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. 

Post-45 Peer Reviewed allows one to experiment with genres and styles of academic writing. Alongside our deconstruction of the conceptual categories mentioned above we’re thinking critically about and beyond the genre of the academic essay. To that end we encourage a range of submissions that might take the form of exhibit reviews, fiction, poetry, or multimedia projects. 

If interested, please submit an abstract of under 250 words describing your submission and a brief bio to Alex Alston baa2137@columbia.edu and Samantha Pergadia spergadia@smu.edu by December 15. Full drafts of accepted papers will be due by April 30.