Amerasia Journal Special Issue Call for Papers
Asian American Religions in a Globalized World
Guest Editors: Professor Khyati Y. Joshi (Farleigh Dickinson University) and Professor Sylvia Chan-Malik (Rutgers University)
Publication Date: Spring 2014
Due Dates: 400-word abstracts due on January 10, 2013; authors with selected abstracts will be notified shortly after, with an April 1, 2013 due date for completed essay submissions.
How does religion shape the existing and emergent terrains of Asian Pacific America? In our contemporary moment, as neoliberal policies of globalization and militarism converge with legacies of colonialism and racial violence, what role has religion played in the racial formation of Asian Pacific Americans in the U.S. and beyond? As dividing lines between the “religious” and the “secular” become increasingly blurred, how do processes of racialization affect what we understand as “religious” practices in APA communities, both domestically and transnationally? To investigate such questions, we seek critical essays, book reviews, and first-person accounts that engage the intersections of Asian Pacific America and Religion for a special issue of Amerasia Journal, scheduled for publication in Spring 2014.
Building upon “Racial Spirits” (1996), an earlier project exploring Asian American religions in Amerasia Journal, this special issue will look at how religion plays a central role in creating belonging and identity formation in Asian Pacific America, alongside how APA religions themselves are constructed and reproduced through lived experience and community formation. While broadly speaking, there is increasing interest in religion amongst scholars in Asian American Studies, much more inquiry is necessary to assess the salience of spirituality and religion in the everyday lives of Asian Pacific Americans, as well as how religion has been racialized, gendered, and sexualized in the post-9/11 era. We are particularly interested in how religion provides transnational sources of identification for APA communities, enabling and fostering affiliations that often span beyond the nation-state and challenge U.S.-based categories of racial and religious formation.
We seek scholarship engaging APA religions from a variety of methods and disciplines, and welcome intersectional analyses that account for and offer new frameworks for understanding the dynamic interplay between categories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. In addition to scholarly essays, we encourage submissions of first-person narratives from community activists, theologians, and religious leaders. Stepping across theoretical and disciplinary boundaries is strongly encouraged.
The issue’s major foci will be on:
- Asian Pacific American Religious Histories and Communities, in particular those affected by post-9/11 racializing practices, e.g. Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, etc.
- Lived Religion in the Asian Pacific American Experience
- Asian Pacific American Religious Communities and Social Justice
- Race and Sacred Spaces
- Interracial-Interreligious Intersections, i.e. Relationships between Asian Pacific American Religious Communities and other religious communities of color (i.e. Black/Chicano-Latino/Native American-Indigenous, etc.)
To submit, please send a 400-word abstract, along with a short biographical note, to Dr. Khyati Joshi, Dr. Sylvia Chan-Malik, and Dr. Arnold Pan at the addresses below by January 10, 2013. If selected for publication, final pieces will range from 3000-5000 words.
Submission Guidelines:
The editorial procedure involves a three-step process. The guest editors, in consultation with the Amerasia Journal editors and peer reviewers, make decisions on the final essays:
1. Approval of abstracts
2. Submission of papers solicited from accepted abstracts
3. Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission
Please send correspondence regarding the special issue on religion and Asian American Studies to the following addresses. All correspondence should refer to “Amerasia Journal Religion Issue” in the subject line.
Professor Khyati Joshi: khyati@fdu.edu
Professor Sylvia Chan-Malik: s.chanmalik@rutgers.edu
Arnold Pan, Associate Editor, Amerasia Journal: arnoldpan@ucla.edu
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