Literature of Color

Writing is to create spaces for memory, survival, and transformation—to give shape to memories and experiences that might otherwise be lost. Authors and writers tell stories to make sense of the world, reconnect, and understand. Sandra Cisneros concludes her famous The House on Mango Street with, “…I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (Cisneros 110). For communities of color, literature is thus the reclamation of the collective memory and a responsibility to return to the community. Women, Gender, and Families of Color invites submissions for a special issue on the “Literature of Color.” In this special issue, we invite contributions on topics related to race, gender, and sexuality, informed by intersectional, decolonial, and transnational approaches. We invite submissions that focus on the lived realities of communities of color, histories of displacement, dispossession, diaspora, and colonialism, with special attention to questions of gender, sexuality, family, and community. This special issue aims to demonstrate the intellectual, political, and aesthetic interventions of literature produced by and about communities of color. We ask: how does literature of color mobilize memory, language, and form to negotiate histories of loss, identity, solidarity, and repair? How does the literature of color become an archive of those who have been silenced, excluded, and made invisible? How does literature respond to censorship, forced forgetting, social and political violence, communal and personal traumas? Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):

• Diaspora, migration, and home in literatures of color

• Memory and literature

• Literature as activism, testimony, or witnessing

• Gendered and queer archives, silences, and erasures

• Racialization and the politics of form and genre

• Intersectionality in narrative strategies and character formation

• Decolonial and anti-colonial literary interventions

• Speculative, Afrofuturist, Indigenous futurist, and utopian imaginings

• Black feminist, womanist, queer of color, trans of color, Indigenous, and decolonial/anticolonial criticism.

• The role of language, memory, translation, and diaspora in shaping literary production and reception.

• Questions of community, intergenerationality, and the responsibilities of writing

• Poetics and politics of memory

We invite theoretical and empirical work from the social and behavioral sciences, the humanities, and transdisciplinary formations. Submissions from established and emerging scholars, community-based researchers, and activists are encouraged. Comparative and transnational approaches are welcome, as are analyses of cultural production, public policy, and institutional practices.

About the journal:

Women, Gender, and Families of Color is a multidisciplinary journal that centers the study of Вlack, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American women, genders, and families. Within this framework, the journal encourages theoretical and empirical research from the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and from new and established scholars. It welcomes comparative and transnational research as well as analyses of domestic social, cultural, political, and economic policies and practices.