Migration and Nation--Past and Future:A Call for Papers
A Special Issue of American Quarterly
David G. Gutierrez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Guest Editors
For scholars and social critics whose interests lie in tracking the relationship between the nation-state and the constant movement of human populations across national borders, the past two years have proved momentous. The protests and civil unrest staged by the children of immigrants and former colonial subjects in France and other European nations in late 2005, and the equally dramatic mobilization and marches of hundreds of thousands of non-citizen workers and their political supporters in the United States in the spring of 2006, once again placed large and pressing questions of the relationship of the extant system of nations and the mass movement of different diasporic populations into and through national jurisdictions at the center of intellectual and political debate in the much of the world.
At this crucial historical moment, we seek innovative and imaginative scholarship focused on the evolving dialectic between the nation-state and its institutions and the inherently transnational social phenomenon of human migration. With what some have called a third wave of critical analysis of the notion of "transnationalism" currently well underway, we feel this to be a particularly propitious time to issue this call. As scholars and social critics rethink this provocative and (perhaps overly) capacious abstract concepts -- and related ideas such as "state sovereignty," "transnational community," and "globalization" in the context of recent social trends, it is imperative that the critical intellectual processes that helped create such broad and often amorphous catchphrases continue to be rigorously interrogated, tested, and analyzed.
To encourage this ongoing process of interdisciplinary imagination, dialogue, critique, and revision, we seek the submission of both conceptual/theoretical and empirical papers focused in the broadest terms on the historical and contemporary significance of the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions of transnational migration. We privilege no particular critical perspective or set of questions but encourage submissions on a range of issues that might include the effects of population circulation and demographic change on dynamics of incorporation, community formation, segregation, and integration; on the interplay of nation and migration with reference to production and consumption patterns under capitalism; and on political socialization, the creation and transformation of individual and collective subjectivities, and the emergence of social movements. We also encourage the submission of papers analyzing the past and future of the nation-state, nationalism, citizenship, and other nation-based institutions in the face of transnational forces; on the historical and contemporary relationship of migrants to homelands as well as destinations; the expansion or contraction of civil society in places inhabited by individuals of different legal and juridical statuses created by cross-border migrations; and on the constitutive roles of gender, labor, and race relations in shaping migration and nation .
Please send essay submissions and questions to American Quarterly via email by September 1, 2007 (american.quarterly@usc.edu). Essays should be no longer than 10,000 words, including endnotes. Submission guidelines and other AQ information can be found on our web site.
For a previously published law-related Special Issue of American Quarterly, see Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, eds., Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (American Quarterly, September 2005, republished by Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006).
Other AQ Special Issues include:
Carolyn de la Peña and Siva Vaidhyanathan, eds., Rewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies (AQ 2006, republished by Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2007)
Raúl Homero Villa and George J. Sánchez, eds., Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures (AQ 2004, republished by Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005)
