JAF Releases Spring 2022 Special Issue, “Redirecting Currents: Theoretical Wayfinding with Latinx Folkloristics and Women of Color Transnational Feminisms”

The editors of the Journal of American Folklore are pleased to announce that “Redirecting Currents: Theoretical Wayfinding with Latinx Folkloristics and Women of Color Transnational Feminisms,” a special issue of JAF: A Global Quarterly Spring 2022 (v. 135, no. 536), has been mailed and is available online to subscribers.

In the issue, guest editors Rachel Valentina González-Martin, Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera, and Solimar Otero curate a collection of articles that particularly engage with folklore key terms used by researchers, community members, public sector workers, artists, and activists. Throughout, the authors view the reframing of terminology as an important act of intellectual decolonization through purposefully anti-racist, queer, and feminist work. In addition, the volume provides a transparent conversation about intellectual and/or ethnographic distortion that acknowledges the power of writing as process and the politics of remapping the field of contemporary folklore studies. Though focused on Latinx folklorists, the contributors engage with multiple fields of study and theoretical approaches, and with scholarship produced by people of different racial, ethnic, historical, gender, sexuality, class, and differently abled body experiences and backgrounds.

Timely and essential, this special issue of the Journal of American Folklore unearths alternate roots and routes that expand and shift folklore’s epistemological paths and currents.

The issue’s contributors are Maribel Alvarez, Norma E. Cantú, Rachel Valentina González-Martin, Ana-Maurine Lara, Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera, Eric Mayer-García, Eric César Morales, Selina Morales, Javier Cardona Otero, Solimar Otero, Domino Renee Perez, and Alexandra Sanchez.