Published by Northwestern University Press-- click here for press webpage

Critical Insurgencies: A Book Series of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association brings an interdisciplinary community of activists, academics, artists, independent scholars, and media makers together to forge new theoretical and political practices to—unsettle the nation state, neoliberalism, carcerality, settler colonialism, western hegemony, legacies of slavery, colonial racial formations and gender binaries, ableism, and challenge all forms of oppression and state violence—for generative future imaginings.

This series seeks to interrogate what it means to do critical ethnic studies work within, outside, and across a variety of locations, such as in education and the academy, community organizing, the arts and media, mass movements, intimate spaces, and more. Since theory and practice reside in multiple geographies and through multiple genres of work, Critical Insurgencies will engage diverse readerships and generate conversations that resist the ways that ethnic studies work can be limited by the historic separation between academic writing and popular texts.

The series invites monographs, field guides, keyword texts, anthologies, contributed volumes, and hybrid and experimental formats that take the intersection of academic / activist / artistic praxis as a key site of interrogation, transformation, and insurgency. Submissions that consider what ethnic studies looks like beyond the United States are strongly encouraged.

Key themes of the series:

Settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, and immigration
Feminist of color, indigenous, and queer and trans of color methodologies and practices
Academic and nonprofit industrial complexes, grassroots organizing, social movements, resistance, and protest
Critical disability epistemologies
Activist and radical pedagogies
Policing, criminalization, and carcerality
Neoliberalism, privatization, critiques of development, precarity of labor, extraction, exploitation, and environmental violence
Anti-black violence, anti-Muslim racism, xenophobia, and indigenous erasure
Gender and sexual violence, heteropatriarchy, and reproductive regulation
Land rights, housing, sovereignty, landlessness, and complex relationships to land and home sustainable development
Displacement, dispossession, gentrification, and forced migration
Diasporic and transnational organizing
Decolonization, autonomy, sovereignty, and indigenous political thought

Proposals and inquiries can be sent to Gianna Mosser, Acquisitions Editor, Northwestern University Press,g-barbera@northwestern.edu.

About the Editors

Michelle M. Wright is Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University where she focuses on Black European and diaspora studies. Her previous publications include Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015) and Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004).

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. Her focus is on indigenous studies, indigenous and postcolonial literatures, and critical technology studies. Her previous publications have appeared in journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and her monograph, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, was published in 2011.

About CESA

The Critical Ethnic Studies Association is a transnational, interdisciplinary, and un-disciplinary association of scholars, activists, students, artists, media makers, educators, and others who are directly concerned with interrogating the limitations of Ethnic Studies in order to better engage the historical stakes of the field and the development of community-based knowledges and radical resistances. CESA organizes projects and programs to reimagine Ethnic Studies and its futures through new theoretical interventions—both within the university and the multiple activist formations outside it. CESA aims to develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, community-building, and activism animated by the spirit of the decolonial, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other global liberationist movements that enabled the creation of Ethnic Studies and which continues to inform its political and intellectual projects.