The editors of "Comparative Indigeneities of the Americas" have announced a call for proposal submissions for their upcoming volume. Proposal submission deadline: July 31, 2009.
Call for Proposal Submissions: July 31, 2009
Comparative Indigeneities of the Americas
Editors: Arturo J. Aldama, M. Bianet Castellanos,
and Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera
Political and economic crises in Latin America have forced indigenous people to migrate
within the Americas. For example, there are now just as many Zapotecs, Mixes, and
Triquis living and working in California as can be found in their native state of Oaxaca in
Mexico. Recent scholarship on indigenous migrants document the harsh living and
working conditions under which they toil and highlight the multiple ways they cope under
these circumstances. Like the native peoples of the United States, these migrants face
similar issues of economic marginalization and racial, gender, and sexual
discrimination. Regardless of this shared postcolonial condition and in spite of their
proximity (now more so than ever), very little scholarly collaboration occurs between
U.S. and Canadian Indians and indigenous groups in the Americas.
Chicano scholars since the 1960s have made the most concerted effort to engage
indigenous Latin Americans in their scholarship and to acknowledge an indigenous
ancestry. Through a process of re-Indianization, scholars like Gloria Anzald√∫a, Ana
Castillo, and Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez embrace an indigenous past as a form of
resistance against racial, economic, and political oppression. The push toward
indigenismo within Chicana scholarship may be perceived as part of the growing trend
to claim indigeneity. Not surprisingly, these declarations have generated more suspicion
and tension than a welcoming, fraternal reception from Native people. This tension
points towards a need to theorize and conceptualize indigeneity to acknowledge both
historical shifts and cultural erasure without making claims on indigenous resources.
To address these tensions, the edited volume relies on a hemispheric approach to
indigenous studies that interrogates key concepts and methodologies, including their
intellectual genealogies, used to analyze indigenous experiences across the Americas.
Granted tribal histories within and between these countries are historically specific and
distinctive, but given that these histories overlap and that geographic and linguistic
distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred, what does it mean to be indigenous
today? Anthropologists have analyzed the ideologies that undergird indigenism, but
what happens to ideologies of indigeneity when they are framed within an international,
comparative context? Our objectives for this interdisciplinary volume are to bring
together a group of engaged scholars from different disciplines, fields of study,
geographic regions, and ethnic backgrounds (including tribal affiliations) to analyze
intersecting themes and histories across the Americas, while promoting a broader
understanding of the relationships between native communities in the U.S. and Canada
and those in Latin America.
The edited volume will be organized around key concepts that emerge from studies of
indigenous peoples in the Americas and arranged into four intersecting themes:
indigenism/xicanismo, mestizaje/hybridity, migration/displacement, and
autonomy/sovereignty. In spite of being ubiquitous, these concepts and themes are not
understood or deployed in the same way across ethnic groups, disciplines or national
boundaries. We seek essays that foster a shared understanding of these analytical
concepts and the decolonial methodologies used to unpack them, and that will promote
their adoption outside of their disciplinary home. This exchange will provide scholars
with new tools and alternative frameworks by which to analyze native communities and
structure an international comparative framework for indigenous studies. The edited
volume will be of interest to students in Ethnic Studies, American Studies, American
Indian Studies, Chicano Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Queer Studies,
Latina/o Studies, Latin American Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Anthropology, History,
and Cultural Studies.
BY JULY 31, 2009, please submit a 2-3 page proposal and 2 page CV single space, ms
word, times new roman to the editors: arturo.aldama@colorado.edu, mbc@umn.edu,
lgn@dartmouth.edu
We will select the contributing essays by September 1, 2009, at which point we will
begin working with a university press to publish the volume. Complete essay drafts are
due December 15, 2009.
In peace and solidarity,
Arturo J. Aldama
Associate Professor of Latino and Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder and
Director ex-oficio of CSERA (Center for Studies of Race and Ethnicity in the Américas).
His publications include: Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican
Immigrant and Native American Struggles for Representation (Duke UP); Ed, Decolonial
Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, (Indiana UP, 2003);
Violence and the Body: Race, Gender and the State (Indiana UP, 2003). He also served
as senior subject editor in film, media and popular culture for Encyclopedia of Latina
and Latino Popular Culture (Greenwood, 2004). Most recent, he serves as Editor for CU
press book, Enduring Legacies: Colorado Ethnic Histories and Cultures, Series Editor
for Cognitive Studies at the University of Texas Press, and co-editor for the forthcoming
edited volume, Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands.
M. Bianet Castellanos
Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Minnesota. Her book on Maya
migration to Canc√∫n is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press (2010). She
served as co-editor for a special issue of the journal Latin American Perspectives,
entitled Engendering Mexican Migration: Articulating Gender, Region, Circuits (2008).
She has contributed essays to Frontiers, Latin American Perspectives, Chicana/Latina
Studies, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and the edited volume
Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters (Duke UP,
2009).
Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera
Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies and Anthropology,
Dartmouth College. She is currently revising a book for publication on Yalaltecan
transnational migration. She has contributed essays to Latino America: State by State
(Greenwood Press, 2008), Health Education Quarterly (1997), and the forthcoming
edited volume Beyond El Barrio: The Everyday Politics of Transnational Life in Latino
América (NYU Press). She is also the Coordinator for the Gender and (Im)migration
Workshops at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College and serves as an elected
member of the American Anthropological Association's Committee on Minority Affairs in
Anthropology (CMIA) and the Executive Board of the Society for the Anthropology of
Work.
