Call for Book Chapters: Beyond Home and Homeland: Rethinking Belonging in Global Anglophone Literature

Volume Editor: Namrata Dey Roy (PhD) | Faculty member, Writing and Communication Program, Georgia Institute of Technology

Theme and Purpose

What does it mean to belong? Is belonging determined by one's relationship to a particular place, community, language, or cultural tradition? Does physical presence necessarily confer belonging, or can individuals remain strangers within spaces they have inhabited for generations? Conversely, can attachments to ancestral homelands, inherited memories, or cultural communities persist despite geographical separation? These questions have particular significance in Global Anglophone literature, where histories of colonialism, slavery, migration, displacement, and cultural transformation challenge conventional understandings of home, identity, and membership. Scholarship in postcolonial, diaspora, and memory studies offers important perspectives on these questions. Avtar Brah's concept of diaspora space challenges distinctions between migrants and those considered native to a territory, while Sara Ahmed's work on strangerhood examines how individuals become recognizable as outsiders. Marianne Hirsch's postmemory illuminates the intergenerational transmission of traumatic histories, while Jacques Derrida's work on hospitality exposes the tensions between welcome and the authority to determine its conditions. Together, these perspectives reveal belonging as a complex relationship shaped by historical experience, cultural memory, and structures of recognition.

Yet migration and diaspora, while central to discussions of belonging, do not exhaust its meanings. Individuals may experience estrangement without crossing national borders; colonial dispossession may disrupt Indigenous relationships to ancestral lands; and familial expectations, gendered hierarchies, or cultural exclusions may complicate belonging within familiar communities. Conversely, alternative forms of kinship, solidarity, and affiliation may emerge across geographical and cultural boundaries. Belonging, therefore, concerns not merely where individuals reside but how they are remembered, recognized, welcomed, excluded, and connected to others.

Literary narratives illuminate these complexities. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016) explores how slavery, colonialism, and historical trauma shape familial connections and inherited belonging across generations. Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees (2017) examines the intersections of displacement, memory, identity, and cultural affiliation, while Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea (2001) interrogates asylum, hospitality, and strangerhood through experiences of loss and contested recognition. Such narratives challenge reductive distinctions between home and exile, presence and absence, or belonging and exclusion.

This edited collection approaches belonging as a multidimensional, historically situated, and contested relationship in Global Anglophone literature. Bringing migration, diaspora, memory, kinship, hospitality, and citizenship into conversation, it proposes four interconnected conceptual trajectories: dislocated belonging, remembered belonging, negotiated belonging, and relational belonging. With particular attention to African and South Asian literary traditions, while welcoming comparative perspectives from other postcolonial, diasporic, Indigenous, and transnational contexts, the volume invites scholarship examining how literary texts challenge fixed categories of home, identity, nation, and community, and imagine alternative possibilities of belonging.

Suggested Themes and Topics (Including but Not Limited to)

The collection welcomes contributions exploring the following interconnected themes, as well as other perspectives relevant to belonging in Global Anglophone literature.

1. Dislocated Belonging

• Colonialism, dispossession, and relationships to land

• Migration, exile, refugeehood, and displacement

• Indigenous belonging and settler colonialism

• Cultural alienation, internal exile, and estrangement

• Borders, partition, and fragmented homelands

2. Remembered Belonging

• Cultural memory, postmemory, and intergenerational trauma

• Ancestry, genealogy, and familial histories

• Nostalgia, imagined homelands, and narratives of return

• Language, storytelling, and cultural inheritance

• Historical silences and contested memories

3. Negotiated Belonging

• Hospitality, strangerhood, and the politics of welcome

• Citizenship, asylum, and precarious residency

• Otherness, exclusion, and social recognition

• Gender, race, class, caste, and structures of belonging

• Cultural assimilation and linguistic identity

4. Relational Belonging

• Alternative kinship, chosen families, and familial relationships

• Transnational solidarity and diasporic affiliations

• Gender, sexuality, and intimate belonging

• Multilingual identities and cross-cultural encounters

• Community formation and belonging beyond national boundaries

Submissions may engage with more than one thematic area, and comparative or interdisciplinary approaches are welcome.

Submission Guidelines and Important Dates

• Abstracts: 300–350 words, accompanied by a short biography (approximately 100 words).

• Abstract submission deadline: 15 January 2027

• Notification of selected proposals: Within one month of the abstract deadline

• Full chapter deadline: 30 June 2027

Submission address: belongingeditedvolume@gmail.com

AI use and declaration: Submitted chapters must be the authors’ original scholarly work and must not be AI-generated. Contributors must include a clear declaration identifying whether generative AI tools were used and, if so, specifying the nature and extent of that use. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of their submissions.

Proofreading and revisions: Contributors are expected to submit carefully proofread, publication-ready chapters and to complete any editorial or peer-review revisions requested within the agreed deadlines.

The proposed collection is under contract with Vernon Press; publication remains subject to satisfactory peer review and the publisher’s final approval.