[Call for Papers] JEACS 8.2 (2027) Special Issue: Affirmative Memories, Alternative Futures: Remembering Otherwise in Sinophone Cultural Worlds
Call for Papers: JEACS 8.2 (2027)
Special Issue: Affirmative Memories, Alternative Futures: Remembering Otherwise in Sinophone Cultural Worlds
In societies undergoing profound transformation, the past is a powerful and contested resource through which communities articulate claims to justice, negotiate collective identities, and orient themselves toward the future. Across Sinophone contexts, experiences of imperialism, colonialism, social transformation, displacement, and political violence have been the focus of these processes. Yet engagements with the past do not necessarily produce reconciliation, shared understandings of history, or common visions of the future; they may instead deepen division, contestation and generate competing temporal imaginaries.
Both, memory work and its scholarship have devoted considerable attention to difficult pasts through frameworks of trauma, victimhood, accountability, reconciliation and historical responsibility. Far less attention, however, has been paid to how individuals and communities remember what they once valued, loved, enjoyed, hoped for, or sought to carry forward.
This special issue proposes affirmative remembering as a provisional lens for addressing this gap. By “affirmative remembering” we do not mean recollections that are necessarily positive, harmonious, or consolatory. Rather, we use the term to describe practices of remembering that preserve, reactivate or reimagine attachments to hope, joy, belonging, solidarity, creativity, care, or collective aspiration. We are particularly interested in how Sinophone cultural production retains and reworks past futures: futures once anticipated, imagined, promised, or desired, but unrealized, interrupted, foreclosed, denied, or simply forgotten.
Affirmative remembering may involve remembering not only what happened, but also what was possible and what might still be. It can thus draw attention to unrealized potentialities embedded in the past and to forms of historical experience that do not fit neatly within narratives of rupture, loss, trauma, or progress. Such remembering may be intimate and everyday as well as explicitly political; it may take the form of attachment to places, objects, practices, relationships, cultural forms, or ways of life, as well as collective aspirations and political projects.
The issue considers how affirmative memories take shape within post-authoritarian, post-socialist, and postcolonial histories, as well as amid ecological crisis technological transformation and planetary change. Rather than attending to forms of nostalgia that idealize the past, promote escapism, whitewash historical violence, or reproduce exclusionary narratives, we ask how particular engagements with the past might generate future-oriented possibilities of belonging, solidarity, activism, care and social change. How might remembering what was valued, hoped for, or imagined enable us to rethink the present? How might such memories open alternative future, challenge teleological understandings of historical time, and unsettle the assumption that the future must reproduce the trajectories of the past?
The special issue invites contributions that examine how affirmative modes of remembering otherwise intersect with questions of temporality, futurity, memory politics, and cultural production across Sinophone contexts. We particularly welcome papers exploring memories of what was loved, hoped for, enjoyed, desired, or imagined and how these memories complicate established approaches to memory while illuminating forms of future-making that remain otherwise difficult to see.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Affective dimensions of memory, including joy, hope, love, pleasure, care, attachment, desire and longing
- Past futures and unrealized potentialities, including interrupted, denied, foreclosed, anticipated, or alternative futures,
- Memory, futurity, and alternative temporalities, including nonlinear, recursive, cyclical, asynchronous, and heterogeneous experiences of time
- Ecological, planetary, and more-than-human futurities
- Post-authoritarian, post-socialist, and postcolonial temporal politics
- Nostalgia, belonging, and competing claims to the past, including the productive and ambivalent dimensions of nostalgic attachments
- Memory and activism, including the cultural, political, and social mobilization of affirmative memories
- Intergenerational memory and the transmission of hopes, aspirations, and unrealized futures
- Aesthetic forms of remembering otherwise, including textual and visual, sonic and performative culture
We invite original research articles on Sinophone cultural worlds across literary, cinematic, visual, digital, and other cultural forms that engage with questions of memory, temporality, futurity, and future-oriented cultural production.
Submission Guidelines
We welcome submissions from scholars at all career stages working in Sinophone studies. Articles should present original research and engage critically with questions of temporality, memory, and futurity in Sinophone cultural worlds.
Contributors are required to submit an abstract (max. 300 words, including the title, research question, methodology, keywords, and key findings) for discussion with the guest editors, Serena De Marchi (serena.demarchi@su.se), Simona Gallo (simona.gallo@unimi.it) and Irmy Schweiger (irmy.schweiger@su.se)
- Deadline for abstracts: February 28, 2027
- Notification of abstract acceptance: March 31, 2027
- Submission of full articles: July 15, 2027
- Article length: max 8,000 words
- Language: English
- Submission process: Please follow the submission guidelines of the Journal of the Association of Chinese Studies.
- For inquiries regarding the special issue, please contact irmy.schweiger@su.se
