Call for Writers: Imagining Survival

In our current moment,  a firehose of laws have sought to delegitimize welfare and its capacities. Many lives and ways of living are becoming more vulnerable to displacement, chaos, imperialist violence, and fascism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theory of state violence and surveillance through “organized abandonment” could not be more prescient. More lives are forced into precarity, while, at the same time, power and wealth move further to an even more elite group. Under the pressure of state violence and the retraction of welfare, collective survival is difficult to imagine. 

Insurrect!: Radical Thinking in Early American Studies is soliciting authors to submit short essays for the roundtable Imagining Survival. We are interested in proposals that document how an individual or group expresses the emotions of survival in the  pre-1900 Americas and Atlantic World. Specifically, we seek to publish reflections on possible ways to understand our current crisis as an afterlife of the past. We are especially interested in submissions from public historians, scholars, and artists to write on the possibilities and limits of communal care, solidarity, and courage within the present. We encourage contributors to be attentive to how some of the aforementioned terms are often used in reductive ways and encourage nuanced interpretations of survival. 

Roundtables with Insurrect! are written dialogues between three to four writers, such as this recent roundtable on Mutual Aid, which this cfp builds upon. Each completed submission will be 500–1,000 words. Compensation for each contribution is $150. 

Please submit completed drafts, along with a few sentences on your personal, academic, or professional interest on the topic, by June 20th to insurrect.history@gmail.com and copy fallonm@bu.edu. Acceptances will be sent the following two weeks after the deadline. Please carefully consult our style guide before submitting and feel free to email us with any questions.  The completed roundtable will appear in Insurrect! in the late summer or early fall.  

Insurrect! aims to challenge academic gatekeeping, build solidarity across disciplines, and embraces methodologies that are both accessible and wide in its scope. We encourage submissions from early career researchers, contingent scholars, and public humanists.