Postcolonial Body Performance Narratives (PBPN) diversely engage postcolonial themes, theories, theologies, and realities from decidedly situated perspectives and irreducibly treat bodies and lived experiences as multidimensional sites from which to theorize postcolonial corporeality. They take seriously recent autoethnographic trends in anthropology, and feminist, performance, and queer studies that attempt to visibilize and mark subjectivities oft-absented in scholarly literature. In persistently employing the first-person voice, they treat experiential, intellectual, and affective knowledges as intertwined, legitimate, and generative formations worthy of critical attention. In so doing, PBPN work to remedy a current gap in postcolonial scholarship, created by the dominance of a particular modality of postcolonial inquiry and knowledge production that privileges third-person narratives. While the third-person scholarly voice is not problematic in itself, when not accompanied by other genres, it silences explicitly personal and emotional engagements with postcolonialism, and ultimately shores up perceived boundaries between minds and bodies, reason and emotion, thought and action. Moreover, this elision reproduces in postcolonial imaginaries the very imperial epistemological dynamics they purportedly seek to deconstruct.
Therefore, PBPN lift up disparate ways of dialectically narrating the postcolonial and the personal, without privileging any single model, and does so in ways that add to – not subtract from – and enhance – not dismiss – an already robust field of postcolonial scholarship. In connecting the postcolonial to the personal, PBPN attempt to show that imperial and (neo)colonial contestations perform themselves on and through real lives and bodies, human or otherwise, and that those lives and bodies are simultaneously sites of postcolonial re-visioning and resistance-staging. Characterized by hybridity, intersectionality, and heterogeneity, PBPN are not bound by standard forms of English, academic vocabularies, or conventions; rather, they may engage multiple languages and English vernaculars, and may be written in prose and poetry. They are animated by the hope that they will give rise to decolonized and decolonizing modes of thinking, seeing, writing, signifying, and ultimately being that creatively attend to tensions between particularity and universality, difference and identity, self and other, inclusion and exclusion, immanence and transcendence, the local and the global, truth and truth.
Before submitting your PBPN, please reference the following guidelines to ensure that your piece will fit what we are looking for. Do make sure it:
- Is between 1400-1700 words
- Attends to the body through a lens informed by postcolonial theories, theologies, texts, and/or themes
- Names the social locations from which its author(s) write(s)
- Is reflective and self-reflexive in tone
- Unapologetically and frequently asserts the first-person singular
- Contextualizes first-person plural, and second- and third-person plural and singular voices
To submit a PBPN for review, please email it to pheike@gmail.com and jcharris2009@gmail.com. When writing the email’s subject heading, please follow the following format: Full Name_Title of Article_PBPN Submission.
