We are proposing a special issue of Post-45 Journal, titled “Race and Animality Reconsidered.” In light of a host of recent interventions and discourses emerging from Black studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, and other fields, this special issue seeks to highlight contemporary work on the entanglements of racialization or racialized gendering and animalization, including what this means for the material lives of human and nonhuman animals since WWII. In contrast to earlier waves of animal studies scholarship that generally relied on a rhetorical mobilization of racism as an analogy for (what it held as the originary and more foundational problem of) speciesism, we seek papers that are historically- and materially-attuned to surprising, counterintuitive, paradoxical, or uncanny connections and entanglements between race, species, gender, animality, capital, consumption, and related key categories. We imagine the issue as less a critique of this earlier work, and more of a sustained engagement with fresh (perhaps agonistic) starting points, questions, and formulations that (re)think and de/re-construct the relationships between, for example, indigeneity, blackness, coloniality, Asian diasporas, orientalism, and the thick, variegated discourses of animality with precision. 

If interested, please submit an abstract of 250 words describing your longer essay (5,000-8,000 words) and a brief bio to Alex Alston b.alex.alston@rutgers.edu and Samantha Pergadia spergadia@smu.edu by February 29. Full drafts of accepted papers will be due by June 15, 2024