"The Poetics and Politics of Gender, Mobility and Migration in the New Anglophone Literatures"

CFP for Volume 29 of the European Journal of English Literature to be published in 2025

Guest editors: Nadia Butt (University of Giessen), Radhika Mohanram (Cardiff University) and Michelle Stork (University of Frankfurt)

This special issue sets out to address the poetics and politics of gender in the New Anglophone literatures of mobility and migration. Considering the “mobilities turn” in the humanities (Sheller and Urry 2006, 207-226; Aguiar et al. 2019, 4) and its connection to migration, this issue aims to investigate how Anglophone literature by writers of diverse cultural backgrounds provides new perspectives on gender. The major objectives of the special issue are to examine both gender and the literary interrogations of Europe’s cultural encounters, as protagonists travel, move and migrate between cultures and continents, both literally and metaphorically. 

Focusing on writers working in English, the special issue interrogates how mobility and migration not only shape and transform the genre of the novel, prone to generic overlaps with travel literature, the epistolary novel, the memoir, the Bildungsroman, narratives of displacement or exile, journey or quest narratives and refugee narratives, but also facilitate our understanding of culture, nation, gender and identity in relation to various forms of movement. According to Aguiar et al., mobility “operates at multiple scales of meaning, any and all of which constitutes society’s mobile culture” (2019, 2). Likewise, migration is a “continual” and “multidirectional” (Ahmad 2019, xxvii) experience. Not only may gender propel movement in the first place, but “[e]ach journey takes the unmistakeable imprint of gender” (Siegel 2004, 9). 

In light of current research, we seek approaches to mobility and migration in the New Anglophone literatures from feminist, queer and transgender perspectives showing how gender shapes the experience of movement “across the lines” (Cronin 2000; Klooß 1998). We are very much interested in representations of gender with reference to mobility and migration as perceived by writers of the ‘Global South’, whose works are deeply engaged with global cultural entanglements. 

We are keen to address the following questions in this issue:

1. Why is it important to investigate the poetics and politics of gender, mobility and migration in the New Anglophone Literatures?
2. How can we grapple with the poetics and politics of gender in narratives of mobility and migration in the face of global modernity?
3. How do the New Anglophone Literatures bring out the dynamics of gender, mobility, and migration in relation to the Global South and the Global North? How useful is it to speak of “gendered racism” to allude to the racist oppression of migrant women “as structured by racist and ethnicist perceptions of gender roles” (Castles et al. 2014, 62; Essed 1991, 31)?
4. What is the role of transcultural and transnational relations in examining the nexus of gender, mobility and migration?
5. What is the role of diaspora, nomadism, exile and forced migration in shaping the poetics and politics of gender in a literary work?

Submission instructions

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to all editors by 30 November 2023: Nadia Butt, Nadia.Butt@anglistik.uni-giessen.de, Radhika Mohanram, MohanramR1@cardiff.ac.uk, and Michelle Stork, m.stork@em.uni-frankfurt.de. 

Full articles are due 31 May 2024. 

EJES operates in a two-stage review process.

1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2023.
2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review by 31 May 2024.
3. The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2024 for publication in 2025.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html and https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current.