[CALL FOR PAPERS] Dossier "Law and racial relations"

1 Presentation

The InSURgência: rights and social movements journal (ISSN: 2447-6684), linked to the Instituto de Pesquisa, Direitos e Movimentos Sociais – IPDMS, aims to disseminate unpublished theoretical production concerning the theme “rights and social movements”.

With the objective of promoting research developed with, by and for social movements, mobilizing researchers from Brazil and other countries in different areas of knowledge, the Instituto de Pesquisa, Direitos e Movimentos Sociais - IPDMS founded the InSURgência: rights and social movements journal (ISSN: 2447-6684), an international journal that promotes unpublished theoretical and/or empirical productions committed to critical and liberating knowledge on the subject of rights and social movements, in the Brazilian, Latin American and international contexts.

For the first edition of 2024 of the InSURgência Journal (vol. 10, num. 1, jan./jun. 2024), the Dossier’s organizing committee invites the academic community, researchers and social movements activists to send their contributions in the form of a scientific article with the theme “Law and racial relations”, according to the guidelines below.

 

2 Dossier: “Law and racial relations”

The academic formulation movement in the field of Law and Race Relations developed in Brazil, especially from the 1980s onwards, is the result of a transatlantic process of political, cultural and social articulations against the racial status of the modern-colonial world. In the most recent experiences of contesting racism, it is evident that not only a new semantics for equality was constituted, but also the destabilization of the racist myths that founded the political-legal apparatuses in communities - such as the struggles for decolonization and liberation in African countries , the American Civil Rights Movements, the articulations of the movements to recover the native peoples in the Latin American context, the rearticulation for the black movement to act in the public sphere and the black-indigenist agency.

It highlights how the idea of the nation is in these relations conformed by powers, practices, and knowledge that are feedback by hierarchies of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, territoriality, and ethnicity that are interconnected. The critique that considers these mechanisms of power-knowledge in the Brazilian legal arena was encouraged by the demands of social movements, which, confronting the authoritarian regime, denounced in the streets of the cities or in traditional territories how racial violence is a continuous regime that has taken root, above all, with the ideology of racial democracy.

Opposing the supposed Brazilian particularism that in the country the modern project of racial harmony was materialized here, the black and indigenous agencies established fundamental understandings and actions such as: the articulations in regional and national indigenous assemblies; the claim of November 20 as Black Consciousness Day; the criminalization of racism; the denunciation of the dictatorship's violence against indigenous population; the opposition to Brazil's diplomatic relations with segregationist countries; the claim for quilombola lands; the recovery of indigenous territories; the insertion of the history of Africa and the Afro-Brazilian experience in educational curricula. Some of these formulations have repercussions on Brazilian legal thought. Two studies that inaugurated new agendas based on the experience of the black population stand out: "Racial prejudice and legal equality in Brazil" by Eunice Aparecida de Jesus Prudente (1980) and "Law and race relations: a critical introduction to racism" by Dora Lúcia de Lima Bertúlio (1989).

After the 1980s, these struggles for rights reaffirmed their legacies and positioned Brazil in the international scenario of confronting colonialism in spaces of civil society and intergovernmental organizations, conferences, declarations, and commitments that were also institutionalized, especially in the Federal Constitution of 1988. The struggles also reverberated in other institutional initiatives such as: the creation of the Palmares Cultural Foundation; the Indigenous Health Care Subsystem; the implementation of Affirmative Actions; the Regulation of the procedures for titling quilombola territories; the enactment of the Racial Equality Statute; the formulation of the National Policy for Territorial and Environmental Management of Indigenous Lands; and the National Policy for Sustainable Development of Traditional People and Communities. All of them are examples of an institutional result of the formulations and articulations for the confrontation of racism in Brazil.

However, these institutional arrangements have not been enough, and black and indigenous agencies continue to face the challenges of a colonial state. The recent conjuncture of governmental crises, in which indigenous peoples, traditional communities, quilombolas, black population and other groups, were openly considered enemies, what became evident was the repercussion of the genocidal logic of the imaginary of an internal enemy of the nation. Therefore, the centrality of racism for the understanding of concrete reality demands from legal research a specific theoretical instrument for its analysis. There is a diversity of categories that are mobilized by the epistemological and analytical challenge in dealing with racial relations and their interlocutions with the legal arena.

In these terms, the present volume aims to compile papers resulting from completed or ongoing research, which contribute to the systematization of the theoretical, methodological, and epistemic analyses in "Law and Racial Relations". We encourage the submission of proposals from different analytical perspectives, considering the plural characteristics of the investigations that comprise the area, supported by various currents for the understanding of racism in Brazilian legal culture, such as materialism, intersectionality, the African Diaspora, indigenous philosophy, pan-africanism, decoloniality and other matrices of modern thought, in the following axes:

1. Afro Latin-American studies on law and racism;
2. intersectional analyses of racism in access to justice and state bureaucracy;
3. research on racial interdiction in climate justice and socio-environmental relations;
4. studies of the apparatus of raciality in critical theories of law;
5. research on the praxis of social movements and political organizations in confronting racism;
6. research on fundamental rights and public policies to combat racism;
7. analyses on the ethno-racial dimensions of territorial conflicts.

Considering the distinct resources of the journal, we invite researchers, masters of traditional knowledge, and leaders of social movements to share scientific, political, and cultural formulations and results on race relations and the law.

 

3 Conditions for submission

To send your contribution, you must register on the InSURgência website. The contribution must be original and unpublished, and not under evaluation in another journal; otherwise, it must be justified in “Comments to editor”. The submission file must be in editable format (Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or RTF), without any type of authorship identification. The papper must contain title, abstract and keywords in 2 languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French or English). The content of the papper must contain an introduction, development, conclusion and bibliographic references (not necessarily with suc titles), written in an single language preferred by the autor, between Portuguese, Spanish, French or English. The formatting of the papper should follow the model avaiable on the review’s website.

The number of co-authors should be limited to a maximum of three. Exceptionally, collective works will be accepted, whose methodology must be presented and the exceptionality justified in advance to the Editorial Board by the email insurgencia.revista@ipdms.org.br.

The same author may send up to 2 (two) contributions to the “Dossier” and “In defense of research” sections (free articles section). Contributions to the other sections are unlimited: “Generating themes” (Entries section); “Political Poetics” (section of texts and artistic manifestations) and “Nobebook of return” (section of text reviews).

All submissions must follow the style standards and bibliographic requirements described in “Submission and guidelines for authors”.

Submission deadline: July 8, 2023.

Organization: Ciro de Souza Brito, Emília Joana Viana de Oliveira, Inara Flora Cipriano Firmino, Rodrigo Portela Gomes.