CALL FOR PAPERS
Submissions are sought for an edited volume titled Tenuous Veneers: Women of Color in the Academy –Narratives of Distress and Success in the Tenure Process. The theme for this compilation derives from dialogues with faculty of color whose receptions on university and college campuses in the U.S. resonate with the immigrant experience of attempting to settle and acculturate in a new country. The familiar concept of embracing a “land of opportunity” serves as a useful metaphor for the challenging and disorienting experiences faculty members of color often undergo as new arrivals onto the landscape of academic opportunity.
Faculty women of color often come enthusiastically onto campuses where we discover that the terrain of the ivory tower is uncharted by forerunner academics of color who have paved the way in integrating the hallowed halls of traditionally Anglo academe. Navigating this reality can be fraught with painful difficulties that are rarely understood or even noticed by the dominant academic culture, and adapts well to W.E.B. DuBois’ famous quote regarding the American Negro, in that the faculty woman of color “is gifted with second-sight in this American [university] world,–a world which yields [her] no true self-consciousness, but only lets [her] see [her]self through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels [her] two-ness,–an American [academic], a [faculty woman of color]; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one [ethnic other] body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Adapted from The Souls of Black Folks, 1903).
Tenuous Veneers builds from this truth while also seeking to be inclusive of a representative range of narratives from distress to success for women of color in academe.
Submissions for this edited volume are invited and encouraged in order to tell a complete and balanced story that reveals both the challenges and the rewards of careers in the academy for faculty women of color.
Please email 500-word abstracts by April 30, 2012 to: masmith@seattleu.edu<mailto:masmith@seattleu.edu>