"Making Trouble: Subversions and Reclamations in American Imaginaries"
RIAS Vol. 21, Fall-Winter (2/2028)
Edited by Lisa Buchegger and Liliia Makala
Executive Editor: Nathaniel R. Racine
(By Guest Editors' request, call open until December 30th, 2026)

This issue of RIAS invites contributions on the theme of “Making Trouble: Subversions and Reclamations in American Imaginaries.” Engaging ongoing debates in global American Studies on power, representation, dissent, and cultural transformation, the issue seeks contributions that examine how American cultural, political, and social imaginaries are challenged, reworked, and reclaimed across diverse historical and geographical contexts. It invites interdisciplinary perspectives from the global field of American Studies and welcomes submissions from scholars worldwide.

The issue will trace how American cultural production “makes trouble” through formal innovation, moral ambiguity, and radical redefinitions of kinship and care. Thereby, it will highlight “trouble” as an ethical and aesthetic stance within American studies—one that values fracture and contradiction as generative sites of thought and belonging. In keeping with the mission of the International American Studies Association and RIAS, the issue encourages transnational, interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed approaches to the study of the Americas and their global entanglements.

We welcome submissions from scholars working across a wide range of methodological and theoretical perspectives. At the center of the issue is the question of how American literature and culture engage “trouble” as both method and motif—challenging dominant narratives, destabilizing fixed identities, and reimagining marginality as a site of creative and political agency. Contributions may examine how texts resist ideological containment, embrace contradiction and ambiguity, and cultivate dissent, imaginative collaboration, and new forms of kinship, inspired by Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble.”

Key questions the Editors wish the Contributors to address, include, among others:

• How do American texts transform “trouble” from a sign of crisis into a source of imaginative and political possibility?
• In what ways do narratives of rupture and fracture challenge dominant histories and identities?
• How do practices of dissent, refusal, and repair intersect in literary and cultural production?
• What new forms of kinship, solidarity, or community emerge from troubled spaces?
• What aesthetic strategies make ambiguity, failure, or contradiction productive?
• How do marginalized voices reclaim “trouble” as a mode of survival and creativity?

We welcome submissions that engage with American literary and cultural texts across periods, genres, and critical frameworks, particularly those that trace “trouble” as a productive, ethical, and aesthetic stance - valuing fracture, ambiguity, and rupture as sites of imaginative and political possibility. Essays may focus on, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Subversive aesthetics and narrative strategies of resistance
• Queer, feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous reworkings of American imaginaries
• Archives of protest, care, and mutual aid
• Ecologies of trouble: environment, technology, and more-than-human worlds
• Trouble and genre: satire, horror, speculative fiction, life writing
• Transnational and diasporic perspectives on American “trouble”

Submission Guidelines: Articles should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words. For technical information, please consult Authors’ Guidelines (click here).

Submission Deadline: The submissions should be delivered to the Review of International American Studies via its Online Journal System by December 30th, 2026.

Selected contributors’ articles will enter a double-blind review process according to RIAS guidelines. Interdisciplinary approaches, comparative perspectives, and global engagements with American literature and culture are especially encouraged.

Each submission MUST include:

1. First Name and Family Name of the Author/Auther
   2. Institutional Affiliation of the Author/Auther
   3. Author/Auther's ORCID number (www.orcid.org)
   4. Author/Auther's website address
   5. Author/Auther's email address
   6. If the Author/Auther wishes to receive a complementary hard copy of the journal, the physical address to which the copy should be delivered
   7. The title of the article
   8. A 250-350 words’ abstract of the article
   9. A 250-350 words’ biographical note on the Author/Auther
   10. Keywords
   11. Disciplines represented (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines)
   12. The text of the article formatted in strict accordance with the principles of the MLA Handbook (9th edition) (length between 4000 and 6000 words).
   13. The bibliography of works cited formatted in strict accordance with the principles of the MLA Handbook (9th edition)
   15. All images must be submitted in print quality (min. 300 dpi)
   16. All copyrighted visual material must be accompanied by permissions or licenses issued to the Author.
   17. Along with the article text and required metadata, the Author must include a signed declaration on the use of artificial intelligence in the process of the preparation of the manuscript (click to download forms in the MS Word or PDF formats).
   
   

IMPORTANT: Please bear in mind that incomplete or incorrect submissions will be automatically rejected.

FOR TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS, PLEASE CONSULT THE AUTHORS’ GUIDELINES SECTION.