Author Archives: Kelly Baker Josephs

Lorna Goodison at the Windham-Campbell Prize Festival

Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica, is a recipient of a 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry. She will be participating in various talks/readings at Yale University during the Prize Festival (12-14 September). Goodison’s participation is detailed below in chronological order. See the Windham-Campbell Prize website for full festival details.

All events below take place on the Yale University campus and are free & open to the public. Continue reading →

Special issue: Intersections of Postcolonial studies and Indigenous studies

CFP: Special issue of Ariel: a Review of International English Literature, slated for publication in 2020
Due dates: 250-word abstracts due August 1, 2018; final articles due January 15, 2019.

Call for Papers

This special 50th anniversary issue of Ariel: a Review of International English Literature,  will unpack the tensions and interrelationships between postcolonial studies and Indigenous studies. When Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin published The Empire Writes Back (1989), the ensuing recognition of Canada and the United States as products of imperialism and colonization necessarily provoked questions about the people who preceded settlers. Indigenous literary studies became recognized as a necessary missing piece of those conversations. However, the vocabulary and approaches of postcolonial theory often failed to address–or even obstructed–questions that Indigenous literary scholars, particularly those with community obligations, needed to consider. Ariel’s 50th Anniversary Issue is an opportunity to reconsider the trajectory of discussions among Indigenous and postcolonial studies scholars and practitioners. At this historical juncture of increased visibility of issues concerning Indigenous rights, migration, displacement, and global imperialism among other pressing urgencies, now is the moment to return to these debates and recast the dialogue.

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VISIONARY APONTE: ART & BLACK FREEDOM (A SYMPOSIUM)

This symposium will gather scholars and artists discussing the figure of José Antonio Aponte and the art exhibit on view at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center from 23 February to 4 May, Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom.

Symposium:
Friday, 23 February
9:00am–5:00pm
King Juan Carlos I Center
New York University
53 Washington Sq S
New York, NY

The Jamaican 1970s: A Symposium

The Jamaican 1970s: A Symposium
Thursday, 28 September – Friday, 29 September 2017
The Graduate Center, CUNY and Columbia University

Livestream links: Thursday; Friday

Program

Thursday, 28 September
The Skylight Room, Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

1:00-1:30pm: Opening remarks: Don Robotham
1:30-2:15pm: Opening remarks: Donette Francis

2:30-4:30pm: The Popular
Rachel Mordecai, On Reading Jamaica Inc., Seriously: Sensational(ist) Seventies Literature
Eddie Chambers, Jamaica’s influence on the making of Black Britain

5:00-6:00pm: Monuments
Petrina Dacres, Sculpture, Architectural Modernism and Memory in 1970s Jamaica

6:00pm: CUNY reception

***

Friday, 29 September:
The Heyman Center, Columbia University
74 Morningside Dr, New York, NY 10027

10:00-12:00pm: Sustaining Social Movements
Kimberly Robinson-Walcott, “Black Man Time Now!” Race, Class, and Culture in 1970s Jamaica
Rupert Lewis, The Jamaican Left: Dogmas, Theories, and Politics, 1974-1980

1:30-3:30pm: Autobiographical Reflections
Honor Ford Smith, Performance, Decolonization and Life Stories: Sistren Theatre Collective and the Search for Radical Alternatives in the Present
Brian Meeks, Reading the Seventies in a Different Stylie: Dub Poetry and the Urgency of Message

4:00-6:00pm: General Conversation
Don Robotham and David Scott

A collaboration between the University of Miami, the CUNY Graduate Center, Columbia University, and the Small Axe Project.

Image adapted from flyer.

Paule Marshall Special Issue

The Work of Paule Marshall Today
A Special issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 14, Issue 1 (2017)

The Work of Paule Marshall Today
Kelly Baker Josephs

“You have permission to do this” : John Keene Reflects on Paule Marshall’s Influence
John Keene

“This house belong to me, now”: The “Slumming” and “Gentrification” of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as Experienced and Foretold by Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones
Marlene Clark

Ghosts in the Posthuman Machine: Prostheses and Performance in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People
Justin Haynes

Paule Marshall Reimagining Caliban and Prospero in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
Shirley D. Toland-Dix

“Threads thin to the point of invisibility, yet strong as ropes” : Afrofuturistic Diaspora in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow
Janelle Rodriques

The Profane Ear: Regimes of Aural Discipline in Paule Marshall’sThe Fisher King
Petal Samuel

“Her Special Music”: Wild Women and Jazz in Paule Marshall’sThe Fisher King
Patricia G. Lespinasse

Water, Roads, and Mapping Diaspora Through Biomythography
Lia T. Bascomb

“How You Mean?” Speech, Resistance, and the Contemporary Relevance of Paule Marshall
Jason T. Hendrickson

 

‘Imagining Kingston’: A Conference on the Regeneration of a City

9-12 November 2017
Organized by University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in collaboration with the Institute of Jamaica

CFP deadlines: 250-word abstracts and short bio due 1 August 2017; presentation papers due 1 October 2017 imaginekingston2017@gmail.com

The restoration of old, historic, depressed or derelict quarters of cities is a common feature of social, economic, aesthetic and environmental development strategies around the world.

Restoration and regeneration are often used as the basis to catalyse and to chart pathways for economic growth and renewal, to pioneer new sectors of social and economic endeavours, and to cultivate pride and civic feeling in a people’s existential journey. The scholarship and expertise in this area are growing globally and providing governments/policy makers, investors/entrepreneurs, citizens and various publics with knowledge, advice, training/agential capacity, building facilities and skills for urban renewal, regeneration and a multiplicity of possibilities, including imagining and realizing new exciting urban spatial creations alongside the iconising of spaces. Continue reading →