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Special Issues

American Quarterly publishes one special issue per year each September.  Special issues are edited by the guest editors in collaboration with the AQ editors and the AQ Managing Board. They are comprised of a combination of essays that are solicited by the editors and essays that are submitted to a call for papers. Proposals are reviewed by the AQ Board, and the submission process is subject to a peer-review process. For more information on special issues and a look back at past special issues, please visit the Special Issues page.

Call for Papers

2026 Special Issue: Indigenous Borderlands

Indigenous Borderlands Working Group: 

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Amrah Salomón, Susy Zepeda 

 

Recent U.S moves to remove Indigenous place names such as Denali and to claim Greenland as a colonial territory alongside increased border militarization and deportation targeting non-white migrants, especially those from Latin America, is indicative of the ongoing threat that Indigenous relations to land, that have always included travel and mobility, pose to settler colonialism. We are also witnessing a rising rejection of civil rights and the gains of social movements structured through white supremacist nationalism, heteropatriarchy, and settler nativism that seek to undo the work of Black emancipation by targeting the potential citizenship of both migrants and tribal nations. This positioning of Black communities, people of color, Indigenous nations, trans and queer communities, and migrants together as enemies of the white patriarchal nation-state creates opportunities for solidarities not yet realized by the liberation and social movements of the last century. At this critical juncture we draw attention to Indigenous experiences of borders that work to unsettle projects of militarism, carcerality, extraction, colonial racial capitalism, and exclusion as points where abolitionist and freedom geographies can be imagined. 

 

This special issue in American Quarterly on the Indigenous Borderlands aims to bring together a range of interdisciplinary scholars who consider borders and borderlands from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. The emergent field of Indigenous border studies broadly considers the containment and extraction of peoples, lands, and waters and the Indigenous relations and movements that resist the violence of colonial separation. The borders that partition Indigenous peoples and homelands are not just at the frontiers of settler states but also are imposed anywhere settler occupations reside and where false hierarchical binaries of being, movement, and belonging are imposed. A growing interest into the history and analytics of anticolonial fugitivity, refusal, and evasion is also putting Indigenous border critiques in conversation with a wide array of fields not historically in conversation with Indigenous Studies. 

 

This call for papers continues a long conversation about borders by American Quarterly (AQ). The 2005 special issue, “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders” helped us think about borders from the perspective of non-territorial forms of U.S. legal sovereignty that extended border control far beyond geopolitical borders. Then the 2010 special issue, “Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies,” focused on relationships between Indigenous peoples and immigrant diasporas. This special issue now asks us to imagine and interrogate the emergent field of Indigenous Border Studies. 

 

We are calling for papers, creative works, and analysis that center Indigenous perspectives and recognize the abolition of borders as the work of decolonization. Topics can include but are not limited to the following possible themes: 
 

  • Indigenous Homelands: Concepts of space, time, and embodiment such as felt theory, land / water / sky relationality, futurisms, long histories, and relational ecologies that situate unboundedness and border abolition. How might we decolonize interconnected forms of displacement where, for example, the logics of containment and expulsion both locally and globally are part of the settler colonial order? Where might we highlight decolonial compass points and sacred directions that could orient a shared Black, Latinx, and Indigenous liberational futurity? 
  • Rethinking Borders: Critiques of border studies concepts and keywords due to the erasure of Indigenous perspectives - margins, third space, intersections, hybridity, immigration law, alliances or solidarities across or at borders, borderlands, contact zones, transgression, citizenship, belonging, etc. What colonial ideas about space have we internalized that orient Western territorial, racial, or legal definitions of citizenship and belonging? How might the plantation, hacienda, ghetto, barrio, and reservation share carceral logics? 
  • Indigenous Migrations: How can we rethink the limitations of migration and refugee studies that erase Indigenous migrants or reinforce colonial borders on Indigenous lands? What other histories and terminologies might open up ancestral movements that transcend nation-state terminologies such as migration? How might we collectively support and imagine alternative practices of, and respect for, collective land-based belonging and ways of moving across and into other people’s sacred land? 
  • Trans-Indigenous struggles at borders: How do Indigenous confrontations with colonial and settler occupation ask us to reconsider or refuse U.S. governance through categories such as the nation-state, law, recognition, identity, cartography, citizenship, and settler colonial sovereignty? What other orientations to belonging and governance emerge through a focus on Indigenous cosmologies? ​​ How can we interrogate internalized borders, such as how limits of race, language, and anti-blackness hinder decolonization? What does Indigenous solidarity across borders look like?
  • Indigenous Border Abolition: What would an Indigenous abolitionist approach to borders look like? Where are the texts, conversations, and knowledges that get us to the beyond, before, and after of the border? Can we trace lesser known genealogies and solidarities that have already been doing this work? How do Indigenous perspectives cause us to rethink abolitionist work such as activism and resistance to borders, carcerality, containment, policing, occupation, missions, reservations, Native complicity with border patrol, ecological borders, militarism, etc.? 
  • Unbordered Temporal-Spatialities: How do Indigenous critiques and experiences queer, decolonize, and unsettle colonial concepts of time and space that provide the mooring, justifications, and logics of borders? What alternative scales of timespace can we draw on to unbind Indigenous lands and peoples? And how might we think with and beyond the normalization of the nation-state logic that continues to drive historical notions of time that incarcerate Indigeneity to the past? 

 

Submission Instructions

Please submit a 150 word abstract and optional working draft by April 15, 2025 directly to the guest editors at indigenousborderlands@gmail.com. Final polished draft of essays from 5,000 words to 10,000 words are due August 1, 2025. Address your submissions to the guest editors and state clearly in your cover letter that your submission is for the Fall 2026 Special Issue. Information about American Quarterly and submission guidelines can be found at www.americanquarterly.org. Final essay submissions must be made through the AQ portal at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aq.

 

About Us

We come to this special issue through a series of conversations organized around a rethinking of Chicanx and Latinx studies in relation to Indigenous Studies and Indigenous communities. We first gathered in 2023 at University of California, Santa Cruz for the symposium Indigenous Border/lands to bring scholars, artists, and community members in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and Indigenous Studies together to discuss Indigenous perspectives on borderlands in the Americas, particularly at the intersection of the U.S.-Mexico border. In our symposium, we also centered the experiences and scholarship of California Indigenous communities who have endured multiple settler colonial occupations. We have continued this work through a multi-campus faculty working group grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute on Indigenous Borderlands: Refusal and Fugitivity, where we are now developing an open online syllabus on Indigenous Border Studies and this special issue.