Religion Call for Papers | @relcfp

JEASA - Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia - Special Issue on Voicing Otherness: Reconfiguring Australia’s Postcoloniality?

deadline for submissions: 

July 15, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

The European Association for Studies on Australia

contact email: 

[email protected]

JEASA (the Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia) is looking for other 3 papers to conclude its special issue on 

Voicing Otherness: Reconfiguring Australia’s Postcoloniality?. This was originally a panel organized by professors Salhia Ben-Messahel 

(Université de Toulon, France) and Marilena Parlati (University of Padova, Italy), but we would like to further open the discussion to other

scholars worldwide.

This is the call:

Recent debates in so-called Commonwealth na3ons have raised issues about the representation of others and the way in which an Other is often defined through a distorted vision stemming from the sustaining of imperial/nationalistic practices that may been even more significant in the late 20th and the 21st Centuries at a global level. The place of Europe in former colonies is still paramount with the
binary centre/margin, locating the non-European Other in a liminal space and, in fact, conveying a nostalgia for an imperial past. The post-reconciliation stage in Australia and the Uluru statement from the heart (2017) have paved the way for the current political debates around “A Voice to Parliament” meant to enshrine an Indigenous voice in the Australian constitution and thus bring all Australians
together and encourage them to move forward as a nation. Several critics in various fields of the academia (Ashcroft; Appadurai; Bhabha; Mbembe…) have sought to explore the perception of otherness in order to question the various discourses that seek to reappraise the role of the nation, reconfigure the space of the na3on or the agency of Other. Australian fiction often
shows how the cultural encounter between individuals under the flagship “multicultural nation” is even more complex, considering the sustaining of practices inherited from Europe and of a discourse that maintains the “non-European” in a liminal space.

In his book, Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) Gilroy argues that the need for the homogenized nation often surfaces as an attempt to dismiss a postcolonial situation deemed desperate. Gilroy focuses on the mechanisms that trigger the return of nationalisms (in their various forms) and induce a postcolonial chaos. Taking on Gilroy’s analysis of ethnicity and identity issues and Ghassan Hage’s work
on multiculturalism and his idea that Australia’s multiculturalism is a “cosmopolitan multiculturalism”, that it thus prevents inclusion for the sake of less visible forms of exclusion, we encourage papers that analyze the various forms of marginalization that occur in the “postcolonial moment” and to what extent such a “moment” may encourage writers to search for new alternatives: alternative
ways of living and of relating to the earth, alternative ways of approaching and experiencing otherness, also literary discourses of the Other – which may point out to tensions between the postmodern and the postcolonial. Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” may be useful for the understanding of discourses that articulate physical space, social space, and spiritual space. The issue at stake will be to determine to what extent a reconstruction of landscapes, a rewriting of myths and stories can or cannot trace the contours of a post-colonial cultural
dilemma.
In following these ideas, we encourage papers in the field of Australian literatures that address the displacement of individuals and the many forms of wanderings that that occur within the space of the nation and global environments. Thus, it might be noteworthy to determine the extent by which the act of wandering may trace the contours of various forms of enrooting and may create a diaspora of
forms. How such a diaspora may question, affect, or simply relocate the postcolonial in an “alter moment”.

Please send your proposals to the General Editor, [email protected]   The Issue with accepted papers will be published by the end of 2025.

Do check the Journal website: https://www.australianstudies.eu/?page_id=92

In partcular, the section on Submissions Guidelines: https://www.australianstudies.eu/?page_id=96