Call for Book Chapters: “Matrilineal Family Saga Beyond Western Modernity” (no)
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Call for Book Chapters: “Matrilineal Family Saga Beyond Western Modernity”
We are excited to invite researchers, writers, and practitioners to contribute a chapter to an upcoming book entitled Matrilineal Family Saga Beyond Western Modernity. This interdisciplinary collection aims to explore diverse perspectives on matrilineal family structures across cultures, examining how they challenge and expand beyond the frameworks of secular Western modernity.
Focus and Themes
We are particularly interested in chapters that reflect on the portrayals and roles of matrilineal family systems in a variety of cultural contexts and geographical regions, including but not limited to, the Arab region, South and East Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc.
The book will also engage with contemporary theories and leading critics in motherhood studies, like Andrea O’Reilly, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, among many others, to address the representations of cultural identities in matrilineal narratives across various genres, including literature, film, and field work. We especially encourage contributions that engage with the following theoretical perspectives:
Memory/Trauma Studies: How collective and individual memories of matrilineal family dynamics are shaped and remembered.
Alternative Motherhoods: Reimagining motherhood and family roles outside the traditional, normative Western frameworks.
Feminist Perspectives: Investigating matrilineal family systems through feminist theory, with a focus on gender, power, and social structures.
Identity, Ethics of Care, and Belonging: The role of caregiving, belonging, and identity in the construction of family, particularly in non-Western contexts.
Possible topics might include:
· Familial relationships and dynamics within matrilineal societies and cultures
· Motherhood, motherline, and mothering
· Care and motherwork
· Conflicted discourses on what motherhood and mothering means or entails
· Othermothering, community mothering, and communal child-care
· Mother-child relationship, mothers and sons, mothers and daughters
· Memory/trauma and motherhood, mothers of martyrs
· Ecofeminism/ecowomanism or nature-centered approach to motherhood
· Motherhood and spirituality, storytelling, and traditional ways of knowing
· Queer motherhood and non-gender-based definitions of motherhood and mothering
· Etc …
Submission Guidelines
We welcome critical submissions that provide insights into the shifting representations and understandings of matrilineal family systems. Chapters should range from 6000 to 8,000 words (including bibliography and endnotes) and should contribute to a broader conversation about global family structures beyond the paradigm of Western modernity.
Please send your abstracts (300-500 words), along with a bio of 200 words, by 30 June 2025 to amany.abdelrazek@hu-berlin.de and yes.khedhir@gmail.com. Please include ‘Matrilineal Family Saga + Your Full Name in the subject line.
Timeline:
Notification of acceptance: 1 August 2025
Draft submission deadline: 30 November 2025
Expected date of Publication: End of 2026
N.B: Some well-established international publishers have expressed their interest in the book and will be contacted as soon as we have a working table of contents.
For any further inquiries, please contact the editors on the two above-mentioned email addresses. We look forward to your contributions to this exciting exploration of matrilineal family sagas beyond Western modernity.
About the Editors:
Dr. Amany Alseify is a writer and adjunct lecturer at the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender studies within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She is also a section editor for Open Cultural Studies, a peer-reviewed journal published by De Gruyter. She holds a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from the Institute of English Philology at the Free University of berlin, awarded in 2022. Dr. Alseify’s interdisciplinary research bridges gender studies, postcolonial literature, secularization, and fashion theory. Her scholarly work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals in both Arabic and English. She is the author of Modern Egyptian Women, Fashion, and Faith: Discourses and Representations, a critical exploration of the intersections between identity, culture, and dress in contemporary Egypt published by Palgrave in 2023.
Dr. Yesmina Khedhir holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies, the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She received her BA and MA in English from the Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Humanities of Manouba, Tunisia, and was a Fulbright scholar (FLTA) at Stanford University in 2011-2012. Dr. Khedhir is currently working on her first-to-be monograph, titled Narratives of Survival: Memory, trauma, and Healing in Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage Trilogy, and has published several articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, like Callaloo, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), North Meridian Press, Philological Review, Cambridge Scholars of Publishing, and Demeter Press. Her areas of interest and research include African American literature, history, and culture, Southern studies, Black feminism/womanism, ecocriticism/ecowomanism, memory and trauma studies, Blue Humanities, and migration studies.
Dr. Amany alsiefy
