Call for Papers: The Global South (Fall 2016)

Theme: Globalizing the Province
Guest Editor: Shirley Lau Wong

At a time when discourses of globalization, world literature, and planetarity are promoted as "transcending" the local, what happens to those spaces that attempt to resist the purview of such globalizing impulses? For this issue, the editors invite papers that interrogate literary, political, and cultural representations of "local" spaces and communities, as well as other zones of underdevelopment more broadly. We are especially interested in essays that focus on local, regional, and provincial literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are shaped by, but elided from, the perspective of the national and transnational. Contributions should upend simplistic binaries of the local and global and instead juxtapose what are often seen as incommensurate scales of experience: the regional, provincial, peripheral, transnational, cosmopolitan, and beyond.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• The role of old frameworks and dualisms (the local and global, national and transnational, etc.) in shaping new rubrics of analysis
• Representations of dislocation, exile, and migration that reconfigure conventions of scale
• Representations of rural spaces that are constitutive of and/or disrupt larger movements of capital
• Discourses of domesticity, gender, space, and globalization
• The postcolonial as a politics of the local

The Global South is an interdisciplinary journal published by Indiana University Press. It concentrates on the literatures and cultures of those parts of the world that have experienced the most political, social, and economic upheaval, and which have suffered the brunt of the greatest challenges facing the world under globalization. Areas of interest include Africa, Central and Latin America, much of Asia, and those "Souths" within a larger perceived North, such as the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Mediterranean Europe.

Please submit an abstract (400-500 words) and brief scholarly biography by May 31. Notice of acceptance will follow on June 5 and complete articles will be due on August 10, 2015. Contributions should be 7,000 – 10,000 words long. Please send submissions and questions to Shirley Wong at swong@westfield.ma.edu.