*Guest Editors – Meena Alexander and Rosalind Petchesky*
* *
CALL FOR PAPERS
How do we make sense of debt? What does it mean to live in a world of debt
– whether you are a college student in the United States, a struggling
farmer in India, a homeowner, a country? What does it mean to forgive a
debt? How have these meanings shifted over time? Do ancestral debt, ritual
sacrifices to the gods, tribal and national vendettas, debts to parents and
children, colonial debt, slavery and indenture hover as foreshadowings of
the late capitalist turn, *when* *debt becomes a way of life*? Whether
seeking justice or imposing injustice, debt has its own temporality,
compressing and bringing forward pasts, reconfiguring and elongating
futures.
As student loans in the US surpass $1 trillion, is student debt becoming a
form of training and disciplining bodies, an apprenticeship in “debt
enfranchisement”? Has debt become the newly normal way of performing
citizenship? Under conditions of neoliberal globalization, green card
holders and naturalized citizens find themselves beholden to the nation
state; indeed this becomes an unwritten part of assimilation into America.
Those without debt (mortgages, loans, credit cards) by definition have no
credit–are discredited, literally disenfranchised and placed in a kind of
moral and political state of exception at the extreme end of which reside
undocumented migrants and refugees. What are the racialized, gendered,
sexual, and generational effects, and affects, of these contemporary
realities?
Yet debt also makes powerful ethical and historical claims on us that
contain seeds of feminist, anti-racist, and progressive
transformation. Demands
for reparations or redress for the descendants of slavery and victims of
apartheid or occupation are based on an assumption that, as Stephen Best
and Saidiya Hartman write, “assessing debt and calculating injury [may]
itself [be] a formula for justice.” But is the language of debt (“You owe
me!”) sufficient to encompass ethical bonds and social justice? And what
happens when debt overwhelms moral obligations, de-moralizing both debtor
and creditor?
We invite contributions to an issue of WSQ on “Debt” that will probe these
contradictions and their reverberations in economics, politics, poetry,
visual arts, popular culture, and everyday life. Submissions may address,
but need not be limited to, any of the following themes, keeping in mind
how they involve relations of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality:
� Student debt, universities in debt
� Debt as a moral and/or political language
� Mythic, ancestral, psychic dimensions of debt
� Debt across generations (within countries, families)
� Colonial debt
� National and transnational debt and deficits (US, Eurozone,
elsewhere)
� Managing debt through micro-credit, micro-lending, structural
adjustments
� Household debt and homelessness
� Medical debt
� Securitization of debt; banks as vampires
� Occupy initiatives around debt (StrikeDebt, Rolling Jubilee)
� Reparations and redress (for slavery, occupation, torture)
� Debt as injustice or justice
� Aesthetic dimensions of debt
� Sexual debt
� Trauma and debt
� Gift vs. Debt
� The female or transgender body and debt
If submitting academic work, please send articles by March 15, 2013 to the
guest editors, Meena Alexander and Rosalind Petchesky, at *
WSQDebtIssue@gmail.com*. Please send complete articles, not abstracts.
Submission
should not exceed 20 double spaced, 12-point font pages and should comply
with the formatting guidelines at
http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines.
Poetry submissions should be sent to *WSQ*’s poetry editor, Kathleen Ossip,
at *WSQpoetry@gmail.com* by March 15, 2013. Fiction, essay, and memoir
submissions should be sent to *WSQ*’s fiction/nonfiction editor, Nicole
Cooley, at *WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com* by March 15, 2013. Please review
previous issues of *WSQ* to see what type of submissions we prefer before
submitting poems or prose. Note that poetry and prose submissions may be
held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if
the poetry/prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We
do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all
contact information in the body of the e-mail. If submitting poetry, paste
submission into the body of the e-mail along with all contact information.
Art submissions should be sent to Margot Bouman at *WSQArt@gmail.com * by
March 15, 2013. Art that has been reviewed and accepted must of 300 DPI or
greater, saved as 4.25 inches wide or larger. These files should be saved
as individual JPEGS or TIFFS.