Telling wider and deeper solidarity stories

art by Rini Templeton, copyleft

Certain stories tend to get told about solidarity work, so I am excited by this effort to pull together an edited book to tell the stories we hear less of. I have great hopes that someone will write about the fabulous queer to queer US/El Salvador work in the 80s. Note that this book will be a mix, with scholarly papers, analytical essays, first person reflections and other creative submissions and expressions (poetry, spoken word, etc.) of between 6,000 and 7000 words  (though presumably memoirs and poetry could be shorter). Have an idea for something that might work? Send them a 500 word abstract by April 6th. Or send the call on to someone else you know who has a story that should be told!

CALL FOR PAPERS

Living Archives: Third World, Indigenous and Anti-Colonial Queer and Feminist International Solidarities

a volume co-edited by Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi (San Francisco State University), Anna M. Agathangelou (York University), Paola Bacchetta (University of California, Berkeley) and Tamara Lea Spira (Western Washington University)

The 1960s -1980s witnessed an explosion of transnational exchanges between women, feminists and queers from the global south and north who were engaged in feminist, queer, transgender and lesbian liberation and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements worldwide. They constructed powerful imaginaries and practices of social justice and liberation that deeply altered the landscape of movements for sexual and gender justice. Radical and critical Indigenous, Third World and anti-colonial women, feminists, queers, transgender subjects and their movements inscribed traces of their theories, expressions, practices and activisms in alternative journals, leaflets, posters, pictures, poetry, artwork, music and personal writings. Yet, many of these histories have been erased, distorted, co-opted or forgotten. These earlier activists and activisms have been largely occluded from historiographies of feminism, Gender and Women’s Studies, LGBTQI Studies, Queer Studies and Ethnic Studies - indeed from all academic narrations - with serious implications for practices and projects of liberation today.

Living Archives is concerned with a range of subaltern voices and with the epistemic violences to which some are subjected, made unhearable, or even impossible. This anthology seeks to address the effects and results of such a historical omission. It brings together participants and scholars of these movements with a younger generation of activists, artists and scholars to open up, re-assemble, re-animate and re-theorize this archive of feminist, queer, transgender and lesbian anti-colonial internationalisms from the perspective of the present. The anthology is interested in heterogeneous contemporalities that include visions of building another world. The anthology will also engage with the relations of power and ethico-political implications regarding the authority, authorship and authorization involved in the very process of constructing archives and of the many ways of engaging with them.

This anthology seeks to bring together multi-generational analyses of solidarities and alliances across theories, expressions, practices, activisms and movements of Third World, Indigenous and anti-colonial queer and feminist internationalisms of the 1960s-1980s. We invite contributions from scholars and activists who were directly involved in that era, as well as reflections from a younger generation.

This anthology is interested in addressing power entanglements in heterogeneous contemporalities. What relations of power are implicated in the production, erasure, revival and diffusion of subalternly positioned archives? What traces exist and have been re-framed and sanitized? What traces have been elided or erased, and why and how? What is at stake in retrieving, passing on, editing or discarding archives that are produced at the intersections and in the overlappings of multiple formations of gender, sexual, racial, religious, secular, ethnic and colonial violence? What does it mean to do so in the context of advanced global capitalism, neoliberalism, war and security states, wherein a premium is assigned to certain lives while others are subjected to increased marginalization, death-boundedness, brutality and death itself?

We are interested in the implications of this knowledge production upon our ability to conceptualize and enact radical politics today. What does it mean to “archive”? And what does it mean to archive liberation enactments, collective daily life, affect, confrontations with power including violence, multiple modes of solidarity, and their contingent internationalist imaginary of radical justice and freedom? What does the commitment to reassemble radical histories and solidarities, and to re-theorize them, bring to bear upon contemporary radical justice and freedom movements and expressions, and to our intimate lives? What are the stakes, effects, and results of such projects today?

Possible Topics for consideration in the context of the overall arch of 1960s-1980s Black, Third World, Indigenous and anti-colonial feminist, queer, transgender and lesbian international solidarities and alliances include, but are not limited to:

Genealogies:

• Genealogies of Third World, Indigenous, internationalist and transnational feminist, queer, transgender and lesbian solidarities;
• Genealogies of internationalist and translocal feminist, queer, transgender and lesbian activisms in and across movements against colonialism, settler colonialism, occupation and racism, and for peoples’ liberation;
• Reflections upon the politics and relations of power implicated in the production, erasure, or sustenance and deployment, of archives.

Movements’ Relationships and Entanglements with Contextual Relations of Power:

• The place of differential formations of colonialism including settler colonialism, as well as capitalism, globalization and neoliberalism in relation to movements;
• Movements and the co-constitution of spaces and scales;
• The ways that entanglements with power inform the remembering or forgetting of radical histories;
• Materialities and the political economies of movements.

Experiences of Resistance, Solidarities, Political Action and Movements:

• Materialities and political solidarities and action;
• Embodied and lived experiences and affect of struggle and political action;
• Communes, communities and other configurations of collective life of movements and political solidarities;
• Erotics, imaginaries, utopic visions, heterotopics, freedom dreams, resistance and revolution;
• Poetry, art, film, documentary and other cultural labor and production in radical justice and liberation movements;
• Internal problematics and politics of movement and coalition building.

Experiences of Repression and Multiple Forms of Violence:

• Incarceration, surveillance, torture, repression, intimidation, assassination, and other forms of violence and death;
• Displacement and exile;
• Affect, trauma and Repression;
• Disciplinary mechanisms as they pertain to the suppression, elision, re-writing and distortion of historiography.

Knowledge Production and Approaches to Archives:

• Terminologies and languages of radical justice and freedom of the 1960s to the 1980s;
• Traces, memories, memorials, and memoralizations;
• Trauma, affect and amnesias of the archive;
• Radical critical archiving historically and today.

The Contemporary:

• How contemporary desires and imaginaries of justice are linked to multiple historical struggles;
• Affective economies of ongoing struggle;
• Inter-generational memories and movement building;
• Continuities and ruptures with earlier liberation movements in the present;
• Simultaneous temporalities of solidarities and radical movements.

Scholarly papers, analytical essays, first person reflections and other creative submissions and expressions (poetry, spoken word, etc.) of between 6,000 and 7000 words are welcomed. For consideration, please submit an abstract of 500 words to by April 6, 2015 to: 3rd.world.internationalisms@gmail.com. Inquiries may be sent to the same email. Full article submissions are due on September 28, 2015.