Call for Papers

Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts

Issue One, Autumn 2007
“Transnational Migration, Race, and Citizenship”

The editorial staff for the new peer-reviewed journal Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts invites submissions for its inaugural issue on the subjects of "Transnational Migration, Race, and Citizenship." Race/Ethnicity maps the development of important themes in the field of race and ethnic studies by using a "classic" piece as a point of departure for a reconsideration of critical issues within the contemporary economic, political, and cultural terrain.

While the classic piece establishes the thematic parameters of each issue, authors are under no obligation to actively engage the arguments posed by that work.

Issue one explores the subjects of transnational migration, race, and citizenship with consideration of the chapter "The Shock of Alienation" from Oscar Handlin's ground-breaking book The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People. In this chapter, Handlin investigates the relationships between labor, cultural membership, citizenship, and the production of racial difference. Citing violence against Chinese and Filipino immigrants in the early 19th century, he details the ways in which labor tensions in the US were integral to the establishment of federal anti-immigration policy aimed at these "unassimilable" groups. According to Handlin, cultural variation and poverty status became the criteria used to infer an ostensibly inherent racial inferiority that served as the basis for denying Chinese and Filipino immigrants the rights and protections that accompanied citizenship.

While labor, cultural membership, and race remain central components of the current complexities of immigration, new concerns have emerged since the 1951 publication of Handlin's Pulitzer Prize-winning history. On one hand, new signs of deterritorialization-the increasing incidence of dual citizenship, home-country remittances, expatriate involvement in home-country politics, and "diasporic" community-building-have led some to assert the declining relevance of the nation-state as a primary attachment and the declining significance of citizenship itself. On the other, debates and policy developments around immigration and citizenship suggest that the nation-state's power to regulate the movement of labor and capital within and across borders is far from obsolete. In particular, state power continues to have a profound impact on racialized disparities, processes of racialization, and the burdens and benefits of citizenship. In this new context, we are compelled to reconsider the nature of transnational migration, the nature of citizenship, the link between the two, and the role of race in mediating that link.

To this end, the "Transnational Migration, Race, and Citizenship" issue of Race/Ethnicity seeks manuscripts that investigate:

A) Economic Flows, Migration, and Racialized Disparities
How is migration racialized/ethnicized and gendered? What is the relationship between late capitalist economic operations, migration, and racialized disparities in health, education, self determination and representation, and wealth? In what ways do "citizenship gaps"-spaces in which market participation forecloses political membership-(re)produce racialized disparities globally?

B) Borders, Boundaries, and "The Nation"
How is immigration policy racialized? What is/should be the current role of the nation-state in generating policy that regulates the movement of wealth and people across borders and in regulating resultant disparities? What forms of regulation/governance that exceed the nation-state can be conceptualized? What role does cultural nationalism play in political membership? What transnational forms of political and cultural membership are or can be imagined?

C) Processes of Racialization
In what ways are immigrant populations affecting domestic racial hierarchies and racial identities? How are transnational cultural flows affecting conceptualizations of race and ethnicity and their relationship to the nation?

The deadline for manuscript submission is February 16, 2007. Please send manuscript submissions to Mobley.2@osu.edu. See Style Guidelines to prepare your document in accordance with the style guidelines of Race/Ethnicity.

Melanie Maltry
Assistant Editor, Race/Ethnicity
The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
The Ohio State University