Journal of Intercultural and International Communication
Special issue: Memory, Culture, and Difference
Special issue editors:
Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, The E. R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University
Susan Owen, Communication Studies, University of Puget Sound
Peter Ehrenhaus, Communication and Theater, Pacific Lutheran University
Recent events highlight the continuing importance of memory and forgetting to negotiations of identities and allegiances cross cultural borders.
Most recently, the protests against the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and reactions to them, exposed different memories, forgetting, and willful ignorance of violence against African Americans. Last year, scholars working at the US Holocaust Museum concluded after long research that many more ordinary people participated in the genocide of Jews in many more sites and in mundane ways than had been previously thought. But this is not how Shoah is remembered. Such examples abound and highlight difference, hegemonic closure and contestation as key factors shaping memories.
Memories define who belongs and who does not, as well as who and what are worth remembering, and who and what are not. Creative, limited and purposeful, memory serves present needs and expresses points of contention, anxiety and negotiation within and among groups. Some memories attain cultural legitimacy and become interpretive frames through which groups shape their identities and their engagement in other cultural practices. There are memories that luxuriate in public repetition and affirmation by official commemorations. Other memories are forgotten and/or purposefully pushed away, ignored, and denied only to reemerge at cultural junctures for however brief contentious moments. At the same time, counter-memories hold tenaciously against prevailing versions of the past.
Memory has not been a key focus area for intercultural scholars, with some notable exceptions. Thus, this special issue will address intersections between and among memory, culture and difference. We seek submissions that explicate memory as a site of struggle, exchange, engagement, and contestation in ways that highlight intercultural communication. Submissions should propose theoretical innovations on the basis of critical and in-depth analyses written in an engaging style. They should address culture as a fluid zone of struggle over meaning and difference as relational and dynamic including race, ethnicity, gender, national, sexual orientation, class and other relations.
Submissions addressing the following and other topics are welcome:
Memories and group identities, belonging, and relations;
Communities of memory;
Place and emplacement of memories: museums, memorials, ruins and other memory sites;
Media representations (news and entertainment);
National, cosmopolitan, transnational, and diasporic memories: how memories circulate, intersect, and contest each other, how they are rearticulated, how they shape belonging within different scales (local, national, regional, global), how they reaffirm or contest these scales;
Relationships between history and memory;
Affect, power and ideology;
Technologies of memory;
Memories and their political uses;
Remembering, forgetting, amnesia;
Cultural trauma
Submission information
Manuscripts are due by June 1st, 2015. Manuscripts must be double-spaced throughout, prepared in accordance with APA 6th ed. and should not exceed 9000 words, inclusive of notes and reference matter. To facilitate the blind, peer review process, all identifying references to the author(s) should be removed. Manuscripts need to adhere to the instructions for authors for the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and uploaded to ScholarOne Manuscripts. We ask that submitting author(s) indicate on the title page “for consideration in the special issue on memory.” Direct inquiries regarding the special issue to Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, A. Susan Owen, and Peter Ehrenhaus at memoryspecialissue@gmail.com
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 