Call for Abstracts
USAbroad: Journal of American History and Politics
Deadline: May 2, 2022
For bell hooks (1952-2021):
"White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy" and "Feminism is for Everybody"
in U.S. History, Politics, and Culture
bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in the rural and segregated South of the 1950s, rose to become one of the most influential scholars of feminism, cultural studies, and pedagogy in the United States. Through her life and work, she reclaimed the "margin" as an "inclusive space" of "radical openness" where one can decide to "locate oneself" and from where to wage their struggle. A space of "creativity and power" that now, after she passed away, is even more imperative to explore, not only to study her thought but also to shed new light on American history, politics, and culture from the racist and patriarchal foundation of American democracy through the watershed of the 1960s and 1970s up to the present.
The dense pages of historical reconstruction and theoretical discussion bell hooks devoted to the African American and the women's movements provide an invaluable source for reconsidering the history, historiography, and theory of social movements from the 1960s to the present, along with the trajectory of Black studies, gender studies, and cultural studies from their origins to their academic institutionalization, in light of the "interlocking systems" of oppression that she defined as a "white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy."
The next issue of USAbroad aims to acknowledge and celebrate the importance and impact of bell hooks' transgressive interdisciplinarity, which challenges the boundaries of academic disciplines and those of the cultural marketplace to present a "feminism for everybody," accessible beyond academic and corporate languages. We invite proposals that address the myriad themes of her intellectual output: from gender to sex and sexuality, from sexism to the construction of masculinity, from racism to the representation of blackness, from the house as a site of resistance to women's labor, from the university teaching to education in general. These and other issues can be considered in bell hooks' intellectual production or examined in the writings of other authors who were influential to her work, have engaged with or were inspired by her ideas. We also welcome proposals investigating relevant political and historical junctions that were part of hooks’ analysis or can be reinterpreted through her writings. Submissions can therefore explore a wide range of fields, theories, topics, and perspectives that characterized hooks' life and work and that today shape her legacy, including but not limited to:
- Feminist histories of American democracy;
- Abolitionist movement and modern slavery;
- Critical historiography;
- Feminist theory, gender theory and queer theory;
- Methodology of cultural studies;
- Art, cinema, and music;
- Black literary criticism;
- Educational and pedagogical theories and practices;
- Public discourse and debate;
- Political subjectivity and positionality;
- Autofiction and memoir.
Click here to read and download the long version of the call: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P7p4ykwLZzL5U6QEUN50f2cZNTKLBHV-M9kfkw4i2j0/edit?usp=sharing
Applicants are asked to submit an abstract of approximately 500 words, along with a résumé including their main publications, by May 2, 2022. Please send your proposal by email to:
usabroad@unibo.it
Applicants will be notified regarding submission status by May 16, 2022. Please note that a final version of the accepted essay (maximum 7,000 words) must be submitted by September 4, 2022.
More info can be found at: http://usabroad.unibo.it/