Volume 12, Issue 1 (2018) Beyond the Nation-State: Decolonial, Liberatory, and Critical Essays Imaging an Otherwise

Editor Note

This special issue of the McNair Scholars Journal sets out from standpoint that the world we live in was made to privilege some at the expense of others. I continually witness the rich continue their consolidation of wealth under neoliberal economic policies, defense contracts for the U.S. imperial wars in the Middle East and beyond, the endless cycles of human migration caused by urban gentrification, and Indigenous land-theft, to list a few.

The conditions listed above are dismal, yet I continue to be hopeful because I see and know scholars, activists, and community leaders who are deconstructing the institutions, normalizations, and narratives that were designed to subjugate some while privileging others. More importantly, I see and know scholars, activists, and community leaders who are transcending critique in their creation of spaces for a radically different otherwise.

The essays in this issue will both look to critique the heteropatriarchal white supremacist ordering of our world and begin to imagine an elsewhere beyond colonialism, racial capitalism, and the nation-state. In the spirit of la paperson’s "Third University," the authors and editors of this special issue look to use our postionality as students and aspiring scholars within the colonial university to subvert the logics of the system from within.

Finally, I would like to thank those who came before us in leading the resistance and in the creation of new worlds that are accountable to the futurity of the subaltern. We inform our critiques in the courageous and unwavering challenges by those who have sacrificed life, safety, security, and livelihood for a better world. These brave dissenters theorize and work to enact a world that will no longer position many of us as second-class, inhuman, subhuman, savage, murderable, invisible. I would also like to thank the authors of the essays in this special issue. I am filled with inspiration and hope from reading your rigorous, original, and dynamic work and more so from knowing that you will be the designers and constructors of new worlds to come, that radically move beyond colonialism, capitalism, and the nation-state.

In anticipation for a decolonized elsewhere,

Ried Gustafson

Editor, McNair Scholars Journal