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PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies

On January 28 2004 The University of Technology Sydney took the lead in
online publishing of academic papers in Australia with the launch of
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, the first
journal published by UTSePress, which will publish an array of local and

international scholarly material accessible via the Internet.

Alex Byrne of UTS University Library, which administers UTSePress, said
while it was not the only online publishing service in Australia,
UTSePress possessed features which pushed the boundaries of electronic
publishing and would enable expansion in the volume and range of
academic material available online.

Portal may be accessed via the UTSePRess website at
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/

Call for papers

Portal is dedicated to the publishing of scholarly articles from
practitioners of – and dissenters from - international, regional, area,
migration and ethnic studies, and it is also dedicated to providing a
space for the work of cultural producers interested in the
internationalisation of cultures. International Studies in Portal refers

to studies of contemporary societies and cultures in contextual relation

to processes of transnationalisation, polyculturation, transmigration,
globalisation, and anti-globalisation, and to material and imaginative
responses by people and communities to those processes. Portal aims to
achieve a genuinely multidisciplinary mix of approaches to international

studies by scholars working in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and
Cultural Studies, and by cultural producers working anywhere. Portal
permits full online peer-review of scholarship. Critical and creative
work will appear in many languages including Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa
Malaysia, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese,

Spanish, and Serbian.

Papers may be submitted by authors on line following a simple
registration process at the Portal website at
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/

Call for papers for Portal Vol. 2, No. 1 (2005): special issue on Exile
and Social Transformation
This special issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International
Studies will focus on the nexus between exilic conditions and social
transformation in the contemporary, late capitalist world, a fractured,
multifarious space now regarded by U.S. state power as a vast but always

already subjectable sphere of influence. In this embattled context, it
seems fitting that contemporary discussions on exile take place in the
late Edward Said’s shadow, not only opening with but also deviating from

and questioning his reading of exile made from one particular historical

perspective, that of a displaced Palestinian intellectual. If, as Said
posits, exile is “a condition legislated to deny dignity—to deny
identity to people,” or more correctly in his case, to “a” people, when
does a people become exiled? More fundamentally, for whom is a people
“a” people, and when is this status achieved? Might Said’s notion of
exile, which presumes collective identificatory commonality and
indissolubility, be premised on an essentializing, exclusionary and
ultimately fictive claim to a home, a land, a bounded, finite territory?

These questions, in turn, generate others. What exactly is the time and
place of exile? Who claims that condition, when and why? Is exile
possible within a homeland, or within a geopolitical state? To what
extent does the state (over)determine exile conditions? Do external and
internal exiles share similar patterns of estrangement and
against-the-odds possibility? How do gendered, sexualized, racialized
and classed hierarchies impact on the exilic body? What happens to the
imagined national community if a significant portion of the national
population resides elsewhere? What resistances are possible for exile
communities split and splintered in more than one geopolity? To what
extent can exile engender and invigorate active resistance? What tactics

are available in exile to counter the forces that gave rise to
displacement in the first place? Does exile status inevitably generate
the nostalgic romanticization, if not fantasy recreation, of an age
before exile? Why is exile so often presented as a site of
memorialization? How do we theorize exilic memory? What happens to the
exile, and to activism done beyond the homeland, when return is
permitted? Conversely, what happens to the activist-in-exile impulse
when there is no prospect of a return, or no homeland (geopolity) left
to accept the returnees? How do we regard the exile community that
gradually transmutes into one mere migrant community among many,
comprising generations whose claims to place and selfhood may reflect
the host society’s identity discourses and not those of a former
homeland they may have never seen? And finally, turning from the lived
experience to the exile trope, if exile has functioned as a master
narrative of western culture since the advent of modernity as Said
claims, what epistemological leverage, if any, is enabled by the use of
exile as a governing metaphor for the (post)modern psyche? Does this
metaphor hold outside the West, and outside the pages written by the
exiled intellectual? Has exile lost semantic, locational and historical
specificity and use value by becoming simply one of many synonyms for
displacement and estrangement under late capitalism?

These are some of the motivating questions behind this special issue of
Portal. We particularly welcome papers that seek to problematize the
notion of exile when understood as a physical and identificatory space
for social activism and transformation. We also encourage contributors
to reflect on such issues as language use(s), and the tensions between
geographical and metaphorical understandings of exile, and between exile

and such related terms as exodus, asylum, migration, and diaspora.
Finally, we would like to consider artistic, literary and multimedia
responses to exile or to the questions posed above.

Submissions should be made via the website
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ by July 31 2004.
Please send
questions about the special issue to special editor
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