Special Issue of Latin@ Literatures Journal
Guest Editors: AJ Baginski, Ivylove Cudjoe, Alexa Hurtado, Alain Lawo-Sukam, Regina Mills, George Villanueva
Call for Submissions
“Post- 1492, what the uninhabitable tells us… is that populations who occupy the ‘nonexistent’ are living in what has been previously conceptualized as unlivable and unimaginable.” – Katherine McKittrick
Personal experience captured in writing – journaling, recipe writing, collective note taking –may never be published, but can shape how knowledge of space and survival moves through communities and across generations. AfroLatinx writers have long engaged practices of life writing – working between biography, memoir, poetry, movement observation, and theory – to incorporate embodied and collective experience into modes of published writing that reflect and define AfroLatinx identities. This call for submissions seeks writing that pushes the limits between the publishable and the personal to change our assumptions of where and how we imagine living to take place.
How do ancestral landscapes generate a sense of belonging, even when these exist only in memories and images? What elements – water, minerals, air – carry our senses of self, community, and history? How do Latinidad and/or blackness appear differently in different linguistic, institutional, national/cultural and natural environments? How can we direct ourselves and others home? What real or imagined geographies are conjured by the desire for return, even if this desire can never be realized?Submit poems (max. 2) or hybrid poetic writings (max. 500 words) in English, Spanish, or a combination of both to landscapesbelonging@gmail.com by March 1, 2024.
Visit the Special Issue page: https://lob.latinoliteratures.org/