Contested Again: Cultural, Historical, and Pedagogical Implications of Race

Call for Papers for a Critical Collection
Edited By Valerie Kinloch and Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine

In this critical collection of essays, we seek submissions from passionately engaged individuals to provide the academic and the public with new ways of reading, understanding, teaching, or theorizing pedagogy on race. As Edward Said points out, any form of intellectual work is always situated in the world. Therefore, we are more interested in essays that aim at changing the world instead of merely interpreting it. We welcome articles that present unique and unconventional analytical parameters and critical angles, especially those that localize race issues, transgress the rigid boundaries of academic disciplines, and approach race from interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as scholarship that pushes the focus of race issues beyond the U. S. geo-political boundaries.

Possible topics, with no special preference in the listed order, can include:

• A literary and political space in which national culture, identity, and hegemony are contested by the history and definition of race
• How the convergence of race with national culture and identity impacts the existence of and the challenge to the canon
• How racial memory and history function as narrative strategies
• How racial conflict, embedded in national history, is socialized in the context of the nation’s cultural values
• How to engage race issues in the classroom that are not merely re-producing an intellectual class whose expertise, as Edward Said points out, “has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society”
• What makes a (racial) experience historical and how race has been essentialized and commodified in the academy, and what approaches can be employed to challenge such construction and build a new paradigm in addressing and teaching race
• Pedagogical approaches that help students position their subjectivities in relation to their racial and ethnic communities through racial memory and history, and in the context of U.S. cultural history
• Pedagogical approaches to addressing race issues with immigrant and other-national histories
• A historically and culturally informed reading and teaching of race or works that address race issues
• New Historical approaches in teaching race by discussing how social conditions impinge on the texts addressing race
• The danger of addressing race in the political realm and/or in the classroom and possible solutions
• Struggles with confronting the silences involved with teaching, living, and/or talking about racial diversity in academic and nonacademic spaces
• Ways of engaging in conversations with language as an agency of power through issues of race

Please submit, in electronic format in MS Word, a 500-word proposal/ abstract and a two-page CV to both Dr. Valerie Kinloch of Teachers College, Columbia University and Dr. Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine of the University of Houston-Downtown via the email addresses below. The deadline for proposals is December 20, 2003. The deadline for completed articles is July 2, 2004. All submissions will be acknowledged. The length for completed articles is between 4,000-6,000 words, including all notes and bibliographical information.