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Call for Submissions:
Rehearing Gospel Music in Global Perspective
Submission Deadline: September 15, 2026
Link to Call Page
Link to Submission Page
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Emerging from African American Christian experience, gospel music travels through migration, media, and mission to communities across the globe. As it travels, gospel music reinscribes and destabilizes boundaries of race/ethnicity, culture, and religion; it empowers and unsettles, unites and divides. Gospel music’s multiplicity is a defining characteristic: it resists reduction to a single affiliation or purpose, instead becoming entangled in a global web of sonorities and meanings.
This special issue invites contributors from across academic disciplines to consider: (1) how gospel music’s sonic, ritual, and theological dimensions shape social worlds, and (2) what frameworks clarify its complex interplay of religious practice, sociocultural identity, and musical expression. We especially welcome papers that consider one or more of the following questions:
–How does a global perspective challenge or complicate gospel music’s historiography? What novel methods and theories complement the analysis of gospel music in a global frame?
–How are definitions of gospel music shifting in response to differing contexts, theological commitments, and geopolitical pressures?
–How do power, ownership, and questions of authenticity affect gospel music’s global circulation?
–How have transnational collaborations among musicians shaped sounds, styles, and performance practices within gospel music and mainstream popular genres?
–What roles do institutions and industries play in preserving gospel music and supporting its futures?
–How are postcolonial, decolonial, and neocolonial movements shaping the discourse and practice of gospel music?
–How are new technologies influencing the creation, distribution, and reception of gospel music? What are the ethical, theological, political, and economic implications of utilizing these new technologies?
Authors are welcome to contact Guest Editors Toyin Samuel Ajose, Monique Ingalls, and Pauline Muir, as well as Editor-in-Chief Jeffers Engelhardt, with questions regarding their submission.
