[CFP] Race, Borders, and Migration across the Postcolonial Atlantic (Il Tolomeo: A Postcolonial Studies Journal)
Organization: Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Il Tolomeo: A Postcolonial Studies Journal
Call for papers 2026 - English version
Race, Borders, and Migration across the Postcolonial Atlantic
Special issue edited by William Boelhower, Silvia Boraso, Lucio De Capitani, and Alice Girotto
The editors of Il Tolomeo invite submissions for the upcoming 2026 issue (no. 28) dedicated to the themes of race and migration across and around the postcolonial Atlantic.
Since the early 1990s, transatlantic studies have progressively established themselves as a major scholarly field for reconceptualizing the Atlantic as a fluid geographical space of circulation, translation, creolization, cultural transfers, and gendered social relations shaped by the slave trade, colonization, and countless migrations. Starting with Paul Gilroy’s pioneering work The Black Atlantic (1993), this interdisciplinary field has critically tackled diasporic dynamics, cultural exchanges, and racialized identities that have made the modern Atlantic world what it is today. As a cross-disciplinary paradigm, transatlantic literary studies invest in the ways cisatlantic, transatlantic, and circumatlantic scales intersect, often drawing on insights from other research areas such as the social sciences, environmental studies, translation studies, and migration studies.
This paradigm has also fostered an ecological approach, inviting us to investigate the porousness of traditional national and linguistic frameworks. The Atlantic thus emerges as a vital laboratory for thinking about the relationship between memory, history, language, agency, and identity in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts, and for analyzing how literatures and societies adapt to these ultimately borderless and vexed heritages.
In the Anglophone world, transatlantic studies have developed primarily within an interdisciplinary tradition integrating history, literature, and cultural studies (Boelhower 2007, 2009, 2019; Manning and Taylor 2007; Tavor Bannet and Manning 2011). Recent scholarship has placed race, migration, and borders at the centre of its agenda (Campbell 2022; Kenney, Salenius and Smith 2016; Beidler and Taylor 2005), treating the Atlantic as a space in which racial constructions of identity and migratory processes are mutually constitutive flashpoints. Migratory trajectories and their accompanying processes of racialization unfold across a long geohistorical continuum and link the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary diasporic formations in the circum-Caribbean and the rich nations of the Global North.
Scholarship in the Francophone world has developed a complementary line of inquiry centred on the memory of slavery, migration, hybridity, and the racial hierarchies inherited from colonialism (Miller 2008; Marschall 2009; Moura and Clavaron 2012; Moura and Porra 2015). These studies foreground how creole identities are shaped through forced and voluntary mobilities across the Atlantic (Schnakenbourg 2021), while memories of slavery and neocolonial domination continue to structure contemporary forms of belonging, exclusion, and cultural production.
A similar reorientation characterizes research among Portuguese-speaking scholars, who have reframed early historical and anthropological approaches (Vale de Almeida 2002; da Costa and Silva 2003) within the perspective of South-South circulations and the re-examination of postcolonial histories. Roberto Vecchi (2008, 2016) has helped to redefine postcolonial scholarship through the concept of the “South Atlantic” and the internal articulation between imperial peripheries that it implies. More recently, the thematic dossier of the journal Via Atlântica, edited by Emerson da Cruz Inácio, Luca Fazzini, and Roberto Francavilla (2022), has focused on continuities with the colonial past, issues of indigeneity and survival practices expressed through anti-hegemonic aesthetics, theories, and literary and artistic discourses.
This special monographic issue of Il Tolomeo aims to analyze the Atlantic themes mentioned above through a multiscalar postcolonial approach. It seeks to bring together Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone perspectives to understand how race, migration, and borders continue to shape the Atlantic world in a variety of postcolonial contexts. The comparative dimension allows us to examine how racialized identities, migratory movements, and patterns of displacement are constructed, contested, and transformed across different societies and cultural spaces. We invite submissions that explore how Atlantic societies negotiate and represent race and migration through literary, artistic, filmic, or memorial forms through which these dynamics are elaborated.
Possible areas of investigation include:
- Racialized social and cultural dynamics: the construction and negotiation of racial identities, experiences of forced and voluntary migration, and the ways communities navigate colonial and postcolonial hierarchies.
- Migration and cultural production: how migratory experiences and racialized histories are represented, adapted, or reinterpreted in literature, theater, cinema, visual arts, and archival practices.
- Transnational circulations: dialogues among Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone academic traditions, including the transfer of concepts, circulation of postcolonial and migration theories, and comparative approaches to mobility and race.
- Connected memories: how migration and racial histories are remembered, memorialized, and institutionalized in archives, museums, and public commemorations across the Atlantic.
- South-South dynamics: circulation of people, ideas, and cultural practices between Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and their intersections with racial constructions.
Studies with an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, and/or those situating works within their literary and cultural contexts, are also welcome.
Il Tolomeo accepts contributions in the following categories:
- articles (max. 50,000 characters, including spaces);
- reviews (6,000-8,000 characters, including spaces);
- interviews (9,000-15,000 characters, including spaces);
- original unpublished material.
Please submit an abstract (maximum 1000 characters, including spaces) by 09/02/2026 via the link below ("Upload page"). Please attach, in addition to the abstract, a bio-bibliographical note (in English, maximum 1,000 characters, spaces included) and 5 key words (in English; not necessary for reviews, unpublished works and interviews).
Please also indicate the type of contribution (article, review, unpublished work, interview.
The deadline for submitting complete contributions is 18/05/2026.
Contributions must be written (in a .docx format) according to the journal’s editorial and bibliographical norms, which can be found on the journal’s web page. Contributions are accepted in English, French, Portuguese and Italian, as long as there is coherence between language and content (the editors reserve the right to grant exceptions in the case of specific and justified needs). For further information write to tolomeo.redazione@unive.it or consult the journal’s website: https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/il-tolomeo/#call.
Upload page for abstract submissions: https://peerflow.edizionicafoscari.it/abstracts/form/journal/15/392
Lucio De Capitani