Call for Chapter Abstracts - Critical Indigenous Memory Studies | Edited by Ethan Madarieta

Critical Indigenous Memory Studies is an edited collection which will explore Indigenous practices of memory, as well as the differences, overlaps, and incommensurabilities with Western categories of memory and remembrance. Rather than codifying or totalizing Indigenous memory studies in order to assert its distinction from a Euro-American memory studies tradition, the collection seeks contributions that attend to the multiplicity and dynamism of Indigenous peoples’ forms, modes, processes, practices, and understandings of memory and remembering.

Organized by theme and territorial relations rather than nation-state or colonial geographic demarcations, this edited collection will gather essays from and about memory and memorial practices of the Indigenous peoples, for example, of Turtle Island, Abiayala, Mzansi, فلسطين, Moananuiākea/Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, Bandaiyan, Aotearoa, Sápmi, and Ainu Mosir. Although the collection mobilizes the nomination “Indigenous,” contributors attend to the specificity of various peoples’ locality and epistemologies, disrupting assumptions and impositions of homogeneity that arise under such ethno-racial nomination.

We seek chapter proposals that will contribute to the volume’s broad temporal and spatial reach, including the contemporary and historical, and spaces such as what are commonly named the Caribbean, the Americas, Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the far North Atlantic, and Oceania. Essays in this collection will focus on specific peoples, nations, and localities or multiple peoples in comparative, trans-Indigenous analysis. We also encourage engagements with Indigenous memory besides the critical essay such as interviews with Elders, storytelling, and other memorial forms.

Some questions that contributions to this collection might consider are:

• In what ways are specific Indigenous people’s memory and memory processes distinct from non-Indigenous memory and memory processes? To what effect?

• What are specific Indigenous people’s modes and systems of memory and remembering? For example, what role do orality, writing, social and pedagogical structures play in Indigenous memory and remembering?

• Might these modes and systems (processes) fit within traditional Memory studies paradigms such as memory’s psychological and sociological categories? What categories of thought and practices might a Critical Indigenous Memory Studies propose?

• How do specific Indigenous people’s memory and memorial practices think time, space, and the body? 

• What role does art, literature, and especially language play in specific Indigenous people’s memory and modes of remembering?

• What emerges and has emerged from encounters between Indigenous peoples’ memory and settler memory in the realm of history?

• How might consideration of various Indigenous people’s sexualities, genders, and community roles inform understandings of a people’s embodied, historical, social, and cultural memory?

Some themes that essays in this collection might consider are:

• Indigenous memory and: land; nation; sovereignty; autonomy; self-determination; kinship; ethics; relations; ecologies;

• thought/epistemology; philosophy; knowledge; cosmology; metaphysics; ontology; differential ontologies;

• blackness and global anti-blackness; ethnicization; eco-social effects of slow violence; settler colonial logics of elimination; ongoing and overlapping histories of forced transit and migration; sexualities; genders.

Please email 500-word abstracts with provisional titles and author bio to ermadari@syr.edu by April 15th, 2024. This collection will be in Bloomsbury Academic’s new Critical Memory Studies series.