Special Issue of Postcolonial Text (2025/26): Women Remembering Power and Violence
Due Date: 04-30-2025
“Violence is man re-creating himself,” Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth as he witnessed postcolonial destruction in the wake of the Algerian War. The violence he underscored in his seminal work was not the centuries-long decimation of the land and culture of the oppressed but rather the revolution of the colonized against hegemony to reclaim a national and racial identity.
With revolutionary narratives in colonized spaces often centering on masculine heroics, the editors of Postcolonial Text are seeking to publish a guest issue that foregrounds feminine voices confronting power and violence. This issue, Women Remembering Power and Violence, will center on the traumas of postcolonialism, slavery, and other types of subjugation on the individual and collective body, memory, identity, and relationships of women in former colonies of the West. The journal solicits full-length articles on literature, cinema, or other cultural production that contributes to this discourse. Of special interest are essays that answer one or several of the following questions:
- In a postcolonial era, how is womanhood defined by and for women?
- How does the history of colonization manifest itself in the memory or self-perception of women?
- In what ways can women relate race with the flow of power and violence in their life experiences?
- How has the transaction of power between subjugated women and agents of hegemony shifted from colonial times to the present day?
- On what forms of violence do women draw to re-create themselves?
- Can art by women create violence? If so, in what capacity?
- What feminine narratives of resistance have been historically erased which now must be examined?
- How has the legacy of colonialism impacted the formation of and healing from trauma in the collective body and/or memory of women?
Please submit a 300-word abstract and 100-word biographical statement to KC Barrientos (kcbarrientos@sc.edu) by 30 April 2025.
If the abstract is accepted, authors will have to create a user account on the Postcolonial Text website and upload submissions by 30 June 2025.