Queer Environs

Special Issue of Diacritics

Edited by Austin Lillywhite and Nicole Seymour

Call for Proposals

Both noun and verb, “environ” points to what’s “out there,” one’s milieu or surrounding world, the assemblage of human and more-than-human beings in which one finds oneself situated, as well as the activity of encircling an area to enclose, circumnavigate, or occupy it. So too, “queer,” as noun and verb, derives its original meaning from space, referring to something that is oblique, slanted, or off-center. 

Migration has become a global phenomenon that indicates complexity and diversity. The mobility of people has also influenced how texts are migrated through translation and how it could influence cultural production. Translation, which facilitates “communication, understanding, and action between persons or groups who differ in language and culture” (Bassnett 5), plays a vital role in the migration diaspora. Texts like people, want to seek new opportunities, they search for a new life in a new place and time, as Moira Inghilleri points out in her book entitled Translation and Migration published in 2017, migration is a “continuous becoming”, it “necessitates movement” (1 & 3).