Calls for Papers

The Global Antiapartheid Era: 1946-1994 (Radical History Review, Number 119)
Call for Proposals, due May 15, 2012

The Radical History Review seeks submissions for an issue on the global politics of the anti-apartheid movement, 1946-1994. The time frame underlines our sense of the global significance of what we call the Antiapartheid Era, inaugurated by the postwar United Nations debates on discrimination suffered by Indians in South Africa and culminating in the post-Cold War transition to democracy in South Africa during the 1990s. As we see it, this antiapartheid era encompasses the evolution of the United Nations, decolonization, the Cold War, the founding of the non-aligned movement at Bandung, the rise (and fall) of Third World solidarity structures, the U.S. Civil Rights Movements, Left-Leaning Revolutions, human rights politics, upheavals of the global Sixties, and the onset of neoliberal globalization and offers new ways of connecting and contextualizing these various developments.

In 1990, the same year that Nelson Mandela walked free from prison to celebrations held around the world, the RHR published a double issue on “History from South Africa.” The issue was the result of years of collaboration between the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand and the American Social History Project. A little over twenty years later, as a companion and follow-up to that volume, RHR is calling for an issue that centers the history of antiapartheid solidarity. One of the most striking developments in historical research and writing over the last twenty years has been the growing interest in international, transnational, and global history. Widening our focus from the struggle against apartheid inside South Africa to a global frame reveals an exciting range of new perspectives.

For example, what happened in South Africa was bound up with struggles and anti-racist/anti-imperialist work across southern Africa and throughout the world. This activism of citizens from dozens of countries and South/ern African exiles took not only local and national forms, but often transnational forms in such initiatives as sports and cultural boycotts, corporate accountability campaigns, and calls for the release of Nelson Mandela that involved coordination across borders and appeals to a global audience. These transnational networks and campaigns were astonishing in their variety, interconnections, and persistence. There is much more to learn about the nature, scale, and scope of the antiapartheid cause, from civic and popular organizing in India, Japan, the Caribbean, independent Africa, and the “actually existing” socialist countries to the realm of international nongovernmental organizations, such as labor confederations, ecumenical religious councils, and humanitarian, pacifist, and human rights groups, to the formation of a new post-Civil Rights cohort of social activists inside the U.S.

If we borrow from the work of sociologists on global social movements and the global structures of political opportunity they engage with, we can appreciate that the antiapartheid cause unfolded from above as well as below. In addition to transnational advocacy networks and international NGOs, we need to take into account the often substantial efforts of the United Nations and allied intergovernmental agencies (e.g., the International Labour Organisation), the Organization of African Unity, international groupings such as the socialist countries and the European Community, international trade union federations, and individual states. Accordingly, we seek contributions that will trace and assess the extent and limits of the worldwide solidarity achieved in the struggle against apartheid and colonialism in Southern Africa and the impact of this solidarity on global norms of racial equality and human rights to self-determination, democracy, and development.

We are soliciting submissions that engage with one or more of the following areas of concern.

* the emergence of large-scale organizations, networks, publications, campaigns, that gave shape and weight to this global movement.

* the roles and experiences of individual activists, advocates, artists, writers, and scholars, especially the diaspora of exiles from South/ern Africa. Interviews with anti-apartheid activists are especially welcome.

* the role of “new nation-states and socialist nations” such as India, Egypt and Cuba, and/or the Non-aligned Movement in the antiapartheid struggle.

* the impact of transnational activism on apartheid South Africa and the other white minority and colonial regimes of Southern Africa, the foreign banks, corporations, the governments of the U.S., Britain, and other states involved in the region.

* the role of intergovernmental and non-governmental agencies such as the United Nations, the OAU, international labor and ecumenical bodies, and collaborations/challenges that emerged between/against these agencies.

* the production, circulation, and reception of antiapartheid and liberation symbols, imagery, music, fiction, theater, films, and other cultural expressions and media.

* the adaptation of the global anti-apartheid cause in diverse communities and societies and its articulation to local or national demands, especially around recognition and justice for excluded or subordinated populations, such as indigenous people in Australia and New Zealand, Dalits in India, Palestinians, and people of African descent throughout the Americas. Comparative investigations are welcome.

* the application of international human rights law to the case of apartheid and the further development of this framework through interaction with the antiapartheid cause.

* the place of the global anti-apartheid struggle in the reshaping of public history and memory in post-apartheid South Africa, in museums, historical sites, and history textbooks.

Radical History Review publishes material in a wide variety of forms. The editors will consider scholarly research articles as well as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, essays on museum and other public history forums, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, teaching notes and annotated course syllabi, and research notes.

At this time we request that potential contributors submit 1-2 page abstracts summarizing the article you wish to include in this issue as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 119 abstract submission” in the subject line. Initial abstracts and article proposals are due by May 15, 2012.

By June 15, 2012, selected authors will be invited to prepare a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for completed drafts of articles is February 1, 2013. Final article manuscripts ready for publication must be returned to the editors by Aug. 1, 2013. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 119 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Spring 2014. The issue editors strongly encourage the submission of images or artwork to illustrate textual pieces, as well as photo or other visual essays. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document. If chosen for publication, authors will need to send separate, high-resolution images files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), along with written permission to reprint all images.

Abstract Deadline: May 15, 2012
contactrhr@gmail.com

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Sound Politics: Critically Listening to Local and Global Soundscapes (Radical History Review, Number 121)
Call for Proposals, due March 15, 2013

The history of sound is saturated with political meaning and significance. Military and political authorities have historically mobilized sonic techniques and technologies in aggressive and violent confrontations with perceived enemies and foreign threats. Musicians, singers, activists, youth groups, and demonstrators have expressed their dissent, not only in words, but in sonic expressions and articulations, which complement, amplify, and ultimately exceed discursive modes of communication and which create solidarities, mark opposition, and manifest resistance. Meanwhile, the state has expanded its claims to regulate and discipline sound and noise in the name of public health, social order, and communal welfare. Of course, the politics of sound are not limited to the audible; silence also operates as a tool of social discipline, political repression, and cultural homogenization in the hands of political elites and authorities, while among political activists and organizers, moments of silence can serve as powerful acts of memory, recognition, and critical reflection.

Sound and its modulations are a primary, if understudied, tool of communication and expression, forging relationships and inspiring collective action across spatial boundaries. Aside from communicative content, the very form of sound itself can be disruptive, since it can transgress borders, barricades, and blockades. So, too, can sound, in the form of sound cannons or sirens, be deployed to maintain order, to police, to punish and torture. The same set of sounds can be heard differently according to the listeners’ particular contexts and social positions. Thus, a political march’s noise can be, for participants, inspiring and empowering. For its critics, it might be called savage, revolutionary, or wild. Labeling certain sounds as noise or particular neighborhoods as noisy often serves as an implicit or explicit signifier of differences and distinctions based on race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Indeed, sound can act as a sensual and visceral marker of such distinctions. In turn, noise abatement campaigns, whether driven informally within a community or formally by the state, produce and reinforce hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, power and privilege. And within the field of sonic politics, important insights, arguments, and debates around deafness and disability have emerged to destabilize the privilege and assumptions of the hearing population, inherently calling into question some basic assumptions in the emerging academic field of “sound studies.”

This thematic issue of Radical History Review invites scholars working on all historical periods to imagine the political implications of the audial, the aural, hearing and listening, as well as of silence and deafness. Our original intervention in this burgeoning intellectual arena centers on thinking about the politics of sound in its trans-regional, trans-national, and “glocal” (global/local) contexts. How have audial technologies and creative techniques of sound production, reproduction, and recording generated opportunities for the expression of dissent, critique, and resistance? What are the politics of noise? Of laughter? Of music? Of speech, deafness, and voice? Of silence? Does sound’s ephemeral quality limit its uses as political expression, or does sound’s movement across confined and demarcated physical spaces and conventional borders make it distinctively useful for articulating and projecting political opposition? How has sound censorship controlled or limited dissent? How have sound, and its representations, become part of social contestations over the public sphere? How have differences and hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and class been constituted sonically? And to what extent can we think critically and historically about such questions in contexts that emphasize the trans-national and cross-cultural dimensions of sound and soundscapes?

Possible themes we would like to explore in this volume include the following:

• Technologies of sound production, reproduction, transmission, and recording.
• Sound and noise as spatial, social, and political transgression.
• The politics of music, song, and voice.
• Deafness and the politics of disability.
• Colonial, anti-colonial, colonized, and colonizing sounds and soundscapes.
• Sound’s appropriations, confusions, or challenges in cross-cultural or trans-national contexts.
• Historical changes in defining and regulating noise.
• Sound and difference, otherness, and solidarity (e.g., race, religion, gender, class).
• The sonic boundaries, limits, and transgressions of the human/non-human divide.
• The contrasting soundscapes of urban/rural/wilderness or pre-industrial/industrial/post-industrial spaces.
• The storage and archiving of sound for use by academics and activists.

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our Teaching Radical History section. Given the specific theme of this issue, we are also interested in multimedia contributions that can take advantage of our format as a print journal but which might also include sound clips for presentation on the RHR website.

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time we are requesting abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by March 15, 2013 and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 121 submission” in the subject line. By April 15, 2013, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article to undergo the peer review process. The due date for completed drafts of articles is September 1, 2013. An invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee publication; publication depends on the peer review process and the overall shape the journal issue will take.

Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), and secure written permission to reprint all images. Authors must also secure permissions for sound clips that they may wish to include with their articles.

Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 121 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter/January 2015.

For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include “Issue 121” in the subject line.

Abstract Deadline: March 15, 2013
contactrhr@gmail.com