Call for Essays: Entanglements: Regimes of Extraction and The Literary Imagination of Place
Call for Essays, September 2026
Entanglements: Regimes of Extraction and The Literary Imagination of Place
Co-editors: Dr. Gayathri Goel and Dr. Jennifer Horwitz
The constellation of essays in this collection will focus on place-based literary works and address issues around resource extraction and ecological devastation. As the foremost cause of underdevelopment and ecological destruction in the Global South and many parts of North America, resource extraction, its resulting land loss and labor exploitation, is the occasion for this project. One of the aims of this collection is to expand “resource extraction” beyond the primary focus on extraction of fossil fuels, natural gas, and minerals and includes the commodification of any part of nature that results in impoverishment and harm without any consideration for sustainability, renewability, and justice for humans and nonhumans. The utilization and/or extraction of resources is a regular aspect of human activity for the purposes of subsistence to ensure the continued progression of human society. However, the essays in this collection will treat resource extraction as a reference to imperialist “extractivism” that depletes resources for profit, steadily impoverishing entire communities, accelerating environmental devastation, and deepening local conflicts.
Central to this project is also “place” and a deep engagement with literatures that are situated in specific places around the world. As environmental issues are rooted in specific ecological practices, politics, cultures, and history, and also vary widely in nature and severity, an attention to place, then, serves as an anchor and a critical framework for complex analysis. We invite papers that can contribute to this divergent field of “place studies” by centering marginalized voices from across the globe.
The accepted papers will address place-based extractivism and/or resistance to issues of exploitation of any part of an environmental community, land and habitat loss, resource scarcity, displacement/migration, collapsing interdependencies from various parts of the world, from the Pacific Islands, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, to the Americas. The essays will use any combination of critical lenses/perspectives including, Black, Indigenous, feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, decolonization thought to envision lively and liberated places for life forms beyond human and plant, animal, and avian inhabitants.
Note: At this point, we are accepting essays only on African, Latin American, Pacific Ocean literatures for the collection.
Please submit a 9000-word draft (including notes and citations), along with a 300-word abstract, by December 1st, 2026 to placebasedliteratures@gmail.com. Please feel free to reach out to the editors at the same email for your queries about the timeline or for any other clarifications regarding this project.
placebasedliteratures@gmail.com
Gayathri Goel