Studies in American Indian Literatures Special Issue: Ethical Relations in Indigenous Literary Studies

Abstracts for consideration deadline: January 2, 2025 

The Editorial Board of SAIL proposes to publish a Special Issue on: Ethical Relations in Indigenous Literary Studies

This issue will ask contributors to engage the following questions: What does it mean to be a good relative?  What is our ethical obligation in responding to conflict within identity politics, academia, and the practice of literary criticism, especially regarding predatory and extractive behaviors? How do we conscientiously talk about Indigenous worldviews in ways that are not reductive and objectifying in our teaching of Indigenous literatures? What do we do with representations of trauma in Indigenous literature, and how do we teach about it while not reproducing it? 

This CFP is both a reflection on the state of the field and a space to offer dialogues and multiple paths forward.  

This Call For Proposals asks contributors to engage the ethics of relationality in an effort to produce new scholarship, pedagogical approaches, and other provocations that seek redress, reconciliation, and even rebuttal in response to the fraught history and ongoing impact of ethnic fraud and identity and resource theft, misogyny and sexism, homophobia, anti-Blackness, ableism, and more. 

We specifically welcome proposals that demonstrate how Indigenous literatures can help us engage with teaching difficult or controversial texts/writers as well as engage with the impact of ethnic fraud and “pretendianism” on Indigenous scholars and scholarship in the context of colonization and threats to tribal sovereignty, along with but not limited to the following areas: 

  • Reconciliation skepticism and backlash in the Indigenous literature classroom
  • The ethics of sharing family and community stories, ceremonies, and other knowledge, especially outside their cultural context 
  • Consultation with tribal IRB and strategies for navigating community and nation-level consent for research with and among Indigenous communities 
  • Pedagogical implications of teaching challenging and/or problematic historical or contemporary texts/writers
  • How to navigate materials that include religious, spiritual, and ceremonial knowledge and practices
  • Methods for honoring perspectives and experiences of Indigenous students in the classroom, especially in the context of book bans and attacks on Indigenous content in literature
  • The erasure of Indigenous peoples from Abiyala after they cross the US/Mexico border
  • Recognition of and advocacy for more-than-human kin in Indigenous literature
  • Teaching that models for students how to be a productive visitor in a land that is not their own 
  • How to navigate ethical engagement as active disengagement

Please submit an abstract (no more than 500 words) and list of keywords for consideration via email to: SAIL.editors@gmail.com by January 2, 2025.

If submissions are robust SAIL envisions the potential for more than one special issue to be published.