Special Issue Gender and (Post)Colonialism: Locating Marginalised Voices

Dutch Journal for Gender Studies
SI Editors: Maaike Derksen and Margriet Fokken

The argument made by literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorti
Spivak in the 1980s (Spivak 1988), that the recovery of subaltern female
voices is virtually impossible has not been without its critics. Different
scholars have stated in response to Spivak that a full recovery of the
female perspectives might not be possible, but that there is fractured
evidence of her voice that offers the possibility for unsettling colonial
master narratives (Mani 1998, Joseph 2004, Chaudhuri 2010). This raises
questions about how scholars could go about finding marginalised voices
and what these voices would add. The Dutch Journal for Gender Studies will
dedicate a special issue to the subject of locating voices of gendered
marginalised ‘others’, and invites academic articles that reflect on
issues of methodology and interpretation involved in researching
marginalised voices in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

The question of how to write history ‘from the bottom up’ has been on the
minds of social, feminist, and postcolonial historians since the 1960s.
Strategies for studying textual sources held in institutional archives
were developed in order to read colonial sources ‘against the grain’,
looking for contradictions, disruptions and meaningful silences. In
response, Ann Laura Stoler has highlighted the importance of reading
colonial archives ‘along the grain’ before examining the voices of
‘others’ represented in these archives, because researchers who have an
understanding of how these records came to be, can pick up on
uncertainties, doubts, and personal concerns of the author (Stoler 2009).
Ricardo Roque and Kim Wagner propose a third distinct reading strategy,
which derives from historical anthropology and is concerned with the
actual cross-cultural encounters and material practices in which colonial
knowledge is embedded. In this reading strategy, colonial accounts, like
reports or testimonies, on the encounter between Europeans and
non-Europeans, are considered intercultural objects, which can themselves
be used as avenues to gaining access to these historical encounters (Roque
and Wagner 2012). These three reading strategies, alternative or
complementary as they might be, indicate the directions in which we can
engage with (post-)colonial materials. Whereas reading strategies are
conceptualised in application to textual sources, the analysis of visual
and material culture provides an opportunity to critically engage with
other realms of knowledge. Ludmilla Jordanova emphasizes the idea of
‘reading’ a visual or material source for its message is too limited, and
researchers should be attentive to the multiple meanings objects or images
might have dependent on the context and interpreter (Jordanova 2012).

This special issue of the Dutch Journal for Gender Studies, entitled
Gender and (Post)Colonialism: Locating Marginalised Voices, will collect
contributions reflecting on strategies for retrieving marginalised voices
in (post)colonial textual, visual and material sources. We welcome
contributions which focus on a (post)colonial context or use
(post)colonial sources – not restricted to the Low Countries – and read or
engage with (post)colonial archives/sources from a postcolonial feminist
perspective

This themed issue ‘Gender and (Post)Colonialism: Locating Marginalised
Voices’ will provide a platform for contributions of the international
workshop: Locating Voices of Marginalised Others (29 August 2014), but is
also interested in contributions from other scholars working on this
theme.

Submission of abstracts (+/- 450 words) to [log in to unmask]
Deadline submission of abstracts: February 1, 2015
Deadline first version articles (max. 6000 words incl. references and
bibliography): April 15, 2015

Click here for Author Guidelines in Dutch/ Click here for Author
Guidelines in English:
http://nl.aup.nl/nl/tijdschriften/auteursrichtlijnen-tijdschrift-voor-genderstudies.html
http://en.aup.nl/wosmedia/1261/author_instructions_tijdschrift_voor_genderstudies.pdf

The Dutch Journal for Gender Studies (Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies) is
an interdisciplinary journal. It is primarily a platform for authors who
conduct research on or are located in the Netherlands and Flanders, but
also invites contributions from and about other areas. Articles may be
written in Dutch or English. For further information see:
http://www.tijdschriftgenderstudies.nl/.