
Call for Papers:
Existentialism
and Anti-Racism
A Special Issue of
Sartre Studies International
Guest Editor: T Storm Heter (sheter@esu.edu)
Sartre Studies International: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Existentialism and Contemporary Culture will publish a special issue on the theme “Existentialism and Antiracism.”
Jean-Paul Sartre argued that there was no such thing as a “Black problem” or a “Jewish problem”--only a white problem. This special issue of Sartre Studies International will explore how existentialism is a living, global philosophy that contributes to antiracist praxis and theory. We invite contributors to consider the legacy of Sartre’s antiracist politics from his phenomenological critique of antisemitism and white liberal racism in Anti-semite and Jew to his defense of decolonial violence in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to his portrait of white American bad-faith racism in The Respectful Prostitute.
We encourage submissions that analyze Sartre’s engagement with and relationship to such antiracist existential thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Aimé Césaire, Lépold Sengor, Albert Memmi, and James Baldwin. Sartre, more than any other white European existentialist of his time or since, identified with, supported, and philosophized with thinkers from the Global South. How did these thinkers help shape Sartre’s view of racism and anti-racism? Why has existential thought remained such a powerful tool for opposing such forms of racism as state-based white supremacist violence, antisemitism, Apartheid, anti-Blackness, settler colonial racism, anti-Indigenous violence, violence against Black women and women of color, neo-colonial racism, Islamophobia, violence against immigrants, anti-Latinx violence, and colorblind racism?
We ask contributors to consider how existentialist antiracism remains relevant in an era when the Black Lives Matters movement has transcended American borders and become a global rallying cry for people of color in Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Topics of interest include: systematic racism, racism, oppression, whiteness, the white problem, liberation, humanism, Black humanism, Negritude, sexism, Africana phenomenology, feminism, Black feminism, existentialist feminism, decolonization, postcolonialism, colonialism, violence, non-violence, antisemitism, Marxism, Indigenous thought, fascism, antifascism.
Manuscript submission details
Finished manuscripts 5,000 words in length will be due March 30, 2021.
Those interested in contributing should contact the guest editor T Storm Heter (sheter@esu.edu) no later than November 15, 2020.