Monday, August 30, 2010

Invitation: Contribute to IRSCL Journal


Greetings, Everyone.
The editorial team of International Research in Children's Literature is in the final stage of preparing the manuscript of Issue 3.2 to be despatched to the publisher. It will be sent off within this week, and the issue should appear on time in December.
After quickly drawing breath, we now turn our attention to the next issues (4.1, 4.2, 5.1).
Issue 4.1 will be notionally the last issue devoted to the theme of the Frankfurt Congress. If you wish to submit an article but have not yet done so, there is still time. We would like to have submissions by the end of September, but could accept later submissions (please let us know if you wish to submit but need some further time). Since Issue 5.1 will be our next General Issue, we could also accommodate articles on the Frankfurt theme there.
In Issue 3.2 we invite contributions to a series of articles and notes which will introduce our readers to radical writers for children from around the world -- radical in their political or cultural perspectives, or in their use of textual forms. We invite readers to send us further contributions to this series, either as notes (up to 2000 words) or regular 5000-7000 word articles. The series begins in 3.2 with Yasmine Motawyâ's account of the late (-2010) Egyptian poet Muhammad Afifi Matar, a political and literary revolutionary who wrote several books for children.
Volume 4, Issue 2 Issue 4.2 will be a themed issue: 'Between Imagined Signs and Social Realities: Representing Racial Others in Children's Fantasy and Folktale'. Since its beginnings, children's literature has included depictions of racial others, both from within and outside national boundaries, in processes that colonise, vilify, romanticise, assimilate, acknowledge, or strive to represent complex social fabrics. Fantasy and folk tale literatures often use race to evoke exotic or monstrous others (Tolkien's orcs, for example), or appropriate mythology and folklore from other cultures to effect a shift from consensus reality. On the other hand, to quote Ian McEwan, 'Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and it is the beginning of morality.'
Contributors may wish to address some aspects of how the following topics appear in fantasy or folk tale literature:
Others and Selves
Race and the body
Versions of intersubjectivity
The senses and race
Race as metaphor and metonym
Race and languages and/or linguistic communities
Replicating/challenging stereotypes (indigenous peoples; immigrant groups; colonisers)
Viewing the mainstream from the margin
Ethnicity and performativity
Audiences watching themselves watching
Nouvelle racism
The politics of race
Otherness as vicarious experience
Otherness and comedy
Race and space
Race and cyber worlds
The geographies of race
Transracial perspectives
'The importance of the intangible cultural heritage as a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development' (UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage)
Deadline and addresses for submissions The initial deadline for the receipt of articles for consideration for Volume 4.2 will be 1 February 2011, with a deadline of 1 April 2011. We would love to receive submissions on a rolling basis, however, as it enables our lives to run more smoothly.
Please send submissions to John Stephens (john.stephens@mq.edu.au) and Ingrid Johnston (mailto:pam.knights@durham.ac.uk).
Best wishes
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John-- John StephensEmeritus Professor in EnglishMacquarie UniversityEditor, International Research in Children's Literature http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/ircljohn.stephens@mq.edu.au

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