REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/sound_studies

Dear Colleagues,

ARTICLE DEADLINE FEBRUARY 21, 2023

CFP: Sound Studies in African American Literature and Culture – Special Issue of Humanities. Guest Editor: Nicole Brittingham Furlonge (Deadline: Ongoing until February 21, 2023)

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This special issue of Humanities invites works that employ sound-focused approaches to African American (thought of broadly and including but not limited to Black, Black Feminist, African, Postcolonial, Decolonizing, West Indian/Carribean, African Diaspora)  literary works, multimedia creations, events, and performances, and that explore connections between the fields of African American Literature and Culture and Sound Studies. This special issue aims to frame, through theoretical, practical, creative, and speculative scholarly contributions, the development of new and transformative convergences between these two resonant fields. 

African American literary and cultural studies features a robust and sustained critical and creative engagement with sound. This body of criticism has examined how sound and voice have been represented in works of different genres, modalities, and periods. Increasingly, scholars are exploring listening and hearing at the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality – on and off the page. A sampling of more recent scholarship in this vein include Alexander Weheliye (Phonographies, 2005), Kevin Quashie (The Sovereignty of Quiet, 2012), Tsitsi Jaji (Africa in Stereo, 2013), Emily Lordi (Black Resonance, 2013), Carter Mathes (Imagine the Sound, 2015), Jennifer Stoever (The Sonic Color Line, 2016), Nicole Brittingham Furlonge (Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature, 2018), Daphne Brooks (Liner Notes for the Revolution, 2021), and Anthony Reed (Soundworks, 2021), among many others.

Works submitted for this special issue might build upon or depart from earlier critical approaches and turn to sonic figures like listening, hearing, deafness, noise, quiet, sonic vibrations, amplification, sampling, frequencies, sound technologies (radio, phonograph, microphones, turntables, beat boxes, tape recorders, video, mp3), and their representation in cultural texts on and off the page. Examples of questions scholars might consider include:

• What does African American literary and cultural history sound like?

• What does it mean to listen to, for, or in literary contexts?

• What possibilities and challenges does the sonic bring to the work of literary analysis? To the work of speculation?

• How does Blackness and intersectionality sound in sound studies?

• How does the sonic literary archive speak to or challenge the print canon?

• How does the sonic literary archive suggest alternate African American literary histories?

• How does the sonic literary archive reveal previously muted literary voices and communities within the tradition of African American literature?

• What can the sound-infused study of African American literature and culture bring to sound studies – and vice versa?

• What can literary and sound practitioners and artists, and literary and sound theorists learn from each other?

• How might teaching African American literature with or through sound and listening alter or inform literary pedagogy?

Submissions may take the form of scholarly articles, speculative pieces, theoretical forays, historical accounts, multimodal pieces, detailed case studies, or other critical forms that seem most suitable to the author’s purpose.

Full essay drafts of 5000-6000 words will be accepted for review on an ongoing basis until February 21, 2023. Articles will then undergo external peer review prior to final acceptance and publication as part of the special issue. 

The editor is excited to learn about your work, and to work with you in developing it further should it be a good fit for this special issue.

Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI. All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). 

Dr. Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

• sound

• listening

• hearing

• sonic technologies

• vibrations

• frequencies

• amplification

• Blackness

• Resonance

• Distortion

• Interference

• Noise

• sonic