The new Issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, entitled “New Work in Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies,” has been published and is now accessible online. This special issue features reviews of a wide range of criticism, poetry performances and visual art exhibitions in Caribbean studies. The issue is available here.
From the introduction by Raphael Dalleo:
Reviewing is a vital scholarly activity. Academic fields are conversations in which participants speak to one another and to their predecessors. Scholarly writing builds on its predecessors and engages in dialogue with its peers, but the publication process for academic work can be so slow that new ideas often take years to elicit responses and debate. Reviews of scholarly work are therefore particularly important as one of the first responses to a new contribution. We are especially happy to offer this issue of Anthurium and to dedicate it to reviews of recently published scholarship in Caribbean literary and cultural studies in order to help facilitate the conversations necessary for a vibrant field.
This special issue of Anthurium is devoted to the important tasks of first, making our readers aware of new work in Caribbean literary and cultural studies; and then second, situating the contribution of this work in the field as a whole. Reviews of academic work provide readers with an invaluable means of keeping up with new and emerging scholarship while also giving audiences a sense of new directions the field is taking. We have sought to include reviews of new works that speak directly to what are emerging as important questions for today’s field: how citizenship and sovereignty intersect with gender and sexuality; the place of race in the study of populations in the Americas that are not always thought of as part of the African diaspora; how our vision of the present can be disrupted by delving into the archive to revisit forgotten pasts; the erasure and uncanny return of the Caribbean from mainstream versions of history; the practice of performance as a way of articulating community and communal culture.
