Call for Submissions: Black Dreaming and Black Dream Geographies
I’m excited to be a Guest Editor for a forthcoming special issue of The Arrow Journal, a publication that explores the relationship between practice, politics, and activism. More below and here.
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Call for Submissions: Black Dreaming and Black Dream Geographies
Guest Editor: Naya Jones, University of California Santa Cruz Submission Deadline: (Update) Now October 1, 2022 - will also be updated on The Arrow website!
Dreaming emerges again and again in Black expressive culture and social movements. Dreams surface in the biographies and testimonies of Black artists, medicine-makers, and visionaries. Dreams circulate in affirmations: I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams!1
This special issue of The Arrow Journal is inspired by the transformative possibilities of Black dreaming in many senses of the word. An expansive understanding of dreams, along with insights from the field of Black geographies, inspires this call for submissions – which attends to the connections between dreaming, liberation, and spiritual practice.2
This issue takes dream-inspired art, scholarship, and activism as its point of departure. The celebrated play A Raisin in the Sun (1958) by Lorraine Hansberry is thick with dreams in the shape of personal aspirations and dreams of freedom.3 Robin D.G. Kelley (2003) traces “freedom dreams,” or how Black artists and intellectuals have imagined freedom in art, manifestos, and movement.4 Cara Page (2010) writes how collective memories, dreams, and imagination can inspire “new models of healing and justice” within movements.5 adrienne marie brown references dreams in the title of her latest book, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice; her call to reframe cancel culture is grounded in a Black, queer, and feminist framework made possible through radical, collective dreaming.
In most of these examples, dream is synonymous with imagination or aspiration. Often, these dreams are invoked or co-created, while literally and figuratively awake. Still other modes of Black dreaming are less-charted, like dreams received while sleeping or prophetic dreams. We remember how Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and other ancestors traced their dreams to God or the Divine. How Tubman mobilized her prophetic dreams to both map out and carry out the Underground Railroad is perhaps most well-known in Black/African-American context. Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2014) invites us to consider what remembering Tubman’s prophetic dreams means for how freedom, dreaming, and the relationship between them are understood.6 Attending to dreams sourced to the Divine, ancestors, or the metaphysical, opens up Black cosmologies or philosophies of the Universe, leading to other epistemologies or ways of knowing.
Along with these works, this issue builds on a previously-published piece called “Prologue: On Black Dream Geographies” (2021) by the Guest Editor.7 As an expansive field of study, Black geographies offers vital assumptions for work with Black dreaming. Among these, oppressive legacies are spatial and Black space-making persists. Legacies of colonialism and white supremacy, among others, shape present-day power dynamics in ways that are profoundly spatialized, from uneven access to resources across neighborhoods, to mass incarceration, to the inordinate impact of intersecting crises like climate change, environmental injustice, and COVID-19 on Black communities worldwide. At the same time, Black space- and world-making has involved marronage and movements; expressive culture; social and cultural institutions; and more. These have been sites of resistance and thriving.8
At its heart, this Special Issue is about how dreaming has been integral to Black thriving. What is Black dreaming made of, and how does this dreaming matter now? For this peer-reviewed issue, we seek essays, including photo essays and descriptions of practices; scholarly articles; book reviews; and poetry. We welcome works that defy – or refuse! – genre. Activists, scholars, artists, practitioners, and those who blur the lines between these, we invite your contributions. The Guest Editor especially seeks pieces on less-charted Black dreaming, such as sleeping dreams, prophecy, dreams invoked by contemplative or spiritual practice, or how these relate to activism and movement work. And while the field of Black geographies inspires this call, we welcome work from across and beyond disciplines.
Furthermore, this Special Issue seeks to contribute to the collective archiving and analysis of Black dreaming, by centering the work of Black contributors. The Guest Editor especially invites Black, African, and Black diaspora contributors to submit their work, including but not limited to Black folks living outside of the Americas and contributors who identify as Afro-Latinx, Afro-Indigenous, Afro-Asian, and/or Afro-Arab.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Black dreaming and spiritual or contemplative practice
Landscapes of Black dreaming: literal, figurative, imaginative
Black dream rituals
Dreaming and movements, e.g. the global Black Lives Matter Movement, Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry and Black rest, Healing Justice, Restorative Justice
Dreaming in Black Indigenous and African Traditional Religions
Rootwork, conjure, and Black dreaming
Nature and Black dreaming
Black feminism, womanism, and dreaming
Lives of dream-inspired activists, artists, scholars, cultural workers
Black herbalism and dreaming
Collective healing, recovery, and Black dreaming
Dreams in Afrofuturism, Black Sci-Fi, and/or Black Fantasy
Reflections on writing, teaching, and/or researching Black dreaming
Please direct inquiries to our editing team at shahnoor@arrow-journal.org. Submissions are open via the Google Form below and will close on October 1, 2022 for review.
When you’re ready to submit your manuscript, please use this Submission Form.
About the publication:The Arrow Journal explores the relationship among contemplative practice, politics, and activism. The Arrow welcomes the insights of multiple contemplative lineages for achieving a kinder, healthier, and more compassionate world. We encourage dialogue on wisdom and knowledge arising from methods of contemplative inquiry, ways of embodied knowing, and intellectual disciplines. In doing so, The Arrow provides a critical and much needed space for investigating the meeting point of contemplative wisdom and pressing social, political, and environmental challenges.
