Call for papers

ECHO – Interdisciplinary Journal of Communication Languages, Cultures,

Socities 

CFP issue no. 7/2025, edited by Martina Basciani, Federico Gabriele Ferretti,

Elena Lamberti

 

 

AlterNative Intelligences

Forms and Practices of Global Indigenous Resurgences

 

 This process is collectively individual, creating islands of radical resurgence.

Simpson 2017, p. 194

 

“I am interested in freedom, not survival” (Simpson 2017: 45). With these words, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg artist and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reignites a longstanding debate on Indigenous cultural and political struggles. Since the 1876 Indian Act, which marked the institutionalized onset of land dispossession and cultural genocide in Canada through the establishment of reserves and residential schools, Indigenous peoples have resisted the violence of settler colonialism and neocolonialism to preserve their legacy as well as their endangered traditions. Those Elders have planted the seeds of a revolution, but the time of endurance has long passed: it is now the time to resurge.

As a cultural and political movement centering on the regeneration of ancient languages and land-based traditions to foreground sovereignty, Resurgence is, according to Simpson, “a lens, critical analysis, a set of theoretical understandings, and an organizing and mobilizing platform [which] has the potential to wonderfully transform Indigenous life on Turtle Island” (2017: 49). Central to this movement is the value placed on traditional storytelling, which sustains Indigeneity in the present.

As carriers of ancestral knowledge passed down from generation to generation, stories are no longer transmitted solely orally but spread through writing and other communication channels. In this way, they increasingly and pervasively help adapt teachings of the past to modernity, offering essential guidelines for political advocacy. Indigenous Resurgence, therefore, naturally works at the intersection of diverse issues which, because of the very nature of the phenomenon, can be addressed by scholars of various disciplines, from cultural, linguistic, and literary studies to history, sociology, and politics.

If traditional storytelling has the capacity to bring ancestral knowledge to the present and to help imagine alterNative futures, then the dimension of Resurgence must be a-temporal or, in the Anishinaabe philosophy, biskaabiiyang (Geniusz, 2009; Simpson, 2011). Literally translated as “the process of returning to ourselves” (Simpson, 2017: 17), biskaabiiyang interfuses past, present, and future to establish a decolonial and Indigenous reality. Nishnaabeg scholar Grace Dillon (2012: 345) similarly defines this time-collapsing device as “Indigenous slipstream” to view “time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream…”. That of Indigenous futurisms is yet another multidisciplinary question: the stream of traditional storytelling into digital environments has resulted in the production of online educative platforms such as Biskaabiiyaang: The Indigenous Metaverse (www.biskaabiiyaang.com) or Four Directions Teachings (www.fourdirectionsteachings.com, Wemigwans, 2018), as well as video games like Until Dawn or Never Alone, with Indigenous matters as focal points (Byrd, 2021), and keeps on dealing with the advent of modern technologies, such as AI. That social media are strictly entangled with Indigenous Resurgence worldwide, additionally, is evidenced by the work of social and political movements like Idle No More and #NoDAPL in North America, We Are Oceania (WAO) in Australia and New Zealand, and the Movimiento Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas in Mexico, among the others, along with the several activists that are exposing ongoing colonialism in Palestine.

Resurgence, ultimately, seeks to establish a global network of Indigenous solidarities. Defining Indigenous Internationalism as a core element on the Resurgence agenda, Simpson (2017) envisions a web of relations that intertwine human nations, as well as animal and plant nations, on a global scale. The intention, as Simpson asserts, is that Indigenous singularities should not be viewed as monoliths but rather as islands united by a decolonial and resurgent goal. This notion, whether consciously or not, echoes Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant’s metaphor of the archipelago, which underscores relational and non-hierarchical connections between distinct and inherently specific cultures (1990). Similarly, Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of nepantla  - “the space between worlds” as described in her renowned Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987/2022) - and Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s tribal internationalism (“one world, many tribes”, in The Almanac of the Dead, 1991) both point to the establishment of an ethical relationality, a resistance to neocolonialism, and the fostering of global Indigenous Resurgences.

This issue aims to delve into the various declinations of Indigenous Resurgence that are taking place worldwide, crossing the borders that lie between continents and academic disciplines. Contributions that provide a transmedial and transdisciplinary reading of Resurgence in the Americas, Oceania, Europe, Palestine, and globally are especially welcomed. Scholars of various disciplines, including literature, culture, sociology, politics, human geography, and history, among others, are welcome to apply.

Potential research lines include but are not limited to:

  • Survival vs. Resurgence in a diachronic/comparative perspective
  • Colonial History in Resurgent Contexts: recovering the past to understand the present and envision alterNative futures
  • Storytelling, myth, tradition, and orature
  • The political advocacy or Resurgence (online/offline/hybrid);
  • Indigenous temporalities and “the end of the world”;
  • Artistic, literary, cultural, and multimodal productions of Resurgence;
  • Projects of language revitalization (online/offline/hybrid);
  • The spaces of Resurgence: metropolis, tribes/reserves/reservations, and digital environments.
  • How AI serves Indigenous resurgence(s).
  • Indigenous relationalities worldwide.

 

Deadlines:

Abstract (500 words): 10th March 2025                    

Notification of acceptance: 14th April 2025

Article submission: 25th June 2025                               

Publication: 30th November 2025

Length of articles: max 7000 words

To submit an article, write to: rivista.echo@uniba.it

 

Essential Bibliography

 

Anzaldúa, G. 2022. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), 5th ed., Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco.

Byrd, J. 2017. Playing Stories: Never Alone, Indigeneity, and the Structures of Settler Colonialism. Cornell University. (https://www.cornell.edu/video/jodi-a-byrd-video-games-indigeneity-settler-colonialism)

Carbonara, L. 2020. Dances with stereotypes. Ombre Corte edizioni, Verona.

Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Dillon, G. 2012. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Estes, N. 2019. Our History Is the Future, Verso Books, London, New York.

Geniusz, W. D. 2009. Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings. Syracuse University Press, New York.

Glissant, É. 1990. Poétique de la relation. Gallimard, Paris.

Silko, L. M. 1991. The Almanac of the Dead. Simon and Schuster, New York.

Simpson, L. B. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. ARP Books, Winnipeg.

Simpson, L. B. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Wemigwans, J. 2018. A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online. University of Regina Press, Regina.

Whitehead, J., ed. 2020. Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver.

Zaccaria, P. 2017. La lingua che ospita. Meltemi, Milano.