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Humanities
Special Issues
Imagining the Law: American Literature and Justice
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Imagining the Law: American Literature and Justice

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 August 2025 | Viewed by 881

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Richard Schur

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Language and Literature, Drury University, Springfield, MO 65802, USA
Interests: African American literature; law and literature; cultural studies

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We invite articles and essays examining American literary texts (of any type, from novels and poems to graphic novels and popular music) that re-imagine American law for a Special Issue of Humanities. This Special Issue conceives of law broadly to include traditional legal personas, such as lawyers, judges, prison guards, and the police; legal topics, including the constitution, civil rights, contracts, discrimination, property, criminal law, etc.; and stories where legal discourse shapes people, communities, cases, and conflicts. Articles can explore how these texts represent, envision, comment on, criticize, or theorize any aspect of law. We are especially interested in articles that look at how artists and content creators from historically marginalized identities re-imagine the law.

Please send an abstract no longer than 250 words and a short bio-note by 31 May 2024 to: or .

Prof. Dr. Richard Schur
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • law
  • American literary texts
  • justice

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

20 pages, 255 KiB  
Article
Archival Narrative Justice in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive
by Dharshani Lakmali Jayasinghe
Humanities 2025, 14(4), 74; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040074 - 26 Mar 2025
Viewed by 275
Abstract
Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures the challenges that “lost”, or undocumented children experience in their attempts to cross the US-Mexico border and provides a stringent critique of the unjust and arbitrary nature of border laws. In this paper, I argue that [...] Read more.
Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures the challenges that “lost”, or undocumented children experience in their attempts to cross the US-Mexico border and provides a stringent critique of the unjust and arbitrary nature of border laws. In this paper, I argue that Luiselli’s novel merges the narrative with the archival to form an “archival novel”, which generates what I call “archival narrative justice”, a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate. In doing so, I demonstrate how the narrative form and the practice of archiving, both independently and collectively, are significant avenues for re-conceptualizing “justice” through generating counterhistories and making visible multiple marginalized perspectives. I connect Luiselli’s archival-narrative practice with how the borderlands house such counterhistories by building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands. I develop the concept of “borderland as archive” to understand how Lost Children Archive recognizes the interstitial space of the borderlands as coded with the knowledges, histories, memories, lived experiences, and resistance of border crossers and border dwellers, from undocumented immigrants to dispossessed Native Americans who have been illegalized by settler-colonial and capitalistic immigration laws. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Imagining the Law: American Literature and Justice)
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