Current Issue

The Journal of Critical Southern Studies is seeking reviewers, due to the increase in the volume of submissions to the journal/the imminent relaunch of the journal.

General Qualifications

Reviewers should be actively working in an area linked to the focus of the journal, however we do not require candidates to have a PhD or be based within a university.

Applications

https://jcss.demontfortuniversitypress.org/author/register/reviewer/

 Further information or answers to questions can be obtained from Demi Middleton demi.middleton@dmu.ac.uk and further details about the journal can be found here. 

The JCSS is currently accepting manuscripts for its January 2022 Special Issue ‘(Dis)ordering epistemological terra nullius; Or yes, the other can speak’.

Call for papers

The epistemic violence and injustice perpetrated by the onto-epistemological logics, (ir)rationalities and narratives of the raced and feminised non-western other are facing ongoing disordering and disruption of its proclaimed invincibility and totalizing efficacy from multiple voices, human, more-than-human, and non-human and pluridiverse knowledges from the South. These voices have been relegated to outside of humanness itself, incapable of intellectualism, and lacking history and the capacity to have agency and ingenuity. Such a global design is premised on and (re)produces the discourse that Western reason, intellectualism, systems of knowledge production, framing of knowledge and the knowing subject as superior, absolute and universal, eliding the ongoing violent logics and (ir)rationalities that seek to reproduce the other‘s silence. In this modern/colonial onto-epistemological landscape, the voice of the other is often framed at best as embryonic, as in childlike, and at worst as deficient, unmodern and backward, as in deviant and monstrous. The voice of the other can thus within modernity/coloniality, only have agency and legitimacy through Western canonization, appropriation or assimilation. In light of this manufactured and ritualized (un)reality, this extensive absence within the dominant modern/colonial system of knowledge production rests on logics of social death and epistemological denial and reproduce a monological end of history that is increasingly entering into intensified and unsustainable crises.

Such struggles and crises make visible how claims to epistemological terra nullias are ritualized fantasies. The modern/colonial onto-epistemological project has never been able to eradicate the pluridiversity of the South even as it has enacted systemic and systematised originary and ongoing harm. Building on past and present efforts to bring about epistemological decolonization, this call for papers is situated within the contours of this struggle, with the intent to provide a meeting place for the voices of the other to be spoken, listened to, embraced, put into dialogue, and received without the inference of Western validation, the violence of appropriation or the denial of assimilation.

We invite submissions that address these themes and others, and questions below:

• Critiques of the modern/colonial system of knowledge/reason
• Decolonising disruptions of this system of violent appropriation, extraction and disavowal
• Engagements as and with the more-than-human and non-human
• Theoretically informed empirically rich accounts of such decolonising in action
• Dialogues across borders which experiment with pluridiversity in thought and form
• Creative expression of the voice of the other
• Storytelling and writing as ceremony

We will accept a plurality of formats for consideration for publication in this special issue: including full articles that will go out for peer review; cultural pieces; reflection pieces; action notes, poetry; and other formats.

Please contact us to discuss your ideas.

Timeline:

Submission of manuscript: August 1^st, 2021

Review process, including revisions: August-November 2021

Publication: January 2022

About JCSS 

The Journal of Critical Southern Studies is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to scholarship from and about The Global South, broadly defined. The JCSS welcomes submissions on all aspects of southern studies. Subjects might include, but are not limited to: reflections on the configuration of global systems, investigations of institutions of power, studies of the environment and the south, literary analyses outside the canon, examinations of South-South exchanges in gender studies, the coloniality of gender, religion, theology and spirituality, engagements with the geopolitics of knowledge of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, engagements from Blackness, Indigenous sovereignties, humanism beyond the modern/colonial human subject,  examinations of South–South exchanges in all their various manifestations.

Dedicated to the promotion of inter-disciplinary, cross-regional Global South studies, the JCSS is published twice a year. The journal considers original, unpublished manuscripts not under review by other journals. Manuscripts should be 8,000 to 12,000 words in length, double-spaced, and include an abstract of 50-100 words. References and citations as well as general manuscript format should conform to our submission guidelines at: https://jcss.demontfortuniversitypress.org/about/submissions/

We also consider other formats such as action pieces, cultural work, reflection pieces, poetry, storytelling and other.

To submit your manuscripts, please go to the following link: https://jcss.demontfortuniversitypress.org/about/submissions/

edited by: Dr Sara Motta, Dr Abdoulie Sallah, Dr Ybiskay Gonzalez Torres