[artinfo] CFP: Extimité : On Zizek and Race

[Ashwani Sharma]

Extimité: On Zizek and Race

Call for Papers - Special issue of International 
Journal of Zizek Studies 
<http://zizekstudies.org/>http://zizekstudies.org/

Guest Editors: Ashwani Sharma 
<mailto:ash.disorient at gmail.com>ash.disorient at gmail.com 
and Valerie Hill 
<mailto:v.hill at coventry.ac.uk>v.hill at coventry.ac.uk

The notion of race is routinely invoked in 
contemporary academia while at the same time its 
analysis is dissipated across a range of 
disciplines and topics so that it seems it has 
either no critical coherency or else its 
orthodoxy is assumed such that the racial reading 
is always already predictable in advance. This 
creates the paradoxical situation whereby racism 
in its numerous and mutating modalities is 
rampant globally, yet the concept of race or 
racism is hardly examined directly at all. 
Identity, culture, ethnicity, difference, 
diaspora, multicultural are the metonymic chain 
of equivalences that arguably invite a 
post-racial, post-political understanding of 
racism, with the possible effect of leaving 
racisms to operate in new configurations, even in 
the guise of anti-racism. Does the critical work 
of Slavoj Zizek offer a cogent and sustained 
theoretical and political intervention beyond 
this impasse?

A striking aspect of Zizek's output has been his 
consistent interrogation of various forms of 
racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism.  So far 
there been little direct commentary on this 
aspect of his work in the ever growing body of 
secondary literature. This special issue of the 
on-line International Journal of Zizek Studies 
(<http://zizekstudies.org/>http://zizekstudies.org/) 
will examine the critique of racism across 
Zizek's  corpus addressing to what extent Zizek 
offers a distinctive understanding of the 
workings of race that is essential to the 
contemporary geo-political context, and the ways 
his approach can be further mobilised in 
political analysis of race, media and culture 
now. In particular, this issue invites papers 
examining Zizek's analysis of racism, nationalism 
and imperialism through Lacanian psychoanalysis, 
dialectical materialism and ideological critique; 
the critique of liberal democracy, 
multiculturalism, cultural studies, 
postcolonialism and neo-liberal global 
capitalism; and his commitment to a praxis of 
universalism, anti-racism and Marxism.

Abstracts (500 words) by 31 March 2008 to Ash 
Sharma 
<mailto:ash.disorient at gmail.com>ash.disorient at gmail.com 
and Val Hill 
<mailto:v.hill at coventry.ac.uk>v.hill at coventry.ac.uk

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