Call for Papers:

Existentialism

and Anti-Racism

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A Special Issue of

Sartre Studies International

Guest Editor: T Storm Heter (sheter@esu.edu)  

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Sartre Studies International: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Existentialism and Contemporary Culture will publish a special issue on the theme “Existentialism and Antiracism.” 

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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.  

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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? 

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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.  

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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.