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

on

Critical Sexuality Studies: Theory and Practice
July 9 – August 2, 2013
Mondays – Thursdays | 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Instructors:

• John Campbell, UWI St. Augustine
• Alison Donnell, Univ. of Reading
• Rosamond S. King, Brooklyn College
• Angelique Nixon, Susquehanna Univ.
• Colin Robinson, CAISO

Course Description: This is a short course on sexuality theory and research methodologies relevant to the Anglophone Caribbean. It will include an overview of the field and will address topics such as Research Methodologies, the Social Construction of Sexual Identities, Men and Masculinity, Sexuality in Politics and Public Policy and Sexual Rights. Sessions will include discussion and group work as well as lectures.

Undergraduates, postgraduates and staff s in all faculties – the social sciences, the humanities and medicine – with a strong interest in the topic are encouraged to register, regardless of previous experience with sexuality studies. Practitioners and activists who work with community organizations or the government are also encouraged to register.

Limited spaces available. Register Today!
Course Cost: $1,200TT | Deadline for registration May 15, 2013.
Submit the attached registration form by May 15, 2013 to igds@sta.uwi.edu

Participants will be issued a Certificate upon successful completion of the course.

Deadline for applications: 1 June 2013

A great deal of effort by anthropologists, historians, as well as political and comparative literary theorists has gone into mapping new directions for the modern study of the Caribbean in recent years. We seek to engage with and build on these efforts through a project that interrogates how disciplinary practices and self-knowledge shifts when the Caribbean is introduced and/or sustained as a core component of what scholars write and teach.

For example, although the Caribbean (its thinkers, economic, social and political history) was central to the emergence of the modern discipline of international relations, by developing increasing degrees of theoretical abstraction, international relations theorists have erased these antecedents while rewriting its history accordingly. Prior conceptions of international order were deeply wedded to and concerned about imperial imaginaries, colonial doctrines, and racialized social science. This seminar stems from our on-going efforts to shed light on the discipline’s gradual transformation of colonial and imperial themes into the scientific discourse of international relations.

We are seeking paper submissions from advanced graduate students and faculty across the humanities and social sciences working on contemporary Caribbean issues, intellectual currents, and on the region’s social and cultural history that challenge dominant conceptions of and orientations toward international or global studies broadly defined. For example, papers might discuss how disciplines have framed specific problems, e.g. of slavery, colonization, independence and decolonization, and what critical reflection on the Caribbean experience has contributed or can contribute to historiographical and other forms of theoretical reconstruction.

The works in progress will be presented and discussed in a workshop in Martinique in December 2013 hosted by the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane. The papers will be circulated in advance in order to ensure productive discussions. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered for all invited participants. Candidates should send a title, a paper synopsis (one page) and a short bio to puf.seminar.2013@gmail.com by June 1st, 2013. Results will be communicated by July 1st, and the final papers should be made available to the workshop participants by November
15.

Seminar convened in the framework of the 2013-2015 initiative “From Imperial Science to International Relations” supported by the Partner University Fund.

Conveners:

• Nicolas Guilhot (Université des Antilles et de la Guyane and NYU)
• Robert Vitalis (the University of Pennsylvania)
• Chantalle Verna (Florida International University)
• William Miles (Northeastern University)

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

More information on Call for Submissions from the CPA website:

As in the past, we continue to welcome papers from multiple disciplines and on related themes, including presentations that focus on other parts of the globe or that seek to contribute to South-South dialogues. Our view of philosophy is a highly transdisciplinary and intertextual one. We welcome multiple forms of theoretical decolonization and critique. To this extent, we also invite artists, public intellectuals, and organizers who see a value in engaging scholars to join our meeting. We also invite panel proposals that include dialogues among scholars, scholar-artists, or scholar-activists with other scholars, artists, and/or activists. Although each year we have a special focus, we have always welcomed papers that go beyond the scope of our organizing theme and that explore the significance of “shifting the geography of reason” in different sites of knowledge production. We also encourage the submission of papers to the CLR James Journal, the official journal of the CPA.

Send submissions for panels, roundtables, discussions, and abstracts of individual presentations by July 1st, 2013 by email to caribphil@gmail.com.

Abstracts should include: 1) name, position, institutional and department affiliation (if any), and highest university degree obtained, 2) title of proposed paper, panel, roundtable, or discussion, 3) up to one page description of the problem(s) addressed and identification of the sources used per participant. Panel presentations must include a description of the panel as well as title and abstracts of individual presentations and the basic biographical information (as listed above) of each presenter. The maximum of presenters per panel is four, in addition to a moderator. The fourth panelist could be a presenter or a commentator.

We will consider submissions of two to three interconnected panels on key issues that relate to the main theme of the conference. These panels will take place at different days and times throughout the conference to be determined by the organizing committee. We also encourage panels that seek to establish dialogues among scholars, and artists, professionals, activists, and community leaders who are in dialogue with intellectual and scholarly work.

We will review proposals in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish and will create panels for presentations in those four languages. We provide translations of keynote speakers but are not in a position to provide translation of each panel. While we do our best to facilitate translations, panelists are welcome to make these arrangements. They also need to consider the time for translations as they prepare their panels.
All presenters will be asked to pay conference fees and membership to the association as well. For more information on membership rates and conference fees go to: http://secure.pdcnet.org/cpa. Membership and registration are non-refundable.
More information on the CPA can be found at their website.

A collaborative effort between the trinidad+tobago film festival and ARC Magazine, New Media 2013 will present an overview of experimental video and film works for the third incarnation of the exhibit. New Media 2012 showcased the works of 49 artists, and its predecessor 10 artists’ works, which exposed a wide range of scenarios and interrogations that are relevant to the space of the Caribbean and its diaspora. New Media 2013 will take place from 23-28 September at Medulla Art Gallery, located at 34 Fitt Street in Woodbrook, Port of Spain.

For the first time, New Media will have a juried prize of TT$5,000 for best film and or video. To submit an entry to New Media, please read the call for submissions at http://www.ttfilmfestival.com/submit/. All submissions must be made online, via www.withoutabox.com, to the trinidad+tobago film festival. There is no submission fee. The deadline for all submissions is 31 May 2013. This deadline will be strictly followed. Please do not submit films that do not fulfill the stated criteria.

The ttff and ARC Magazine reserve the right to determine the eligibility of the submissions to be screened at the Festival, the appropriate venues and time slots for the screening of films, along with using excerpts of the films for publicity purposes. All films submitted must have applicable clearances and the Festival will not be held liable.

About the trinidad+tobago film festival

Founded in 2006, the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff) is an annual celebration of films from and about Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and its diaspora. The Festival also screens films curated from contemporary world cinema. In addition, the ttff seeks to facilitate the growth of the Caribbean film industry by hosting workshops, panel discussions, seminars, conferences and networking opportunities. The ttff is presented by Flow, and given leading sponsorship from RBC Royal Bank, bpTT and the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company.

www.ttfilmfestival.com

About ARC Magazine

ARC Magazine is a non-profit print and online publication and social platform launched in 2011, that seeks to fill a certain void by offering a critical space for contemporary artists to present their work while fostering and developing critical dialogues and opportunities for crucial points of exchange. It is an online and social space of interaction with a developed methodology of sharing information about contemporary practices, exhibitions, partnerships, and opportunities occurring in the Caribbean region and throughout its Diasporas. ARC is dedicated to showcasing artwork that encapsulates a pan-Caribbean focus while highlighting the lack of boundaries that now exist in the midst of the Internet and post information age. We are interested in promoting and underlining the current regional focus on sustainability for creative industries while engaging with a specified target audience, mostly comprised of emerging artists from the developing states.

www.arcthemagazine.com 

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

Interested parties should send applications  with CV to:

Tamara Mose Brown
Program Director, Caribbean Studies
Assistant Professor, Sociology
Brooklyn College
tbrown@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Reviews of applications will begin at the end of April.

April 26, 2013
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
College Avenue Campus
Alexander Library
The Critical Caribbean Studies Initiative at Rutgers University presents a one-day conference focusing on the aesthetics and politics of sonic culture within and emanating from the Caribbean. To pre-register for the event (it is free), please visit their website.

SCHEDULE

9:00am
Breakfast

9:30am
Introduction
Carter Mathes, Rutgers University

9:45-11:45am
Sonic Resistance Across the Archipelago
Alexandra Vazquez (Princeton University)
Martin Munro (Florida State University)

11:45am–1:00pm
Lunch Break

1:00-3:00pm
Acoustic Caribbean Consciousness
Edwin Hill (University of Southern California)
Michael E. Veal (Yale University)

3:00-3:15pm
Coffee Break

3:15-5:20pm
Technological Innovation, Shifting Soundscapes
Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Alejandra Bronfman (University of British Columbia)

For more information, including individual presentation titles, please see the program flyer or their website.

Wednesday April 10, 2013

Cabot Auditorium, Tufts University, 4:30-8:00PM

Panelists include Faith Smith, Donette Francis and Leah Rosenberg

With Readings by Angie Cruz and M. Nourbese Philip

Join the conversation concerning Carifesta’s 1976 landmark discussion of history in the Caribbean literary imaginary with Caribbean women writers and scholars, who will address how contemporary Caribbean writers and thinkers, female in particular, have continued to “quarrel with the past” but moved forward now to critically contend with colonialism’s afterlife in the region.

Please see the event flyer for more information.

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.

Keynote speakers: Professor Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Professor Robert Young.

Abstracts (200/ 300 words) should be sent to fmkral@gmail.com with a brief biodata before May 29 2013.

Contributions are invited on the following topics:

- Diasporas and nostalgia or memory as a form of collective hypermnesia which seeks to make up for the forced amnesia of colonialism
- Recreated memories and authenticity
- Memory through time and the re-/creation of collective memories through official history and the emergence of subaltern histories.
- The lingering absence of the homeland, and the transgenerational haunting of the homeland, in the light of trauma studies.
-Memory and transnationalism; the way transnational communities relate to memory ; recreating homelands, the impossible return, homecoming narratives.
- Ethics and oblivion; memory as an active process, a duty to remember the homeland?
- Amnesia, the pragmatics of amnesia, instances of these phenomena and what they are symptomatic of.
- Créolité, créolisation, the creole paradigm and memory.

Conference organizers
Françoise Kral, Professor of English and postcolonial studies, Université de Caen Basse Normandie.
Corinne Bigot, Assistant Professor, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre
Sam Coombes, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh