Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
Call for Papers
“Mourning and Memory”

As multiple communities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East reel from the impact of major traumatic events, it becomes increasingly urgent to theorize the significance and politics of remembrance and mourning, along with the inevitable social, psychological, and material effects. More specifically, it is necessary to investigate what trauma does to memory, how mourning helps people deal with such traumas, and how remembrance and mourning influence politics, society, and culture. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East seeks critical essays for a special issue entitled “Mourning and Memory,” for which we solicit papers exploring themes such as:

• public memory and mourning as instruments of power and authority, or resistance and rebellion
• the significance of public mourning to nationalism, identity, fundamentalism, gender, or social power dynamics
• the work of truth commissions, human rights tribunals, conflict resolution, and reconciliation
• ways of approaching the traumatic past, genocide, disaster, famine; legal and medical responses to recovery and strategies for “working-through"
• the role of demoralizations, memorials, and museums; physically marked or reinvented spaces (e.g., Palestinian headquarters, Robben Island)
• traditional and reinvented mourning rituals, lamentations, ways of witnessing
• the role of images in historical recollection; memory and media, photography, the internet, etc.

Please submit essays of between 5,000 and 12,000 words (note and reference inclusive) by July 1, 2003. Essays should be formatted in Chicago style and use the Library of Congress transliteration system for Romanization, without diacritical marks. Further formatting information is available on our website. We prefer electronic submissions to Kamran Aghaie and Rebecca Saunders (via email below), though essays may also be submitted in hardcopy to the address below. If you have questions you can also call or send a FAX. We also welcome relevant books for review or proposals for review essays.