[Bilimsel Haber] NOTICE: Call for Papers from Radical History Review

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Radical History Review <rhr at igc.org>

Call for Papers
Radical History Review
Issue #101: Women, Transnationalism, and Human Rights

Two years after 9/11 and the U.S.'s military incursion in Afghanistan,
Arundhati Roy, the award-winning novelist, public intellectual, and
human rights activist, challenged President George W. Bush's lofty
pronouncement that U.S. intervention was an effort to liberate oppressed
Afghani women. As Roy wrote in December 2003:
"It's been made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the
Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas. We're being
asked to believe that the U.S. Marines are actually on a feminist
mission." Roy argued that the Bush administration was exploiting the
rhetoric of women's oppression and, by extension, international
struggles for women's and human rights to further national and global
interests. Far from liberating women or even highlighting the vagaries
of oppression, however, such vacuous and power-invested claims have
actually obscured women's complex material realities, worldviews, and
grounded liberation strategies--particularly with regards to human rights.

The claim to human rights has been a progressive, even radical
intervention. Yet current politics require that we problematize the
deployment of human rights as a liberating discourse and agenda for
women. In its most progressive sense, the notion of human rights has
elevated and linked local, seemingly disconnected, grassroots
battles, to a broader global agenda of social justice. But in the hands
of the status quo, "human rights" claims have also served as a mechanism
for reconstituting hierarchies and asserting agendas that have little to
do with those suffering harm.

In recent years, scholars such as Kenneth Cmiel have called for
historicizing the popular "idiom" of human rights and examination of its
emergence as a  "political language." For this special issue, the
Radical History Review invites submissions that elucidate, interrogate,
and complicate the relationship between women's liberation and human
rights. How should we define, periodize, and discuss human rights, and
is that discourse on human rights a gendered one? In what ways have
human rights shaped women's liberation ideas and/or activism and vice
versa? To what degree are human rights discourses constituted as
transnational phenomena? How have women's politics, while often bounded
by the particularities of the nation-state, operated within a fluid
global world? In deliberating these questions, contributors are
encouraged to think about the relationship among and shaping influences
of women's material realities, local conditions, and universal claims.

We imagine essays that also might address and analyze the following
issues in a historical framework:
- women, gender, and human rights as liberation language
- women, gender, and human rights as an activist strategy
- relationship between local and universal claims
- socio-historical conditions of women's human rights agendas
- political economy and women's human rights movements
- the politics of everyday and liberation strategies
- the role of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and culture
- religion, age, motherhood, and reproductive rights
- universalizing language of western feminism and transnational activism
- oppressive state regimes and discourses
- links between human rights and state power
- shaping influence of citizenship and nationalism

These are only suggestions and we encourage contributions on the widest
range of topics related to this thematic issue. We also encourage
submissions from scholars who teach women's history/women's studies for
our special section, "Teaching Radical History." In TRH pieces, scholars
discuss their methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical frameworks,
reflect on the class experience, and supply course syllabi.

Procedures for submission of proposals and articles:
By August 30, 2006 please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing your
article to rhr at igc.org.
By September 30, 2006 authors will be notified whether they should
submit their article in full.
The due date for solicited, complete articles is February 1, 2007.

All articles will then be put through the peer review process.
Articles selected for publication after the peer review process will
appear in Issue 101  of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in
Spring 2008.

To be considered manuscripts should be submitted electronically,
preferably in Microsoft Word or rich text format, with "Issue 101
submission" in the subject line.

Abstract Deadline: August 30, 2006
Email: rhr at igc.org

For more information, please consult our website at
http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/rhr.htm

Radical History Review
<rhr at igc.org>