Imaginary Americas: The Dual Continent in the Eyes of Non-American Travelers — RIAS Vol. 17, Spring–Summer (1/2024)
2023-03-12
Call for Papers:
IMAGINARY AMERICAS:
The Dual Continent in the Eyes of Non-American Travelers
RIAS Vol. 17, Spring–Summer (1/2024)
(Call open until October 31st 2023)
The phenomenon of travel has been fraught with paradoxes since the times immemorial. Perhaps the most striking of the travel-related controversies is the fact that although it is one of humanity’s earliest experiences, journeying has never been available to all. Regarded as one of the elementary and universal social practices, it was—and still is—the share of the few. Equally paradoxically, despite the archetypal status of the very concept of the journey, in the social and geographical sense, traveling itself is a relatively new phenomenon: the onset of leisure travel comes as late as in the 19th century, when modern means of mass transportation became popularly available and affordable. Unsurprisingly, then, many of those craving the knowledge of the distant lands, used to depend, and still largely rely on, mediated reports: texts, images, and other narratives representing fragments of experienced (or imagined) reality that always require voluntary suspension of disbelief. (Read the whole Call for Papers here...)
Imaginary World(s): American Visions of the Outside of the Americas — RIAS Vol. 17, Fall–Winter (2/2024)
2023-03-12
Call for Papers
IMAGINARY WORLD(S)
American Visions of the Outside of the Americas
RIAS Vol. 17, Fall–Winter (2/2024)
(Call open until December 30th 2023)
The two Oceans, simultaneously connecting and separating continents, serve as hermeneutic lenses for the Americans who “read” the world outside of the Americas. The paradoxes of travel (and) writing continue to loom large in narratives created by poets, prosateurs, filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians, or simply leisure tourists, who inhabit the Americas from the North-West Passage to Tierra del Fuego, and who have explored Europe, Asia, Australia and Oceania, or those who have been experiencing the Americas hemispherically. Like in the past, also in the present, travel has been generating vivid interest owing to the ecstatic promise it carries. To many inhabitants of the Americas to whom voyaging remains unattainable, the world is, by and large, an imaginary world. (Read full Call for Papers here...)
Blackness and the Knowledges of Intersectionality -- RIAS Vol. 18, Fall-Winter (2/2025)
2023-03-11
Blackness and the Knowledges of Intersectionality
edited by Nathalie Aghoro and Julia Faisst
RIAS Vol. 18, Fall-Winter (2/2025)
(Call open until December 30th 2024)
As the Black Lives Matter movement has laid bare the persistence of structural racism and systemic oppression against Black people in the United States, intersectionality stands at the forefront of inquiries tackling multiple and intersecting forms of structural discrimination, including racialization, sexual orientation, gender, ability, and socio-economic status. In this special issue, we seek to tackle how the presence of intersectional thought in the academy and beyond generates new epistemologies today. In what ways does intersectionality, as an analytical category and an experience focusing on overlapping and mutually constitutive systems of discrimination, engage and narrate Blackness? That is, what kinds of knowledge can an intersectional approach open up about the complex experience of Blackness, and how do academic inquiries that are informed by it shape knowledges and narratives within fields related to the study of North America, including transnational perspectives? (Click to read the full CFP)