CFP: Our First Themed Issue on Anti-Blackness
Rolling submissions
up//root invites meditations that push beyond the understanding that anti-Blackness is (just only) "racism against black people," as it is an effect of global structural conditioning, so much so that its brutality can prosper through the thoughts, actions, and empty declarations of solidarity of non-Black people of color. In this case, we are specifically calling attention to the permeation of anti-Blackness through the structural roots that perpetuate (/protect) U.S.-’based’ enslavement and Jim Crow laws.
Allow us to be explicit here: We strongly encourage non-Black people of color to show up for this; to meditate on the ways anti-blackness is perpetuated through communities of color, together with the ways in which folx (must) intervene.
As part of your knowledge-making project (and beyond), we encourage you to meaningfully engage and build on Black radical social thought, critical Black studies, works in the Black Radical Tradition, Black creative expression, and Black knowledge-making in information science, tech and media.
While some contributions will show joy, resistance, love, resurgence and hope rooted in Black imaginaries and Black futurity towards an otherwise, we acknowledge that some will undoubtedly show (ongoing) abuse, terror and violence; and others, particularly the work of non-Black people of color, will navigate a jarring existence of solidarity enmeshed with unchecked anti-Blackness through white supremacy. It is not our wish to be purveyors of the collective pain that linger in memories, hearts and histories. It is our intention to provide a space where BIPOC share their work and creative expressions that may make them vulnerable, but in community with others. It is our intention to provide a space where BIPOC can cultivate knowledge with others in a community of resistance as they expose, name and resist anti-Blackness.
Relevant to archives, libraries, LIS education, and other information environments, consider reflecting on/examining, for example:
Ever-present structures of power that dictate everyday ways of doing or being
Seemingly ordinary environments in which information is collected, recorded, shared, disseminated, discussed, analyzed, and/or commodified to make visible the entangled web of structural violence
Dominant modes of knowing and creating that are accepted as legitimate
Surveillance
Your (sense of) ‘place’
An incomplete list of knowledge-makers whose work may be helpful, now and always:
James Baldwin • Derrick Bell • The Blackivists • Documenting The Now • W.E.B. Du Bois • Michael Dumas • Jarrett Drake • Anthony W. Dunbar • Fobazi Ettarh • Frantz Fanon • Roderick A. Ferguson • Alexis Pauline Gumbs • Stuart Hall • Saidiya Hartman • April Hathcock • bell hooks • David James Hudson • L’ael Hughes-Watkins • Marcus Anthony Hunter • Audre Lorde • Achille Mbembe • Fred Moten • Safiya U. Noble • kihana miraya ross • Christina Sharpe • Robbie Shilliam • Barbara Smith • Tourmaline • Michel-Rolph Trouillot • João Costa Vargas • WITNESS • Sylvia Wynter……..
A note regarding reviewers for this themed issue:
Non-Black people of color will not be reviewers for accepted proposals on anti-Blackness, unless otherwise stated explicitly by the contributor. This does not include accepted proposals by non-Black contributors of color whose work centers around interrogating the complicity of people of color (particularly their own) in perpetuating anti-Blackness.
