Call for Papers: Deadline Extended

Speculating Exile: Literary Estrangements and Fugitive Belongings

Exile is “the signature and permanent mark of the modern age,” M. Nourbese Philip wrote in 1992: “we cutting we teeth on exile— exile in the very air we breathing.” In this waning quarter of the 21^st century, more than 281 million or 3.6% of the global population are migrants, a number that, by all accounts, will only rise. Displacement, whether due to economic instabilities, climate change, war, political oppression, or just the “maddest Joy” of desire, alters not only those it subjectifies, but the conditions of belonging that inform their trajectories.

And so, the foreigner, the exile, or the stranger have long remained fruitful lenses through which to interrogate national, cultural, and linguistic borders and their attendant politics and aesthetics, and the exilic itself has remained a dominant critical trope in disclosing new forms of relationality and social (re)production. At the same time, while exile is often valorized as a site of privileged epistemic revelation, either representationally in literature or as a condition for its production, critics like Aijaz Ahmed ask us to interrogate the “imaginative construction of exile,” and consider the elided intersections of class, education, and cultural capital that underwrite its possibilities.

Estrangement from home, from community, from self oscillates between contingency and agency, necessity and freedom, loss and desire. As literary scholars we are keenly attuned to the entanglements of text and territory, narrative and nation, aesthetic rupture and cultural norms. Exile speculates as much as it is speculated upon, smuggling in foreign imaginaries and proposing new and unsettling modes of being and relating. Minor literatures deterriorialize formal lineages and activate crosspollinating transnational networks, while fugitive belongings necessitate new representative strategies that collapse the borders of memory and fiction, history and speculation. Edward Said writes that “The exile’s new world, logically enough, is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction,” invoking Georg Lukács’ theory of the novel as an exemplary form of “transcendental homelessness.” But this founding displacement can be registered in other forms such as poetry, drama and nonfiction as well – as the New Zealand author Janet Frame contends, “All writers are exiles wherever they live, and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.”

Pivot invites you to submit critical and creative work that explores the ways in which texts navigate the journey to this always-already lost land, and the myriad pleasures and perils of the migratory and the exilic. While the topic may appear to privilege the material and psychic displacements of modernity, we invite scholars to expand the boundaries of what we ordinarily think of in relation to this topic, whether that’s exploring a medieval poet like Chaucer’s self-exile in Kent and its textual resonances, Romantic wandering and the proliferation of travel literatures, or, in contemporary contexts, the marketability of the peripatetic and its potentiation within the networks of global capital and mass culture. This is an old but continually revitalized topic, and we encourage you to challenge our expectations and frameworks for understanding it.

 

Questions and Topics to consider:

• How is exile and migration represented in literature, and how do those representations propose new relations between space, subjectivity, and aesthetics?
• How does literature navigate the romance of exile, and respond to the claims of territory, nation, and culture made by vulnerable and precarious communities such as refugees and the stateless?
• Can the disaffiliations and transnational allegiances of exilic consciousness help cultivate what postcolonial literary scholars have called a “critical citizenship,” shaping a dialectical space between the homogenizations of globalism and the calcifications of the national?
• How do the imaginative geographies of indigenous life confront the realities of being dispossessed in one’s own land, and can literature and literary scholarship help cultivate what Gloria Anzaldúa has called a mestiza or borderland consciousness?
• How do queer texts and their representations defamiliarize notions of home and propose new modes of (un)belonging? How do queer readings reconceive the politics of desire and its relationships to national imaginaries?
• How have various authors staged their poetics of exile, and what are the political and ethical disclosures of their sensibilities?
• In what Christian Sharpe terms the “wake work” of Black writing, altered and altering aesthetic practices unearth and unsettle, reinscribing space with elided historical meaning and the counter-narratives of “critical fabulation” (Saidiya Hartman) – in what ways do these texts construct their aesthetic and political effects?
• How does gender intersect with the experiences of migration and exile as represented in literary narratives?
• How do diasporic authors explore subjectivities shaped by varieties of an impossible mourning, and what Édouard Glissant has theorized as the hinterlands of a new relational poetics?

 

Note: While we primarily publish literary scholarship, we also curate a smaller selection of poetry and experimental nonfiction. If you are interested in submitting creative work but aren’t sure if it falls under our remit, feel free to contact us with your proposal. You can reach us at journalpivot@gmail.com.

Submissions are to be made at this link by October 25^th, 2024: https://pivot.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/pivot/about/submissions

Below are some guidelines for submissions. For additional information, you can visit our website at: https://pivot.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/pivot

Critical Essays: Critical articles/essays should aim to be between 4000 – 5500 words. They must adhere to MLA guidelines and will undergo a peer-review process. Please include an abstract with your submission.

Reviews: This can include reviews of books, theatre, dance, films, visual and installation art, music and sound art, etc. Priority will be given to work that resonates with the theme of the current issue, but this isn’t required. Reviews should be 700 – 1500 words. 

Poetry: Please submit between 1-3 pages of poetry. Whether the pages consist of one long poem or three separate poems does not matter so long as the entry fits within these limits. 

Creative Non-Fiction: Works of literary non-fiction should be between 1500 – 3000 words. Submissions must engage with Pivot’s current theme in some way, and can include work like autotheory and biblio-memoirs that cross the borders of criticism, non-fiction, and creative writing.

Visual Art: We accept photography, graphic design, paintings, and drawings, as well as photos of sculpture or performance art. In the abstract section, please include a short description or statement that speaks to how your submission responds to the current topic.

We look forward to engaging with your work!