CFP: The Postcolonial and the Popular
In Popular Postcolonialisms: Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture, Nadia Atia and Kate Houlden parse the tensions, and compatibilities, between the broad, encompassing fields of “the postcolonial” and “the popular.” “In the present moment,” they observe, “postcolonial studies is undergoing a crisis in the status and direction of the discipline, which is reflected in the proliferation of labels such as ‘global fiction’ and ‘world literature’” (2)—formations, seemingly, ushering "the postcolonial" and "the popular" into relation. Yet, “postcolonial studies, with its roots and politics in the radical challenge to colonial and neocolonial power, has tended to overlook popular forms, often defined as low or middle-brow and commonly viewed as antithetical to resistance” (2). Given postcolonialism’s innate interest in class, intersectionality and the multiple axis of oppression and resilience, this overlooking, Atia and Houlden suggest, invites reconsideration. Indeed, while “the popular” signifies the arena of “mass consumption, and easy accessibility (be it commercial or semantic)” (1) it is also “what is chosen, [and] enjoyed and consumed by a majority of people” (1). In other words, “popular culture – lightweight, throwaway, insignificant in so many of its manifestations – is, …always at the same time a key front in the battle between classes” (4). In other words, the popular seemingly enlivens postcolonialism’s concerns for matters of governance, jurisdiction, capital, center-periphery dynamics, and political power, and simultaneously necessitates contention with the potential biases, blindspots, and field of vision, of the postcolonial discipline, itself.
For this third issue of Refractions, we echo Atia and Houlden’s query–“What is the place of the ‘popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm?” (3)–and look for responses in the field of popular culture. We draw inspiration from TV shows that appeared between 2020 and 2024, such as, but not limited to, Bridgerton (2020), Reservation Dogs (2021), Dealoch (2023) and True Detective (2024). One of the major critiques of Bridgeton has been that the show is ‘shallow’; the reviews from popular platforms such as Vox and Robert Ebert both associate Bridgerton with this adjective. Through this issue, we hope to theorize ‘shallowness’ and ‘the popular’. Does popularity and its associated ‘lightweightedness’’ discount their value as a site of analysis? Is it possible to leverage the lightweightedness to go beyond the insignificance associated with the popular? Since the popular is linked to mass consumption, while we concede that the popular might reflect the majoritarian perspective, we are interested in investigating how the popular can serve as a site to recount marginalized stories. In addition to narratives, in this issue, we hope to be attentive towards the representation of spaces and places enabled by this popular turn in the postcolonial. Consider, for example, the TV show Deadloch, which parodies police procedural, while drawing attention to settler politics in Tasmania. The fourth season of True Detective, with its location in Alaska, does similar work, weaving Indigenous elements into a police procedural and thus illuminating the various jurisdictions, histories, and ways of knowing vying for space within the show. To this end, we are looking for submissions that situate the popular in a field of power relations. Submissions could respond (but are certainly not limited) to the following prompts.
The links between the need for representation and the popular turn in the postcolonial
“The popular” as a manifestation of capitalist logics, profiting from the need for representation and marginalized stories
Explorations of identities and historical inheritance, and their treatment in popular media
The return to genre in the popular turn in the postcolonial (for example, the return of the western genre, in recent years, and the popularity of the sci-fi alien invasion narrative)
Narrative techniques emerging through the overlaps of the popular and the postcolonial
Modes of representation enabled by the popular turn in the postcolonial/postcolonial turn in the popular
The relationship between the popular and spatial representation- which spaces are chosen to be represented and why? What does it say about the turn to ‘non-conventional spaces’ in contemporary TV?
We are looking for submissions that approach these questions through unconventional formats. Send us your zines, collages, and short write-ups. In the spirit of the popular, and its emphasis on accessibility and wider audiences, we also welcome shorter, non academic and semi-academic pieces. For standard written submissions, please check our “Submission Guidelines” page. Please send your submissions to editors@refractionsajournalofpostcolonialculturalcriticism.com by 15 July 2024.
For our second cfp, we invite reflections on “care work” in relation to postcolonial studies, cultural media and practice, and institutions.
In her essay, “The University Cannot Love You,” Brenna Clarke Gray correlates the advent of remote work during COVID-19 and the decrease in female authored journal submissions. “Care work within both the home and the academy,” Gray asserts, “has always been more likely to fall on women’s desks, and even more disproportionately on the desks of racialized, queer, and disabled scholars.” Gray’s ensuing line of inquiry–“If we can’t trust the university’s capacity for care, what happens next?”--is timely and enduring. It invokes the university’s exploitive “holding patterns” (Zuroski) and systems of “predatory value” (Byrd et al), hyper-visible under COVID-19 and pervasive in many institutional spaces. It speaks to the increasingly corporate, neoliberal university, wherein “care work” is integral and yet often invisible within metrics of productivity, and wherein decolonization and diversity initiatives often manifest gesturally, without concrete changes in remuneration or hiring. As has been identified, in this setting, students and faculty of colour are often disproportionately “forced to care” (see Magoqwana et al)--expected to mentor students, educate faculty, and consult on initiatives, or, in other words, assume duties of necessity often beyond financially compensatory models. JoAnn Trejo calls these added responsibilities for faculty of color “a minority tax.” As Lorgia Garcia Peña asserts, these dynamics risk sustaining “the dominant structures of power while also securing the complicity of students and faculty through investment in ideas of unity, progress, and diversity that are based on whiteness” (Chapter 1).
For Refractions second CFP, we invite meditations on “care work” as a phenomenon that is subject to, revealing of, and opposed to, exploitative systems of labour. What does postcolonial studies, and its relations to Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, Diaspora Studies, Ecocriticism/Ecofeminsm, and Settler Colonial Studies, reveal about the labour economies of institutions, disciplinary tendencies, cultural media and practices, and literature? What does care work look like amidst, despite, and in opposition to, the capitalist neoliberal systems that tend to exploit it, and what other worlds and possibilities does it hold? What does postcolonial studies allow us to see about the economies of “care work,” and what does “care work” allow us to see of it–the institutional space it often inhabits, and the relations, knowledge economies, and dependencies, through which the field subsists? In an increasingly corporatized university system, often perpetuating an “individualistic racial-capital regime that insists we remain isolated from one another—that we ‘eliminate the competition’ to succeed through the logic of exceptionalism?” (Peña Chapter 1), what risks and alternatives does “care work” pose?
We are interested in the possibility that care work occupies a diversity of oppositional and recuperative, disruptive and intimate, forms. As Sara Ahmed’s Complaint!, asserts, opposing the institution’s status quo is an act of care. Student-led protests (such as those transpiring across universities today), initiatives seeking to decolonize the university and oppose its systems of abjection and colonial reproduction (from unlivable wages, to systematized precarity, to its representational economies, to the country’s current reckoning with Indigenous identity fraud), affirm care work as the work of transformation. Beyond academia, anticolonial, anticapitalist thinkers and activists have read and mobilized care work in public protest and assembly (see Simpson). Aside from the manifestations of care work in relation to institutions like the university, we are also interested in the ways care work might inform literary and cultural interpretation, pedagogy, and methods of analysis and making. What does it mean to read, watch, see, create, work, or listen with care? How might such practices bear upon, relate to, or derive from anticolonial and anticapitalist initiatives and political organizing, today?
We welcome creative and scholarly submissions pertaining to the broad topic of “care work” in relation to postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial frames. A possible (though by no means exhaustive) list of potential avenues are:
Institutionalized invisible labour and labour economies
Interpretive, methodological, and analytical forms of care work in relation to literary and cultural materials
Care work as creative practice
Refusal as care work/Care work as an act of refusal
Contingency and precarity in higher education
Economies of knowledge sharing, circulation, and knowledge mining within the postcolonial discipline
Racialisation and cultural mobility
Value networks in the university
Neoliberalization and care work
Protest, collective assembly, and activism
Please consult our submissions page for details on style, length, and format. Please send drafts to editors@refractionsajournalofpostcolonialculturalcriticism.com: The deadline for academic articles is April 1, 2023; the deadline for creative submissions, Perspective Pieces, Notes from the Field, and Book Reviews is July 1, 2023.
Works cited
Ahmed, Sara. Complaint! Duke University Press, 2021.
Peña, Lorgia Garcia. Community as Rebellion. Haymarket Books, 2022.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, and Canadian Literature Centre. A Short History of the Blockade : Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin. First electronic edition., First electronic ed., University of Alberta Press, 2021.
Next CFP Jan. 2023
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Next CFP Jan. 2023 〰️
Issue 1: Refractions
Image from Ludovic Boney’s exhibition, Constructive Interference.
For our inaugural cfp, we invite responses to the title, word, implications, and resonances of “refraction” in the postcolonial.
The law of refraction was discovered in the early 1600s by Dutch mathematician and geodesist, Willebrord Snel van Royen. Royen observed that a beam of light would bend when entering a block of glass, and that the angle of bending was dependent upon the incident angle of the light beam. The greater the angle of refraction, Royen asserted, the higher the refractive index for a substance. Royen’s work spawned debate. In 1678 Christiaan Huygens’ wave theory of light asserted that light was made of waves, vibrating perpendicular to the direction of the wave propagation. This theory was both contested and subsumed by Isaac Newton’s Corpuscular theory of light (1672). Given that waves do not travel in straight lines, Newton argued, the geometric nature of light’s reflection and refraction could only be explained if light was made of particles.
Refraction, as a phenomenon describing energetic transduction, and the bearings of different frames and mediums on perception, invokes both the objectivity of science and the radical possibilities of interdisciplinary thought.
The theory of refraction is central to the apparatus of Reasoned Enlightenment, as an ethos celebrating the ‘objectivities’ of knowledge production. The genealogy of refraction invokes the apparatus of colonialism as mediated through science and Reason, and the Enlightenment as characterized by a belief in the ideal of progress. However, this particular perception of progress advanced the notion of Europe as a place which “eternally, advances, progresses, modernizes” while the rest of the world stagnates (J.M. Blaut). This perception informed the colonial project, which was conducted under the guise of bringing progress and European rationality to non-Europe. The division of the globe into neat halves and binaries still carries into our current perception of the world and our educational environments. Divides such as east and west, canonical and marginal, developed and underdeveloped, indicate “how the world has been constructed around centres and margins, and how these divisions were bolstered through forms of scholarship supported by imperialism” (Willinsky). Bearing this in mind, we turn to contemporary decolonial thought as an avenue to unsettle the “hegemonic logic of domination” and “the sensible architecture of experience” marking ongoing histories of colonial power (Martineau and Ritskes).
In contemporary decolonial thought, refraction is enacted and refracted. Interdisciplinary scholarship’s affirmation of the epistemological value of deploying diverse prisms, mediums, frames, and methods, performs Royen and Newton’s assertion that refraction reveals new ways of understanding perception. The resonances of refraction in interdisciplinary method affirm that “science and literature have much to gain from one another” (Jackson). Simultaneously, theories of refraction are, themselves, refracted, as decolonial scholars emphasize the ways in which the very logics of the sensible reveal sedimentations of power. As Tina Campt argues, archives produced through, or tacitly bearing, the “regulatory needs of the state or the classifactory imperatives of colonization” require “radical interpretive possibilities” to “enunciate alternate accounts of their subjects.” For Campt, “listening to images” offers one method of interrogating the “distributions of the sensible” and the “sovereign gaze of the regimes that created them.” As Dylan Robinson asserts, “settler positionality guides perception...by generating normative narratocracies of experience, feeling, and the sensible.” In researching, writing, and considering decolonization today, we need to reflect on “encounters between particular perceptual logics,” tending to the legacies of disciplining and “‘civilizing’ sensory paradigm[s]” alongside questions of refusal, redress, and resurgence (Robinson).
Invested in these historical influences, Refractions aims to center voices and methodologies which have been marginalized by colonial knowledge production, notably decolonial, queer, and feminist responses to colonial epistemologies. We invite explorations of, and rumination on, the concept of refraction (and/or, its implications and relations) towards postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial aims.
We are interested in work that unsettles dominant methods of knowledge production. Send us your work that opens new lines of inquiry into:
Visual cultures of postcolonial cultural studies
The intersections of postcolonial and sound studies
Anticolonial archival studies and approaches
Decolonial futures
Refraction as method
Queer, Indigenous, and Afro-futurities
Refraction as theory
Speculative futures
Experimental approaches to “postcolonial” literatures; ways of seeing and hearing text
Anticolonial, decolonial, and postcolonial frames onto contemporary media
Works Cited:
Blaut, J.M. The Colonizer’s Model of the World. The Guilford Press, 1993.
Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human : Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York University Press, 2020.
Martineau Jarrett and Eric Ritskes. “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle through Indigenous Art.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2014, pp. I-XII.
Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening : Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Willinsky, John. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. University of Minnesota Press, 1998.