Call for Papers:
“Social Identity between Racisms and Hybridizations”

P.O.I. – Points of Interest, No. 9 (December 2021)

Submission Deadline (abstracts): June 30th, 2021

redazione@poireview.com

 

The biannual journal P.O.I – Points of Interest invites submissions from scholars in philosophy and related disciplines for its forthcoming II/2021 issue. Contributions should address the theme of the issue, on the basis of one or more of the proposed topics, and should conform to the criteria and terms indicated below.

The issue of the relations between different identity groups is, without doubt, one of the central questions in philosophical reflection on politics and morality in the modern and contemporary world. One could ask, first of all, whether a shared social identity – one based on precise elements of cultural homogeneity – is, in effect, a necessary precondition for modern political regimes, as the famous nation/state hendiadys suggests, and as many other constitutions still today suggest; and, secondly, what, then, is the nature of this “precondition”: a pre-existing resource, produced by history, or rather a performative effect of specific acts of political legitimation? The first hypothesis finds support in the frequent failures of “assimilationist” policies and in the spread of political languages based on the corporealization of social identity. At the moment in which “difference” is visually revealed through the colour of the skin, religious rituals, forms of dress, and food customs, political games of discrimination are triggered. But is it an issue to be framed psycho-anthropologically, or rather one to be interpreted in relation to the crisis-processes of political representation and the state-society mediation? The outcomes of the “ethnic cleansing” of the twentieth Century and of the early-2000s, the complex dynamics of the emergence from colonialism, and the failure of cultural struggles against racial prejudice in Western countries suggest that there is a very complex underlying problem involving both the model of the nation-state with its originary limits (and hence the impossibility of universalism), and, at the same time, the objective difficulties of replacing this model with a more-than-merely-abstract bond. What kind of social identity could be proposed, then, to go beyond that of the “nation” and the “people,” finally reconciling the imperatives of coexistence and hybridization between different groups with the multiplicity of underlying traditions?

We welcome submissions on all topics related to the theme. The following is a list of possible topics that could be explored:

  • Forms of collective identity in the modern age and their ambivalences: what creates a “people” and a common or shared destiny?
  • The issue of race and the relation between the concepts of “race,” “people,” “nation”: structurally diverse concepts or variants of one same model?
  • The issue of collective identity in post-imperial and post-colonial political contexts
  • The phenomenon of migrations and the crisis of the nation-state
  • Reflections on hybridization processes and the related moral implications

Guidelines and terms for submission:

  • Submissions should be preceded by an abstract (approximately 2000-characters, including spaces; approximately 350-400 words), which will be pre-evaluated by the editorial staff for relevance to the Call for Papers.
  • The deadline for receipt of abstracts is June 30th, 2021. Communication of decisions regarding the outcome of submissions will take place after that date. Authors of accepted abstracts will then have until September 30th, 2021 to submit the full version of their paper (20,000-60,000-characters, including spaces; approximately 3,500-10,500 words).
  • Contributions must be of original, unpublished work, and must not be under consideration by other journals.
  • Submissions in the following languages are accepted and will be considered: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish.
  • The journal employs a double-blind peer review process. Accordingly, the author’s name and any affiliation must appear only once in the paper, under the article’s title. The full version of the paper should include abstracts both in English and in the language of the paper (max. 1500 characters, including spaces; approximately 250 words), and 5 keywords in English.

Editorial guidelines can be found at the following link: http://poireview.com/en/editorial-guidelines/.

Submissions should be sent to the following e-mail address: redazione@poireview.com