions begin to look more and more like
"museums of thought and politics," a revaluing of the mind that
thinks critically, with infinite curiosity, and within a de-
hegemonizing politics, must be the highest priority.
The journal will of course have a politics, though it will
foreseeably be an evolving politics, probably debated continually
in its pages. Therefore, we invite a broad range of submissions,
representing work and discussion from many points of view. But
since the editors indeed have political views, we will do
something unusual for a journal. The editorial board will adopt
an active stance toward the articles published, at times
responding directly by means of questions or appropriate
discussion, either following the articles or in editorials. The
goal will be to have both the author's thoughts and those of the
editors put before the readers interactively and in dialogue.
Please send submissions, and ideas, to:
ooo TRACES
P.O. Box 11704
Berkeley, CA 94712
If you have questions, proposals, or issues to discuss, contact:
oSteve Martinot, Steven Washington, or Norma Alarcon, at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
also:
oNorma Alarcon Sharon Holland
oDept. of Ethnic Studies Dept. of English
oUniv. of Calif - Berkeley Stanford Univ.
oBerkeley, CA 94720 Stanford, CA 94305
o510-642-0708 415-725-1387
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Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker
Department of Resource Management
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 56
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
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