*"Performing Race"Irene Fattacciu and Claudio Fogu, eds.**Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict
* 4 (2017)ISSN: 2385-1171*
The aim of *Zapruder World* is to create a wide arena in which to exchange critical knowledge based on both individual research and collective elaboration. The journal focuses on social conflict, paying particular
attention to conflicts as movements rather than focusing on their resolutions, so as to better connect the history of social conflicts with current transnational cycles of protest. *Zapruder World* is animated by an
aspiration towards "global history" but intentionally leaves its actual definition, contents, and methods open for discussion.
Seeking to stake a position that does not fall into the definitional trap of considering "race" as a biological fact or as a social construction, the fourth issue of *Zapruder World* will explore the practices through which "race" acquires importance as performance and experience, by focusing on everyday life. Race is indeed not always important per se, but it becomes important through a series of specific practices that influence the way people behave, identify, and reproduce themselves. Racism permeates everyday life in ways often not obvious, affecting the ways in which people relate and look at the world, as well as their aspirations and their sense of identity. And, today, the social construction of "race" is consistently challenged in politics and popular culture by developments in genetic science as well as by public policies that pretend to measure race and establish categories to implement affirmative policies. Critical Race Theory studies and those of connected fields (LatCrit, Feminist and Queer studies) have brought an essential contribution to a new understanding of race by looking at race as a performative identity, shifting the focus from macro-institutions to the mechanisms of the formation of racial identities, still keeping the implicit political dimension of the operation. Yet the idea that racial categorization is primarily the product of historically determined social and cultural practices needs to be further investigated and substantiated. How do the creation and reproduction of racialized discourse interact with the practices that implicitly underpin it? How does the process of construction of "race" as performative identity take place through experiences and practices? Which are the appropriate analytical tools to explore the spaces where race was and is negotiated and socialized? How did the tensions occur at different times/places between racialized institutional practices and patterns of resistance substantiated in forms of struggle against dominant conceptions of race?
*Topics and Themes:*
In order to answer these questions, this issue aims to explore the ordinariness of the ways in which race shapes the world around us through a set of environments, practices, and relations within which we spend most of our time on a daily basis, and where the ways through which one is "raced" (as well as gendered, classed and so on) are not necessarily explicit or understood. We invite contributions focusing on any area of the World since the 17thcentury, and that especially address one or more of the following fields:
- Consumer culture and consuming practices
- Racialized subjectivities, identities and performances
- Racial socialization (family, school, etc.)
- Racism and strategies of resistance in the workplace
- Marriage, love and sex
- The construction of racial identity through the experience of parenthood
- Body and racialized aesthetics
Although history is the main focus of this journal, multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as contributions merging an historical perspective with other disciplines, are highly encouraged. Intersectional approaches focusing on the intersections between race and gender as well as class are also particularly welcomed.
We also invite submissions of non-essay form original work, such photographs, videos, interviews, drawings, comics, songs, hyperlinks to online resources, multimedia, etc… both accompanying the articles themselves and as autonomous contributions. We encourage authors to think about incorporating multimedia both into their pieces proposed for *Zapruder World* and in the sections (e.g. "yesterday" and "today") we have created on our website.
*Volume Timeline*
- Abstracts in English (300-600 words) shall be sent to info@zapruderworld.org by *February 15, 2017*.
- All contributors will be informed about the status of their abstract submission by *March 15, 2016*.
- Full articles (preferably 6,000-9,000 words) will be expected by *May 30, 2017*.
*Contact Email: *
info@zapruderworld.org
*URL: *
http://www.zapruderworld.org/call-for-submissions/
