Special thematic dossier 7.1 | The Boundaries of US Identity and the African American Experience

Editor: Beatriz Hermida Ramos (Universidad de Salamanca)

The special dossier will focus on how US African American identities have been shaped, informed, configured, and challenged since the country’s foundation. It will look at the centrality of ethnoracial boundaries, broadly intended as geopolitical, sociocultural, metaphorical zones of liminality. Boundaries that have been deployed to construct (and deconstruct) the dominant national identity, the existing racial binary and its narratives. The proximity of Black Otherness implies a more or less overt threat to the cultural and racial integrity of the nation’s inherent Whiteness, eliciting a variety of perceived dangers. Stereotypes are born and binaries are created to maintain such integrity, playing on the difference and opposition between inclusion / exclusion, civilization / savagery, correctness / incorrectness, insider / outsider, us / them.

The dossier invites reflections on representations of the African American experience and identity formation in popular culture and discourses, focusing on the diversity of identities, liminality, and disenfranchised experiences of US Americanness, as well as the construction of borders—both material and metaphorical—as means to define the US national imaginary.

Deadline for submission: June 1, 2025 | To be published in vol 7 no 1 (November 2025)

Submission guidelines

REDEN accepts proposals of full articles (6000-7000 words approximately including references) about any aspect related to the call. For any inquiry, refer to revista.reden@uah.es. Please, upload your full article to https://erevistas.publicaciones.uah.es/ojs/index.php/reden/index as a single file (.doc, .docx, .odt). Keep in mind that you will have to upload an abstract and keywords as well during the submission process. You can find the guidelines to prepare your paper, as indicated using the latest Chicago manual of style and author-date citation system, here: https://erevistas.publicaciones.uah.es/ojs/index.php/reden/about/submissions