Current Special Issue CFP: "Refugee Literatures: Migration, Crisis, and the Humanities"
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory invites submissions exploring the life and work of refugees as they engage the humanities today. Just as the mid-twentieth century refugee crisis shaped the emergence and development of aesthetic and theoretical movements around World War II, the mass movement of displaced peoples today stems from a convergence of forces concomitantly reshaping art and humanistic thought, from economic globalization to climate change, neoliberalism, neoimperialism, resurgent nationalisms, violence against black, latinx, Muslim, and queer peoples, and the waning securities of sovereignty and citizenship. In light of these crises, refugees and other undocumented peoples have come to appear less an exception to an otherwise stable world order and more like harbingers of things to come –– embodiments of the “new normal” in a world of permanent insecurity. And yet, Edward Said once warned that an impulse to universalize the refugee might lead scholars to ignore the particularities of the refugee’s plight and to “banalize their mutilations.” Alive to Said’s warning and to the need to give voice and critical attention to the lives of the violently displaced, this special issue asks how writings by and about refugees –– past and present, real and imagined –– might intersect with the work of the humanities to…. read more