Cold War Reformations
Guest Editors: Crystal Mun-hye Baik (University of California, Riverside) and Wendy Cheng (Scripps College)
Publication Date: Planned for Fall 2021
Submission Requirements: 5,000-6,000 words (not including endnotes), due December 1, 2020
Nearly thirty years after its purported end, the Cold War still structures everyday lives, landscapes, and epistemologies—particularly in Asia, Asian/America, and Oceania. Over the past decade, in Asian American studies, Pacific Islander studies, and Transpacific studies, scholars have unearthed and articulated generative and provocative histories and frameworks to contend with these constitutive and ongoing—albeit shapeshifting and often unacknowledged—forces. In this special issue, we seek papers and dialogues that further this important and necessary work. Addressing the Cold War as a racialized, classed, and gendered formation, we ask: What is the relationship between war, militarization, and the everyday? How was and is the Cold War lived and felt at multiple scales, from individual bodies, to interrogation rooms, to the ecological and the oceanic? What are the security, surveillance and administrative technologies that have been crucial to the enmeshment of the Cold War within everyday life? And though the Cold War defies definitive temporal markers such as “pre” and “post,” why is it imperative to specify its recalibrated manifestations in relation to the neoliberal conditions of life and death?
We invite submissions that address these queries and in particular, are interested in works that engage the following themes:
- Cold War infrastructures (e.g., administrative, economic, medical, military, political, epistemological)
- Cold War life and security (e.g., the neoliberal security state, surveillance)
- Geopolitical and spatial formations beyond the national (e.g., local, diasporic, transnational, transpacific, archipelagic)
- Paper militarisms (e.g., the bureaucracy of war, archives of war and adjudication)
- The everydayness of war (e.g., affect, landscape, labor, health)
- The politics of grief and mourning (e.g., trauma, the body, activism, memorialization, public memory)
In addition to paper submissions, we will also be accepting creative conversations between scholars and activists as well as scholars and artists. Within this format, submissions will center dialogues or interviews (or creative renderings of the “interview”) between scholars and activists/scholars and artists that explicitly address core questions and topics listed above. For questions, please contact special issue co-editors.
Submission Guidelines and Review Process
Please submit your paper at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ramj/default.aspx. There, you can find author instructions for uploading your submission, which requires a user account.
The guest editors, in consultation with the Amerasia Journal editorial staff and peer reviewers, make decisions on the final essays:
- Initial review of submitted papers by guest editors and Amerasia Journal editorial staff
- Papers approved by editors will undergo blind peer review
- Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission
Please contact Arnold Pan, Associate Editor, with any questions regarding your submission: arnoldpan@ucla.edu.
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