CFP to a volume entitled Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational, edited by Jude V. Nixon & Mariaconcetta Costantini and published in 2021 by Vernon Press.

This collection of essays on the literature or national allegories (Jameson) of the diaspora and the transnational plans to explore the sundry and geographically expansive ways Anglophone literatures by colonized subjects and emigrants negotiate diasporic spaces to create what Benedict Anderson sees as “imagined communities,” or what Homi Bhabha calls home, a place uncannily oscillating between estrangement and engagement. Themes could include but are not limited to restlessness, tensions, abiguities, assimilation, resistance to total immersion, nostalgia, sentimentality, homesickness, national schizophrenia, divided loyalties, intellectual capital, and geographical interstices—living uncomfortably in that space between two worlds, one perhaps dead and the other struggling to be born. Special attention will be paid to the complex ways identity is negotiated by immigrants to Anglophone countries writing in English about their home abroad experience. Also important are the variety of ways the malleability of English (Calibanizing Prospero’s English as a form of resistance) becomes part of a lingua franca that fosters transnationality. Papers will explore the lived experiences of emigrants of the diaspora within this specific linguistic and cultural area, and the extent to which these new and evolving spaces (physical, ontological, and metaphorical) represented in literature are rife with tensions concerning identify, language, and belongingness in the struggle for home.

Please submit a one-page proposal along with a brief bio no later than 1 March 2020.  The proposal must reflect work at or near completion given the brief turn-around time between acceptance of proposal and delivery of chapter (about six months), then the peer-review process.  We anticipate a 2021 publication date. The volume will be published by Vernon Press. For more on the press, its authors, and its publications, please see their website: www.vernonpress.com. Copies of proposal and bio must be emailed as attachments to the editors, Jude V. Nixon (Jnixon@salemstate.edu) and Mariaconcetta Costantini (mariaconcetta.costantini@unich.it).