Abstracts due June 10, 2013. Final submissions due by October 30, 2013.

Afrofuturism, is a transnational, diasporic, and cultural aesthetic that interrogates the past, present and future in literature, technology, art, or music, and challenges Eurocentric motifs of identity, time and space. While this approach has grown in the past decade, there has been limited engagement with Afrofuturism’s relationship to the discipline of Africana studies, or Africology.

We are soliciting scholarly research, theoretical essays, and applied studies that explore how the concept of Afrofuturism is related to Africana Studies for an anthology.

Manuscripts addressing the following themes will be given priority:

• The intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and technology in human interaction (i.e., examining identities, in communications and new technologies).

• Afrofuturism as philosophy and its impact on religion among African/Diapora communities (ie., metaphysics, theology, philosophy of science and ethics).

• The confluence between Afrofuturism, the environment, bio-sciences, transhumanism, and cyborg manifestations.

• The interstices of time, place, space, and home as metaphors for an Afrofuturist perspective or politics, especially in relation to neoliberal rhetorics of post-racialism, open data movements, radical transparency, crowd sourcing and other forms of political expression in the age of what some call “zombie” or “disaster” capitalism.

• Afrofuturism in relation to other futurisms; such as Rastafuturism, Chicanafuturism, Occidental futurism or Techno-Orientalism.

• Theories of Afrofuturism that explore aesthetics, literature, music, graphic arts, and performing arts, including graphic novels, sequential art, manga and anime.

Authors are to submit a 250-300 word abstract for consideration by the editors by June 10, 2013. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by July 10. Final submission will be due by October 30, 2013. Final submissions may not exceed 25 pages and must include: (1) detachable title page with names of author(s), academic position, institutional affiliation, full address, telephone number, fax number, and email address. All manuscript submissions must conform to the current Chicago Style format.

Queries and abstract submissions should be addressed to: Reynaldo Anderson, co-editor, Department of Arts and Sciences Room 208, Harris-Stowe State University, Saint Louis, MO, Email: andersor@hssu.edu Office: 314-340-3691; and Charles E. Jones, co-editor, Department of Africana Studies, 3264 French Hall P.O. 210370 University of Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0730 e-mail: jones3cl@uc.edu 404-435-7429.

Via the Critical Caribbean Studies list-serv from Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Caribbean Philosophical Association  2013
ANNUAL MEETING
November 21–24, 2013

CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES ON PUERTO RICO AND THE CARIBBEAN
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Deadline for Submissions: 1 July 2013

Shifting the Geography of Reason X: Exploring Decoloniality at the Dawn of a Our Second Decade

For its ten-year anniversary meeting, the Caribbean Philosophical Association invites critical inquiries into existing forms of coloniality and the exploration of multiple forms of decoloniality in the areas of knowledge, power, being, and value in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They also welcome individual presentations and panels in each of the areas of emphasis over the past ten years. These are:

2003 (Barbados): Shifting the geography of reason
2004 (Puerto Rico): Gender, science, and religion
2005 (Montreal, Canada): Aesthetics, science, and language
2007 (Jamaica): Intellectual movements
2008 (Guadaloupe): Intellectual movements
2009 (Miami, U.S.A.): Migrations and diasporas
2010 (Cartagena, Colombia): Music, rhythm, and movement
2011 (New Brunswick, NJ, USA): The University, public Education, and the transformation of society
2012 (Trinidad and Tobago): Racial capitalism and the Creole discourses of Native-, Indo-, Afro-, and Euro-Caribbeans Continued…

Discourse – Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture

Call for Papers
Deadline 15 January 2014

After Glissant: Caribbean Aesthetics and the Politics of Relation

Two recent events have left an undeniable imprint on the critical analysis of Caribbean literary and cultural studies: the February 2011 passing of Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, perhaps the most influential Caribbean intellectual in the last fifty years, and the June 2012 opening of Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, an unprecedented, three-museum art exhibit in New York City that sought to showcase the cultural genealogies of the Antillean region and its diasporic offshoots.  Throughout five theme-based segments that examined aesthetic creation through the frameworks of race, ethnicity, nationality, geography, and popular culture, Crossroads of the World follows a deliberately fragmentary structure that echoes Glissant’s ideas on the Caribbean.  Instead of experiencing the exhibit as what he calls in Caribbean Discourse “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History,” spectators were confronted with an accumulation of “subterranean convergences” that traced cultural continuities not only between the archipelago and the continental territories that constitute the basin, but also with the metropolis.  Unsurprisingly, the exhibit catalogue’s main chapters conclude with an excerpt from Caribbean Discourse.  This textual fragment, which can be read as a memorial site in honor of Glissant, marks the significance of his vision not only for the curation of the show, but for Caribbean aesthetics as a “whole.”

The spirit of Glissant continues to stimulate creative and scholarly work on the historical fragments and possible futures that constitute the Caribbean’s heterogeneous cultural singularity: from the violent shocks of colonialism and the slave-based plantation system to the also violent dislocations experienced and represented by its peoples under neoliberal capitalism. Yet while scholars and artists carry on creatively appropriating Glissant’s theories, a new generation of cultural producers seeks to interrogate and transform the ways the region has been imagined and represented. Critical voices have also emerged from diverse fields to problematize the historical, cultural, political valence of Glissant’s work, especially his late writings, accusing him of abandoning the politics of decolonization he championed in his younger days and replacing it with an exclusively cultural and poetic vision.

Inspired by this debate and by how it performs ongoing tensions between aesthetics and politics within the field, we invite critical interventions that seek to analyze and explore Caribbean cultural production from the vantage point of this post-Glissantian moment.  What is the relationship of the Caribbean to colonial and post-colonial studies? In what new directions is Caribbean cultural production headed, directions that Glissant could not or did not anticipate?  What new understandings can we bring to the Glissantian understanding of History, or to such terms as “relation,” “filiation” and “diversion” (détour)?

Articles should be no longer than 7,500 words, and should be formatted according to the Chicago Style (Humanities) Format.

Deadline: January 15, 2014

Editors:

Kahlil Chaar-Pérez (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University) - kahlilchaar@fas.harvard.edu

Emily A. Maguire (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Northwestern University) - e-maguire@northwestern.edu

CFP Deadline: Abstracts and bios due 29 May 2013

Conference location and date:
The Place of Memory: Anglophone Diasporas in the 21st Century
3-4 October 2013, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

Conference description:
Diasporic studies have often made diaspora rhyme with nostalgia, focusing on the ways in which the loss of the homeland coincides with a dynamics of reminiscence inevitably triggered by that moment of loss. In this perspective, the diasporic subject is, to paraphrase Emmanuel Nelson, a “fossilized fragment that seeks refossilization.”

A large number of literary works but also of visual artistic creations and films undeniably deal with the difficulties inherent in adjusting to a new land, a fact which often makes it tempting for diasporians to seek to revive the homeland and keep it alive through an active process of re-membering. But there is a lot more to the dynamics of diasporization and remembrance than this rather obvious starting point. In recent years diasporic studies have opened up new areas of investigation which have either confirmed or put into question this link between nostalgia and diaspora. Trauma studies have evidenced the haunting presence of past events and their lingering presence in the lives of diasporians through trauma, and the nature of memory — its making, remaking and sometimes its packaging and “marketing” (Huggan) — has also constituted an area of investigation. Indeed, in the wake of geographer David Harvey’s concept of heritage culture, many critics have interrogated the validation and instrumentalisation of the margins, sometimes through a re-/creation of collective memories.

The conference seeks to position itself in this framework of emerging problematics and reassessment of the role, status and place of memory. Contributions are invited on a variety of topics relating to literature but also to different forms of cultural productions (eg the visual arts from films to installations) in the anglophone world. Continued…