Religion Call for Papers | @relcfp

Spring 2025 Special Issue of Critical Humanities on Planetary Thinking [ ] Appalachia

deadline for submissions: 

September 8, 2024

full name / name of organization: 

Critical Humanities

contact email: 

criticalhumanities@marshall.edu

Call for Papers: Spring 2025 Special Issue on Appalachia

Spring 2025 Special Issue of Critical Humanities on Planetary Thinking [ ] Appalachia

In the inaugural issue of the Critical Humanities journal, Puspa Damai notes that the dual focus of the journal is to “foster planetary thinking and…promote discourses of decolonization, democratization and social justice” among individuals and communities on both sides of the North/South divide.This call to “planetary thinking” echoes the focus of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Focusing specifically on the cognitive shifts fostered by climate sciences of global warming, Chakrabarty argues that “we need to orient ourselves to both what we have come to call the globe and to a new historical-philosophical entity called the planet. The latter is not the same as the globe, or the earth, or the world, the categories we have used so far to organize modern history…The globe…is a humanocentric construction; the planet…decenters the human” (Chakrabarty 2021, 3-4). In his work to complicate the political and philosophical categories that we use to analyze anthropogenic climate change, Chakrabarty claims that the boundary between human and natural history dissipates when we start to consider humans as a “geological force” (Chakrabarty, 31).

While Chakrabarty’s argument is focused on the ways in which we narrate history, as a possible resource in decentering humanity, “planetary thinking” can according to Ted Toadvine, expand and deepen the spatio-temporal scales of our perception and imagination. Engaging with, but ultimately critiquing Chakrabarty’s suspicion of phenomenology and subjective bias, Toadvine argues that while “deep time has typically been portrayed as incommensurate with, and incomprehensible from, the perspective of human temporal horizons…[it is] an essential structure of human temporal experience and…its depths can be understood only in experiential terms” (Toadvine 2024, 6). Accordingly, he claims that “the materiality of our bodies embeds us within the asubjective temporal flows of the elements, while our sense and affects tangle us in the generative time of evolution” (Toadvine, 15).

In this Call for Papers, we seek to consider how “planetary thinking” intersects with and potentially challenges narratives and representations of Appalachian history, culture, and identity. Since the advent of Appalachian Studies in the 1970s, questions about what it means to “be Appalachian” or “belong to the region” have drawn on a variety of disciplinary perspectives – literary, historical, political, ethnographic – and recent developments in the field have expanded to include folklore studies (Hilliard 2022), queer studies/memoir (Avashia 2022; Grover 2023), and ecocriticism (Cory and Wright 2023). As the field has evolved it has also engaged with postmodern theory and its challenge to universalism and essentialism (Banks, Billings, and Tice 1993). While the integration of the postmodern sensibility has been beneficial in challenging the reductionism of regional stereotypes, it has also run the risk of emptying the construct “Appalachia” of concrete or material meaning, such that it becomes nothing but a representation (Berry 2000, 126). In the attempt to challenge the “myths of Appalachia,” some scholarship has rendered Appalachian little more than a myth. Yet, as Rodger Cunningham notes, we need not necessarily abandon the postmodern emphasis on construction, rather we should seek “a better understanding what constructivism constructs – or what a construct is” (Cunningham 2003, 381). For both Berry and Cunningham, the response to the postmodern destabilization of an “essentialized Appalachia” is not to deny that the region is unique or different, but rather that such distinction is paradoxically fluid and concrete.

We invite manuscript submissions from scholars across a variety of disciplinary perspectives and submissions that creatively and critically engage the theme “planetary thinking [ ] Appalachia.” As contributors formulate possible ideas, we encourage them to keep in mind the following points:

1.While the term “planetary” has been defined in distinction to terms like earth, place, land, globe, we emphasize a broad definition that accounts for such a distinction while acknowledging the ways in which the concept is also fundamentally bound up with those other terms. We encourage contributors to begin their reflections on the “planetary” with its etymological roots and allow their thinking to “wander.”

2.The absent preposition signified with the empty brackets of the title is intended to provide a grammatical opening within which contributors can creatively think about the relationship between the two nouns. Our aim is to semantically account for the variety of way in which the thought (“planetary thinking”) intersects (of, in, with, through, among, of, toward) with the place (“Appalachia”).

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With these points in mind, we are interested in scholarship that works to situate Appalachia within broader and deeper contexts, including but not limited to deep history/geological time scales; places and cultures in the “planetary south”; myths, folklore, and stories that situate humanity in relationship to the animal, vegetal, and mineral; aesthetic expressions and theory. We particularly encourage essays that engage in critiques of anthropocentrism and its attendant problem of ecological despoliation and economic injustice via resource extraction.

Important Dates

Abstract due: August 15 (abstract 200-300 words and short bio 100-200 words)

Notification of selection: September 22

First draft due: November 22 [Essays should be 6,000-9,000 words, including all quotations and works cited, and should follow Chicago Manual Styles (Notes and Bibliography)]

Final draft due: December 30

Please send abstracts to the editor of this special issue, Dr. Scott McDaniel (smcdaniel1@udayton.edu), and to criticalhumanities@marshall.edu. If you have any questions about this issue, please feel free to email Dr. McDaniel.

Works Cited:

Avashia, Neema. Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2022.

Banks, Alan, Dwight Billings, and Karen Tice. “Appalachian Studies, Resistance, and Postmodernism” in Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, edited by Stephen Fisher. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 283-301

Berry, Chad. “Upon What Will I Hang My Hat in the Future? Appalachia and Awaiting Post-Postmodernity.” Journal Of Appalachian Studies 6, no. ½ (Spring/Fall 2000), 121-130.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Cory, Jessica and Laura Wright. Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023.

Cunningham, Rodger. “Appalachian Studies among the Posts.” Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, (Fall 2003), 377-386.

Grover, Stacy Jane. Tar Hollow Trans: Essays. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2023.

Hilliard, Emily. Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Toadvine, Ted. The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024.