[Air-L] Deadline extension for submissions to Postcolonialism & Imperialism in and around Games anthology

Thu Jan 23 00:37:06 PST 2025

 *Submission deadline extension: February 14, 2025*

Dear colleagues,

We would like to share that the deadline for submitting an abstract to the
anthology on Postcolonialism & Imperialism in and around Games has been
extended to February 14th. You can find the original Call for Papers below:

This anthology published by Palgrave-Macmillan looks to evaluate post- and
decolonial questions in game studies and identify future research
trajectories and underexplored areas pertaining to questions of colonialism
and imperialism in and around games. We seek submissions that expand on
these questions.

The *Deadline for abstracts is: 14th of February 2025. *Abstract
submissions (250-500 words) should be sent to
postcolonialgamestudies at gmail.com

*Background*

The question of colonialism and its historical background radiation has not
been relegated to the past. This is perhaps most noticeable today where a
settler colony functioning as the beachhead for western imperial powers is
conducting a genocide of the indigenous Palestinian people, while
terrorizing and invading its neighbouring populations with extensive
military and diplomatic support by Western governments despite massive
public protests. The historical analogies to previous colonial occupations
and conflicts are evident. Meanwhile, media rhetorics reminiscent of past
European colonial empires (Trouillot 1995) are once again resurfacing with
the depiction of the Other as misogynist terrorists and wealth-leeching
refugees (Lean 2012), barbaric orcs (Shlapentokh 2013), and yellow peril (Tchen
and Yeats 2014). The West’s descent into barbarism reflects Aimé
Césaire’s *Discourses
on Colonialism* (2000) where fascism at home and colonialism abroad are
intertwined and explicated through how colonizers ‘decivilize’ themselves
and “proceeds toward savagery” (ibid. 37-38). Concurrently, countries in
the so-called Global South face further immiseration; military, economic,
technological dependencies; and the unhindered challenges of disastrous
climate change (Hickel et al., 2024). Modern games are no stranger to such
dialectical movements, as they have reflected and reproduced 'the global
color line' in their production, their consumption, and their textual
representations (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2021; Hammar et al. 2021; T.
Mukherjee 2023; S. Mukherjee 2017; Murray 2017).

Since the special issue on *Postcolonialist Perspectives in Games* (S.
Mukherjee and Hammar 2018) and Souvik Mukherjee’s *Empire Plays Back *(2017),
the issue of postcolonialism and its theoretical traditions have deepened
and explored in games research such as technodependencies and platforms (T.
Mukherjee 2023; Baeza-González 2021; Falcão, Marques, and Mussa 2020;
Nieborg, Young, and Joseph 2020); race and orientalism (Fickle 2019;
Patterson 2020; Patterson and Fickle 2024); anti-colonial board games (Mochocki
2023), race and play (Trammell 2023); the status of Northern indigenous
culture in and around games (O. Laiti et al. 2021; O. K. Laiti and Harrer
2023); and Indian boardgames (Rizvi and Kar 2024) and their colonial avatars
(S. Mukherjee 2025), just to name a few. Game makers have also expanded on
issues of colonialism in games (inkle 2021; Nidal Nijm Games 2022), and
move towards what LaPensee, Laiti & Longboat (2022) call ‘sovereign games’.
While the problem for game studies remains that the primary centers of
knowledge production reside in the Global North (Penix-Tadsen and Frasca
2019), we fully acknowledge the contributions in the spaces in and around
games and their study by people across the world in bringing fundamental
question of history and present-day (post)colonialism as seen in cases such
as South America (Falcão, Marques, and Mussa 2020; King 2024), South East
Asia (Jiwandono 2024; 2023) and Africa (Opoku-Agyemang 2015; Randle 2024;
Amoah and Tawia 2024).

Therefore, additional accounts if not critiques of the (mis)representation
of Orientalist attitudes, race, delinking, hybridity, subalternity, Afro-
and Indofuturism, notions of space and the fragmented postcolonial
identities, dependency theory and unequal exchange, and evaluations of
nationalisms in the Global South are consistently required. Indeed,
commercial analogue and digital games would not exist in their current
forms if not for the global division of the world between North and South.
It is therefore imperative that games research inquire and identify aspects
of postcolonialism and imperialism in and around games.

We seek submissions that expand on the established research and/or provide
new and underexplored topics pertaining to postcolonialism and imperialism
in and around games.

The *Deadline for abstracts is: 14th of February 2025. *Abstract
submissions should be sent to postcolonialgamestudies at gmail.com

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

·         Colonialism / Neocolonialism / Postcolonialism

·         The Other / Alterity

·         Delinking / decoloniality

·         Decolonization

·         Orientalism

·         Postcolonial praxis

·         Imperialism / global capitalism / political economy

·         Self-representation / voice / agency

·         Third-Worldism

·         Subalternity

·         Nationalisms in the Global South

·         Indigenous culture

·         Religion(s) / Language(s) / Nationalism(s)

·         Thirdspace

·         Unequal exchange and the game industry

·         Eurocentrism

·         Game studies & politics of knowledge

·         Ecology, colonialism, and game production

·         Game platforms and colonialism

·         Dependency theory and games

·         Fascism as colonialism turned inward: Reactionary politics and
games

Abstract submissions should comprise of:

Abstract (250-500 words)

Author information (short biographical statement of 200 words)

Abstract submissions should be sent to postcolonialgamestudies at gmail.com.
Abstract submissions will then undergo an editorial review process. Authors
will be notified of the outcome as soon as reports are received.

*Timeline*

*Deadline for abstracts: 14th of February 2025*

*Notification of accepted abstracts: End of February 2025 *

*Deadline for full articles: 23rd of May 2025*

Chapter submissions should comprise of

Full-length article (5-8000 words) including references and a short
bibliography.

Author information (short biographical statement of 200 words)

Best regards,

Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, Department of English, Centre for Studies in Social
Sciences, Calcutta, Kolkata, India

Dr. Emil Lundedal Hammar, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen,
Denmark.

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