Announcement
published by Dee Garceau
on Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Date: October
15, 2015
Subject
Fields:
African
American History / Studies, Canadian History / Studies, Native American History
/ Studies, U.S. - Mexico Borderlands, Women's & Gender History / Studies
CALL
FOR PAPERS:
Race,
Gender, and Power in the Mormon Borderlands
Mormon
history lies at the borders between subaltern and dominant cultures. On the one
hand, due to their unusual family structure and theocratic government, Mormons
were a persecuted minority for the better part of the nineteenth century. On
the other, Mormons played a significant role as colonizers of the North
American West, extending their reach to the borderlands of Mexico, Canada, and
the Pacific Islands. There Mormon colonists intermarried with Native Americans,
Mexicans, Hawaiians and Samoans, even as they placed exclusions on interracial
sexual relations and marriage. During the nineteenth century, Mormons also
discouraged Native peoples’ polygamous practices while encouraging plural
marriage for white women. And for the better part of the twentieth century,
Mormon religious doctrine subordinated persons of color within church
hierarchy. African-American men, for example, could not hold the priesthood
until 1978. Historically, then, Mormons have navigated multiple borders--
between colonizer and colonized, between white and Other, and between minority
and imperial identities. This limnal position calls for further investigation.
We propose an anthology of essays about race, gender, and power in the Mormon
borderlands.
Over
the past thirty years, historians of Mormon women have expanded our
understanding of gender and power in Mormon society. However, most of these
studies focus on white Mormon women, while Mormon women of color have remained
largely invisible. This volume seeks not simply to make visible the lived experiences
of Mormon women of color, but more importantly, to explore gender and race in
the Mormon borderlands. Taken together, these essays will address how Mormon
women and men navigated the complications of minority and colonizer status,
interracial marriage and doctrinal race hierarchies, patriarchy and female
agency, vigilante violence and religious responsibility, and plural identities.
These metaphoric borders were brought into play on the geographic and cultural
borders of the United States. Specifically, this volume will encompass the
continental U.S. West, the borderlands of Canada and Mexico, and Pacific Rim
islands such as Samoa and Hawaii, from the nineteenth through twenty-first
centuries. A focus on intersectionality in the borderlands promises to open new
directions for Mormon history in concert with recent trends in western history.
The anthology will be co-edited by Dee Garceau, Rhodes College, garceau@rhodes.edu,
Andrea Radke-Moss, Brigham Young University-Rexburg, radkea@byui.edu,
and Sujey Vega, Arizona State University, sujeyvega@asu.edu . Please feel free to
contact us with any questions you have.
Please send your article abstract or
manuscript as an email attachment by October 15, 2015 to Dee Garceau garceau@rhodes.edu
, phone: 901-484-1837.
Contact
Email: garceau@rhodes.edu
