Call for Papers

Unsettling Homelands

Special issue proposal for Radical History Review 

Co-edited by Adrian De Leon and Liza Black

The homeland is not a place. It is a problem. It is the central problem of modern politics: the violent, enduring, and unsettling question of who belongs, and who gets to decide. This question animates the nostalgic longing of diasporas, the exclusionary fervor of ethnonationalists, the economic strategies of developing states, and the relentless resistance of Indigenous peoples for whom the homeland was never a question, but an answer, an answer that settler colonialism has spent centuries trying to erase.

This issue seeks submissions that critically examine the politics of the “homeland” in its various geopolitical, infrastructural, and affective forms: as sites of nostalgia among diasporas wanting to connect with their “roots”; as settler colonial projects whose ethnic patriotisms obfuscate their violence; as practices of capturing transnational populations and capital for economic development; and as the enduring grounds of Indigenous sovereignty that pre-exist and persist within and against the settler state.

We seek submissions that elucidate the relationship between these formations. At what point, for example, does a diasporic longing for a homeland abroad inadvertently align with the settler colonial logics that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their homelands here? This issue grapples with the central tension of how transnational homeland projects intersect with or challenge the ongoing struggle for Indigenous land and life. 

And conversely: how have Indigenous and other colonized people around the world redeployed the politics of the homeland to articulate alternative visions and practices of self-determination, such as grounded normativity, kinship-based belonging, and refusal of state recognition, to the constitutive violences of the contemporary nation-state? 

Possible topics include: 

affective homelands: nostalgia, longing, diasporic desire
Infrastructures of homelands: ports, airports, digital platforms 
Settler colonial myths: memorials, museums, national parks, statues
transnational capital and Indigenous land defense.
tourism and pilgrimage
solidarity within homelands: diasporic, immigrant, and Indigenous movements for land and liberation
Indigenous practices of citizenship, belonging, and jurisdiction 
gendered and queer dimensions of homeland: kinship, reproduction, and heteronormativity in nationalist and anti-colonial projects.
counter-narratives that disrupt state-sanctioned histories 
treaties: negotiation, betrayal, Indigenous political order.
statelessness, fugitivity, and marronage