Call for Papers
Deadline: September 15th, 2023
Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 February 2023 Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 September 2023
Dear Colleagues,
Critical scholarship on colonialism and medieval and (early) modern Europe has produced new understandings of religion in articulation with race. While distinct from race, religion has performed similar work by means of establishing the boundaries of political communities based on a hierarchical distinction between the human and the subhuman, following Sylvia Wynter (2003). Moreover, religion did not only establish said categories in the distant past. Religion is the precursor of racial distinctions and continues to operate today in a Europe that imagines and narrates itself as secular (Bracke 2011; 2013; Topolski 2018; 2016; Fadil 2016) and non/post-racial (Goldberg 2015; Lentin 2008; El-Tayeb 2008).
Building upon the growing literature exploring the historical, conceptual, and political entanglements between the categories of race and religion, this Special Issue explores the analytical relations and processes of the co-constitution of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and antiblackness in Europe and beyond. It does so by taking into full account the insights generated by the race–religion constellation (Topolski 2018), a novel theoretical approach concerned with the analysis of how the category of religion intersects with and co-constitutes race, as well as how race overlaps with and constitutes categorizations of religion, all these while paying particular attention to the role of Christianity and secularism in said processes. Pioneering scholars on race such as W.E.B. DuBois (1952) and Frantz Fanon (1967) were keenly aware of the relationality between antiblackness and antisemitism and yet, as Neil McMaster (2007) has pointed out, such relation has been scholarly understudied. The same holds true for the relationship between Islamophobia and antiblackness, despite fruitful avenues offered by research on Moors and Morishness. Against this background, this Special Issue aims to build analytical bridges and flesh out the entanglements between these three racial formations.
This Special Issue centers on the historical, conceptual, and political relations between antisemitism, Islamophobia, and antiblackness in Europe and other geographies. This issue aims to publish interdisciplinary, conceptual, and historical pieces, novel empirical research, and case studies unraveling the convoluted nexus among these three racial formations, as well as pieces analyzing the borrowing, exchange, and adaptations of racial tropes, metaphors, practices, and the power relations which inform such phenomena. Furthermore, we invite submissions which fully engage with the gendered and sexualized dynamics of antisemitism, Islamophobia and antiblackness, as well as research concerned with the colonial and postcolonial formations of these racisms. Decolonial analyses of such race–religion constellations are welcome.
With these, we seek to bring into conversation bodies of scholarship on racism that have as of yet remained compartmentalized by and enclosed within disciplinary or epistemic boundaries. Understanding the nexus between antisemitism, Islamophobia, and antiblackness, as well as their gendered and racial dynamics, can shed new light on the different ways in which racisms operate transnationally and trans-historically. This Special Issue will contribute to and supplement the growing literature dealing with the nexus between antisemitism and Islamophobia by engaging with the history, formation, and conceptual articulations of antiblackness, and correspondingly contribute to scholarship on antiblackness by engaging with the insights from the race–religion constellation. The issue welcomes senior and early-career contributors and is open to single-authored and co-authored articles.
We invite contributors to submit their research in English for consideration. Please note that there is a two-stage submission procedure. We will first collect a title and short abstract (maximum 250 words), 5 keywords, and a short bio (150 words), by 15 February 2023, via email to Dr. Patricia Schor ([email protected]) and Dr. Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar ([email protected]). Before 15 March 2023, we will invite selected abstracts to be submitted as 7000- to 9000-word papers for peer review by 15 September 2023. Journal publication is expected in late 2023 to early 2024, depending on the revision time needed after peer review. Each article will be published in open access on a rolling basis after successfully passing peer review.
Dr. Patricia Schor
Dr. Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Authors working under precarious conditions may request a fee waiver. In this case, please contact the co-editors ASAP. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
Published Papers
This special issue is now open for submission.