Unsettling Homelands: Radical Histories of the (Ethno)Nation-State
A Call for Proposals from the Radical History Review
Issue number 161 (May 2028)
Abstract Deadline: June 15, 2026
Co-edited by Liza Black and Adrian De Leon
The homeland is not a place. It is a problem. It is the central problem of modern politics: the violent, enduring, and unsettling question of who belongs, and who gets to decide. This question animates the nostalgic longing of diasporas, the exclusionary fervor of ethnonationalists, the economic strategies of developing states, and the relentless resistance of Indigenous peoples for whom the homeland was never a question, but an answer, an answer that settler colonialism has spent centuries trying to erase.
This issue seeks submissions that critically examine the politics of the “homeland” in its various geopolitical, infrastructural, and affective forms: as sites of nostalgia among diasporas wanting to connect with their “roots”; as settler colonial projects whose ethnic patriotisms obfuscate their violence; as practices of capturing transnational populations and capital for economic development; and as the enduring grounds of Indigenous sovereignty that pre-exist and persist within and against the settler state.
We seek submissions that elucidate the relationship between these formations. At what point, for example, does a diasporic longing for a homeland abroad inadvertently align with the settler colonial logics that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their homelands here? This issue grapples with the central tension of how transnational homeland projects intersect with or challenge the ongoing struggle for Indigenous land and life.
And conversely: how have Indigenous and other colonized people around the world redeployed the politics of the homeland to articulate alternative visions and practices of self-determination, such as grounded normativity, kinship-based belonging, and refusal of state recognition, to the constitutive violences of the contemporary nation-state?
Possible topics include:
- affective homelands: nostalgia, longing, diasporic desire
- Infrastructures of homelands: ports, airports, digital platforms
- Settler colonial myths: memorials, museums, national parks, statues
- transnational capital and Indigenous land defense.
- tourism and pilgrimage
- solidarity within homelands: diasporic, immigrant, and Indigenous movements for land and liberation
- Indigenous practices of citizenship, belonging, and jurisdiction
- gendered and queer dimensions of homeland: kinship, reproduction, and heteronormativity in nationalist and anti-colonial projects
- counter-narratives that disrupt state-sanctioned histories
- treaties: negotiation, betrayal, Indigenous political order
- statelessness, fugitivity, and marronage
Procedure for submission of material:
By June 15, 2026, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the material you wish to submit to our online journal management system, ScholarOne. To begin with ScholarOne, sign in or create an account at
https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-rhr. After signing in, select “Author” from the menu up top, and click “Begin Submission” or “Start New Submission.” Please include “Issue 161” in the “Title” field when filling in the form that follows. Your title should also include your proposal title in the “Title” field. Upload a Word or PDF document, including any images within the document. After uploading your file, select “Proposal” as the submission type and follow the on-screen instructions. Feel free to write to the journal’s managing editor at contactrhr@gmail.com if you encounter any technical difficulties or have any other questions about the process.
By July 15, 2026, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for further consideration. The due date for completed submissions is expected to be in November 2026. Those submissions selected for publication will be included in issue 161 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in May 2028.
Abstract Deadline: June 15, 2026
Contact: contactrhr@gmail.com
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