News
Shannon in The New York Times
Read the article by Ron Nixon, “De-emphasis on Race in Adoption Is Criticized,” here.
The Latehomecomer
Author Kao Kalia Yang talks with Shannon about her new memoir, The Latehomecomer, which traces her own family’s flight from their native home after the Vietnam War.
Wrack and Ruin
Shannon gets the story behind acclaimed author Don Lee’s new novel Wrack and Ruin, and she gives her take on the surprisingly substantial reflections on urban sprawl, race, and identity to be found in his farcical tale.
Riding Shotgun
Shannon recently reviewed Riding Shotgun: Women Write about their Mothers (Borealis Books, 2008) on mnartists.org. She found the book to be a provocative and fresh take on the mother-daughter relationship, which has otherwise been so sentimentalized.
To read the review, click here. For interview with Kathryn Kysar, the book’s editor, click here.
Shannon accepting submissions for BROWN ON BROWN
Call for Submissions
BROWN ON BROWN: MOBILIZING INTER-ETHNIC COALITION AGAINST EMPIRE
The neo-liberal politics of globalization have both ruptured and sutured various groups of people of color around the world. Categories such as “African American” and “South Asian” are closer together, in terms of the battles for living wages and adequate health care that the majority of individuals in both groups face, than they ever have been before. At the same time, the rhetoric of the “level playing field” that a free market economy is supposed to bring is largely a fiction, in terms of these groups’ understanding of and access to each other’s histories.
What would it mean then, to become fluent in each other’s narratives? What are the stakes of dialogue between people of color in this moment of empire? The editor of this anthology invites both critical and creative writers to explore this question – fundamentally one of coalition. She would like to give space to a multi-vocal, multi-ethnic approach to the new connections (and possibilities) that globalization has birthed.
Why an intersection, a cross-section of “creative” and critical thinkers? Creative here is put in quotes because excellent critical work is profoundly creative, and creative work can exist as profound and deeply theoretical critiques. Dichotomous thinking has tended to be a hallmark of European and Euro-centric hegemony.
The editor understands that artistic production by people of color and the criticism that engages it are intimately bound. The terms of these dialogues should be determined by non-Eurocentric discursive practices and theorization. Issues such as induction into artistic canons, financial and institutional support for productions, audience education, etc., are all of profound concern to most U.S.-based professional artists of color, many of whom also produce labor for the U.S. academe, whether as tenured professors, adjunct instructors, or visiting artists.
Issues such as appropriation, the impact of various nationalisms on production, distribution, and reception of both scholarly and “creative” work; formations of sexualities and gender identities; commodification of brown bodies, ideas, histories, land, and resources; and the—largely underground—community organizing done across brown racial lines all need space to collectively interrogate the new meanings of coalition, the meanings of new categories in relation to the (often un-named) old.
BROWN ON BROWN seeks to offer multiple, interrelated counter-narratives to the kinds of cultural and critical production that engages in border policing and gatekeeping, and that keeps our inquiries and critiques of internal and trans-racial differences separate, if not largely silenced.
Submissions can be scholarly essays written for a college-level audience or creative nonfiction, but should do one or more of the following:
1) Discuss the importance of examining critical/creative intersections;
2) Investigate the historical, sociological, economic, psychological, political, national, cultural and artistic factors that have informed inter-ethnic relationships;
3) Provide alternative theoretical, creative, and critical models of community organizing across “brown” racial/ethnic lines, across gender constructions, across borders (or perceived borders) of class and religion;
4) Through creative nonfiction, offer readers examples of “brown” interactions that ask questions that make whiteness incidental in order to open up the imaginative possibilities present in our creative and “real” lives;
5) Explore what purpose it serves to create new categories (e.g. “biracial”—especially being the product of two “non-white” parents of different ethnicities—and “transracial adoptee” identities) for “old” realities and practices;
6) Examine internal differences in gender and sexuality construction, and queer “brown” bodies as various sites of critiques of white masculinities and femininities;
7) Examine the effects of appropriation, commodification, nationalism, and globalized late-capitalism on “brown” on “brown” interactions, including intimate relationships, kinship-building (and breaking), and community organizing (including immigration and labor issues).
Please limit to 5,000 words.
Format: Essays must be typed, double-spaced, and paginated. On the first page please include your address, phone number(s), email address(es), and a short bio. No simultaneous submissions. Previously published essays will be considered.
Submitting: Electronic submissions are preferred. Send essay electronically as a Word file to Shannon at brownonbrownanthology@gmail.com. If you cannot e-mail it, send a hard copy to BROWN ON BROWN Anthology, 3504 5th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55408.
Reply: You will be contacted by June 1, 2007 if your essay has been accepted for initial inclusion to the anthology. It is not possible to respond to every submission; if you have not received a response by then please assume that it was not accepted. Submissions will not be returned.
