CFP: Critical Feminist Biography as Translocal History (Journal of Women's History; 1 Aug)

Journal of Women's History Special Issue
Co-edited by Marilyn Both and Antoinette Burton
Comparative Literature, History and Gender and Women's Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
USA

The return of the embodied subject as a site generative of analytical force and explanatory power in fields of inquiry throughout the humanities and social sciences, including postcolonial theory and even global studies, calls for reassessing the work of feminist biography as a form of historical knowledge. We seek papers that engage the dynamics of feminist biography as a critical mode of historical thinking and especially as an articulation of translocal history. We use the term translocal in dynamic tension with the transnational, in part to re-appropriate the geographical specificities entailed by critical biography as a feminist practice, and in part to insist on the capacity of feminist biography to illuminate geopolitics beyond the boundaries of the nation. We are interested in essays that focus on the construction of biographical subjects while theorizing problems that arise from the conjuncture of individual figures moving across space and time; the presumptions of history as a discipline; and/or the limits and blind spots of feminist inquiry as it has been practiced in the academy. We are especially keen to receive submissions from scholars residing outside Euro-America and/or interrogating the limits of the western historical canon.

The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2007. Please be sure to consult the JWH website for submission guidelines: http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/guidelines.html. Submissions should be addressed to:

Marilyn Booth and Antoinette Burton
Co-editors, Critical Feminist Biography Special Issue
Journal of Women's History
c/o Department of History
University of Illinois
810 S. Wright Street
Urbana IL 61801
USA