Special Issue: Not a Trump Issue

Lateral 6.2 (Fall 2017)

Guest Editor: Gwyneth Shanks (gwynn.shanks@gmail.com)

Deadline: August 1, 2017

In the wake of Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid and the increasing visibility and prominence of white supremacist and sexist ideologies in the United States, this special issue of Lateral imagines how radical, anti-racist, feminist scholars, artists, activists, and educators can enunciate their own forms of resistance. While a host of resistant strategies and gestures have emerged that depend upon the logic of re-contextualizing Trump’s own words, this special issue of Lateral is interested in other ways of activating defiance. Such forms extend well beyond the conventional boundaries of the written word, articulating how embodied actions, visual imagery, and sonic practices posit modes of resistance. Without negating the need to counter the sexist and racist rhetoric and policies of the current administration, each author proposes a mode of resistance that sidesteps Trump in responding to Trumpism. It is a call to resist and oppose as much as it is an imagining of alternatives to longstanding historical conditions.

The title, Not a Trump Issue, references Neil Greenberg’s 1994 concert dance Not-About-AIDS-Dance and Victoria Marks’s 2007 titular homage Not About Iraq. Both dance works depended upon the logic of simultaneously addressing and not addressing the thing in question: AIDS or the Iraq War. The “not” of the title here hopes to privilege resistant actions that are never reducible to nor fully concerned with Trump; rather, this issue is interested in the ways in which repudiation and activation can exist together, response can go along with what supplants response. While ‘issue,’ in the title is an easy pun on the format of the journal issue, it also aims to privilege actions that are engaged with surfacing deeper historical structures of inequity or dispossession; the issue is not not our present, but always already our collective pasts. As such, this issue understands responses to Trumpism to be part of a long history of organizing that extends beyond the current iterations of violence of this administration.

Submissions

Submissions can take many forms, including, but not limited to:

• Artist statement
• Teaching statement
• Scholarly essay
• Visual essay (i.e. a series of photographs or drawings)
• Poem
• Protest chant
• Instructions for activism
• Choreographic score

Scholarly essays should be approximately 4000 to 9000 words in length. Submissions that are shorter (e.g., perhaps taking the form of a poem or protest chant) are encouraged. Completed first drafts are due by August 1, 2017 according to submission guidelines at http://csalateral.org/contribute.

Lateral Editors