Call for Proposals
Reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora
Radical History Review, Issue #103

The Radical History Review is currently seeking submissions for an issue exploring reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora. The past thirty years has seen a burst of scholarly interest in relationships among African descended people in the New World. Concerted intellectual effort has been devoted to the cultural forms, politics, and history of African Diaspora populations in Europe and the Americas, and has even moved beyond these models to include black populations in Africa. The field has generated essays outlining its early history within black studies, its relationship to other new and emerging fields in transnational and transatlantic studies, and its possible directions for future scholarship.

We believe the time is ripe for interrogating current conceptualizations of African Diaspora studies, revising paradigms and revealing alternate experiences.
Has the field gone far enough in exploring non-US-centric approaches to black diasporic identity, both generally and alongside historical interventions about the African descended in the United States? Has enough attention been paid to diaspora movements within Africa, and contemporary transnational relations amongst continental Africans in addition to those between various African populations and Diaspora communities? How can we historicize contemporary events that have created new African diasporas, such as East African immigration; recent events in Paris or the notion of a "black Paris; and neo-liberal economic policies? Finally, have scholars sufficiently explored the gendered underpinning of African Diaspora politics, both in theory and in practice?

For this issue we seek essays examining the following clusters of topics and queries, either directly or by exploring specific cases, events, figures, communities and texts:

*Can we de-centralize the United States in African Diaspora studies? How has Europe, and constructions of the "West" and "Africa" been conceptualized in diaspora scholarship thus far? How does the African diaspora reach beyond the Americas and how do the politics and constructions of "the West" influence diasporan communities?

*How can the diaspora framework be used to historicize contemporary immigration and upheaval in various parts of the world? What are the relationships between Diaspora, race, and "the local"? How do African Diaspora studies contribute to understandings of less mobile histories, places, and communities? Are Diaspora identities always migratory?

*What is the relationship between "Diaspora" and "African Diaspora"? What is the relationship between "Transnational" and "African Diaspora"? How do these fields' major debates and lines of intellectual inquiry converge and diverge? How are idiosyncratic geographies in dialogue, such as the "Black Pacific" and the "Black Atlantic"?

*In what ways do current conceptualizations of African Diaspora history and politics challenge or reiterate other normative identities, including political masculinities, heterosexuality, ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, and nationalism? Is the notion of a "black community," often locally, regionally, or even nationally bounded, relevant to the African Diaspora? What are gendered reframings of African Diaspora history? How might queer studies enable deeper understandings of the African Diaspora?

*In what ways should we rethink, reinterpret, or complicate the relationship between race and the politics of racial identity, and even political identity? Does the field of
African Diaspora studies encourage or discourage the assumption of race as the primary political axis for the African descended? How have politics in the African Diaspora included "identities" or political alliances that cross racial boundaries and/or racial categorization? What African Diaspora cases exist that explore intra-racial identities and categories? (gendered, class-bound, regional, phenotypic, etc.)

*Does the "Diaspora" as it is frequently conceptualized highlight change or continuity?

*What is the relationship of the African Diaspora to modernity, beyond the 20th and 21st
centuries?

By March 15, 2007 please submit a 1 to 2 page abstract that summarizes your article to rhr@igc.org. By April 15, 2007 authors will be notified whether they should submit their article in full. The due date for solicited, complete articles will be September 1, 2007. All articles will then be subject to peer review. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 103 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in winter 2009.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically, as an attachment, to rhr@igc.org with “Issue 103 submission” in the subject line. For artwork, please send images as high resolution digital files (each image as a separate file). For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include “Issue 103” in the subject line.