Special Themed Issue on African-American Literature & Culture (Spring 2014)

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Special Issue of The South Carolina Review: Locating African-American Literature

Essay proposals are invited for a special themed issue of The South Carolina Review that examines race, place, and space in African-American literature and culture. We seek original, unpublished essays that address questions such as the following:

• How have racial geographies delineated the borders of literary history and aesthetic production?

• What are the regional roots of a global, diasporan, or transnational African-American literary imagination?

• How have particular sites—from urban or rural spaces to university campuses, residential neighborhoods, historical places such as plantations or battlefields, cemeteries, public monuments, and so on—been produced and indelibly marked by a racial past?

• How have regions of the U.S.—not only its South but also its North and Midwest, its East and West coasts, its borders, its overseas territorial holdings—been haunted by particular histories of race?

• How have institutional, legal, and political powers produced and managed racialized practices in such spaces?

• How have bodies, places, and spaces been formed, changed, or deformed by legal and cultural narratives of race?

The South Carolina Review is a peer-review journal published by Clemson University.

Please send abstracts of 350-500 words to the issue's two guest editors, Angela Naimou (anaimou@clemson.edu) and Rhondda Thomas (rhonddt@clemson.edu), by December 21, 2012. Essay submissions will be approximately 6-7,000 words or 20-25 typed, double-spaced pages, including citations and bibliography, and due by April 30, 2013.

A portion of the issue will be devoted to reviews of recent critical work on African-American literature and culture, particularly texts that examine race, place, and space. Please contact Cameron Bushnell (CBUSHNE@clemson.edu) by December 21, 2012 if interested in writing a review.

We will also consider original creative pieces, namely short stories, creative non-fiction (1,000 to 4,000 words), poems (up to 3 single-spaced pages), and photographs (black and white, 600 dpi, 5x7 inches), for inclusion in the issue. Please send submissions to Angela Naimou (anaimou@clemson.edu) and Rhondda Thomas (rhonddt@clemson.edu) by March 1, 2013.

Please do not send work that has been previously published or is currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. This themed issue will be published in Spring 2014.