A Gentleman’s War is a transmedia documentary that presents the sights, sounds and anecdotes of New York’s cricketing community. The project presents the milieu of the cricket match surrounding some of the fiercest competition within the sport’s iteration in America Continue reading A Gentleman’s War
The Stuart Hall Project with John Akomfrah
Friday, 28 February
6:30 PM
Davis Auditorium
Columbia University
(use main campus entrance 2960 Broadway at 116th St)
The Stuart Hall Project, a film about the father of cultural studies and social theorist, Stuart Hall, is a stunning record of the massive social and political convulsions of post-colonial Britain. Produced entirely from footage of Hall on British television and radio (alongside archival footage, images from his trips to Jamaica, and the music of Miles Davis), the film offers a moving account of exile, racism, hybridity, violence, and radical struggle—all of which has been the experience of New World black and South Asian émigrés since mid-century. The screening is followed by a discussion with the director John Akomfrah, exhibition co-curator Naima Keith and scholar Rich Blint.
Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas & the Caribbean (IRADAC) presents:
“(Mis)Translations: Toussaint, Modernity, and the Postcolonial Present”
by Natalie M. Léger, Queens College, CUNY
Respondent: Jeremy Glick, Hunter College, CUNY
28 February 2014
4:00 – 6:00 PM
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
ARC Conference Room – 5318
This event is part of the IRADAC Works in Progress Series, which showcases research by CUNY faculty who are engaged in research on the African
Diaspora worldwide. Dr. Leger’s paper is available for pre-reading here.
The Caribbean Writer is now accepting submissions for Volume 28, to be published in 2014.
Deadline: 28 February 2014; submissions accepted via snail mail (address below) or email at [email protected]
Theme: Re-Visioning The Future Of The Caribbean Through Time, Place And Memories
Call For Papers:
The Caribbean Writer is seeking works that explore the defining moments of the Caribbean experience, the symbolism in the places that dot the Caribbean landscape, the journeys that inform our experiences, the memories that will not let us go. The editors hope to highlight and document Caribbean life in its broadest sense. They also invite works that provide a critical and historical overview, of times, places, and memories that reflect the wit, resilience and resourcefulness of Caribbean people as well as the implications of certain periods that have helped to define the notion of the contemporary Caribbean.
Major events in the history of the Caribbean and the experiences of people wherever they live the Caribbean experience are relevant in very profound ways. Memories of these events are meaningful not only because they provide fodder for introspection and change, but also because their implications are articulated on a number of levels. Memories of natural disasters, calamities, migrations, pivotal national decisions, national movements, societal trends, populations shifts, alienation issues, economic swings, internal struggles, and survival strategies ripple through the diaspora and have had such an impact on people that they possess an abiding ability to elicit passionate responses that can create new rifts or forge new alliances.
The passion that some memories arouse suggests that it would be useful to engage in a broad based collaborative conversation about time periods most poignantly remembered and the symbolism in the places associated with our celebrations, our victories, our epiphanies, our misfortunes and our failures. What better way to do this than in the poetry, prose, essays, and plays featured in The Caribbean Writer.
Submission Guidelines
The Caribbean Writer is an international literary refereed journal with a Caribbean focus. The Caribbean should be central to the work, or the work should reflect a Caribbean heritage, experience or perspective.
Submit poems, short stories, personal essays and one-act plays. Maximum length (for short stories and personal essays) is 3500 words or 10 pages. Only previously unpublished work will be accepted. (If self-published, give details.)
Follow this procedure for submissions: Put name, address, and title of submission on separate sheet. Title only on submission. All submissions should be on a separate sheet. Include brief biographical information and mention previous publications and Caribbean connection, if any. Type (double-spaced) all manuscripts.
All submissions are eligible for these prizes:
The Daily News Prize for best poetry ($300)
The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for best short fiction ($400)
The David Hough Literary Prize to a Caribbean author ($500)
The Marguerite Cobb McKay Prize to a Virgin Island author ($200)
The Charlotte & Isidor Paiewonsky Prize for first-time publication ($250)
Book Reviews – Persons interested in reviewing books should contact the editor indicating areas of expertise. Include sample reviews if possible.
Snail mail submissions to address below or email submissions to [email protected] as attached Word or RTF files.
OR
Mail to:
The Caribbean Writer
University of the Virgin Islands
RR 1, Box 10,000
Kinghill, St. Croix
U.S. Virgin Islands 00850-9781
Phone: 340-692-4152
Fax: 340-692-4026
Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 pm, Prof. Kelly Baker Josephs
MALS 73500 – Africana Studies: Global Perspectives; Cross listed with ASCP 81500 (Open to Inter-University Doctoral Consortium students)
In its rhizomatic structure and development, the internet is analogous to Caribbean culture: born out of disparate pieces and peoples; always already predicated on an elsewhere as home or authority; always already working to ignore geography and physical space as barriers to connection. This seminar probes the various epistemological, political and strategic ways in which cyberspace intersects with the formation and conceptualization of the Caribbean.
What constitutes the Caribbean is, of course, not a new question. As we explore the digital media productions that continue to reconfigure the social and geographic contours of the region, we will build on familiar debates surrounding study of the Caribbean. Issues to be addressed include: Geography: What challenge, if any, might cyberspace pose to our geo-centered conceptualization of Caribbean cultures? Community: In what ways do online spaces that claim (or are claimed by) the Caribbean struggle, together or individually, to articulate a cohesive culture? Archival history and voice: Does the ephemerality of online life and the economics of access endanger or enable what we may call the Caribbean subject? Identity and representation: What indeed comprises “the Caribbean subject”? How do questions of authenticity get deployed in crucial moments of tension involving diasporic subjects, particularly in the sped-up world of digital production? These questions, framed by Caribbean Studies, will be our primary focus, but they will be articulated with questions and theories from new digital media studies about knowledge production and circulation, digital boundaries and the democracy of access and usage.
In addition to examining primary digital sources, we will read articles from writers including: Stuart Hall, Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, David Scott, Annie Paul, Curwen Best, Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, Anna Everett, Karim H. Karim, Lisa Nakamura, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jennifer Brinkerhoff and others. Requirements: Oral presentations, blog and in-class participation, and a term paper (15-20 pages).
Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora welcomes submissions of book proposals that place the experiences of African-descended communities within contexts of transnational, transregional, and transcultural exchange. Books in the series will coalesce around the transformation of culture, politics, ideas, and social relations associated with persons moving in any number of directions to and from Africa, and will include studies of relations between African-descended communities and other ethnic and cultural communities. While continuing to acknowledge the salience of the Atlantic World, the series views the African Diaspora as far-reaching, with many spatial and temporal configurations that include the experiences of African-descended populations in the worlds of the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Indian Ocean, and cross-regional space within Africa itself. As! such, the series pursues a more thoroughgoing and capacious vision of the history and substance of the African Diaspora. Examples of rubrics especially welcome include: The Black Experience(s) in the Persian Gulf; Globally Dispersed Communities of Faith; North African-West African Relations in France/Europe; the Global Lusophone World; Ethnic/Racial Complexities in the Caribbean; and Asian-African Solidarities/Divergences in the UK. While the series will consider interdisciplinary approaches, and is inclusive of scholarship pertaining to more recent as well as earlier formations of diasporic communities, its focus is the expansion and elaboration of the Africa Diaspora as a historical process.
Caribbean Philosophical Association
2014 ANNUAL MEETING
19-21 June 2014
Hyatt Regency, St. Louis, Missouri
CFP Deadline: 1 February 2014 ; Abstracts should be submitted to: [email protected]
Shifting the Geography of Reason XI: Diverse Lineages of Existentialism—Africana, Feminist, and Decolonial
In recent years, existential thought has been revitalized by a new generation of theorists investigating questions of gender, race, and sexual orientation. They have brought to light numerous ways in which existentialism has contributed to, and been shaped by, Africana philosophy, Latin American philosophy, feminism, and the work of literary writers and performing artists.
Initiated by the publication of the Beauvoir Series at the University of Illinois Press and the Caribbean Philosophical Association initiatives for the study of relations across gender, race, and sexuality, and global collaborations connecting the region to intellectual work in countries ranging from India to Japan, Senegal and South Africa, to many across the Caribbean, South America, and the globe, the goal of the conference is to overcome isolation, bringing together a wide variety of scholars to share their research on the diverse lineages of existential thought—especially the unique challenge to questions of existence posed by thought from the Global South.
Research questions include: How have existentialist conceptions of freedom shaped, and been shaped by, feminist and postcolonial thought? In what ways can the category of the Other, as conceived by existentialists, inform our understanding of oppression in its various forms? How can we understand the connections between existentialism and Latin American liberation philosophy? How has existentialist thought been shaped by non-existentialist thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Bergson, Bataille, Foucault, Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, C.L.R. James and Sylvia Wynter? What is the relationship between the existentialisms of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon and contemporary Caribbean and African existential thinkers? What is the influence and role of Eastern existentialisms in contemporary Africana and feminist thought? How is existentialism relevant to questions in feminism and race theory? What would it mean to creolize existentialism?
To further discussions of these issues, this conference will be the first formal collaborative meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the Simone de Beauvoir Society, the Jean-Paul Sartre Society of North America, and the Collegium of Black Women in Philosophy. The following journals have also agreed to publish selections of the best papers from the conference: Simone de Beauvoir Studies; The Caribbean Journal of Philosophy; The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy; The C.L.R. James Journal; Sartre Studies International.
Guidelines: Please email (to [email protected]) in MS Word your title, abstract, institutional affiliation, rank or work (e.g., “writer” or “artist” if not an academic), and email address. Submission Deadline: 1 February 2014.
Above adapted from CFP on the CPA website. Visit their site for more information.
The Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) Fellowships program provides assistance to students and scholars who wish to use the resources available in the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries for research on Cuba, the Cuban diaspora, or interdisciplinary studies that include Cuban or diasporic contexts.
For the 2014-2015 award cycle, the CHC will award Fellowships in three categories:
Graduate Research Fellowships,
Graduate Pre-Prospectus Summer Fellowships, and
A new fellowship for work on the Arts in the Cuban Republic.
Criteria for Fellowships
Applications will be evaluated by independent reviewers based on 1) the merit of the proposal; 2) the applicant’s qualifications; and 3) the suitability of the project for the particular holdings of the Cuban Heritage Collection.
Application Guidelines
All application materials must be received by Saturday, February 1, 2014 and submitted electronically to [email protected]. Fellowship applicants must submit the following:
List of Cuban Heritage Collection materials to be consulted during the fellowship period
Curriculum Vitae
Three Letters of Reference (from scholars familiar with the applicant and his/her research)
Requirements
Fellows will be in residence conducting primary work in the Cuban Heritage Collection for the duration of their fellowship period. For the 2014-2015 award year, Graduate Pre-Prospectus Fellows must complete their fellowships between 1 June and 31 August 2014. Graduate Research and Arts in the Cuban Republic Fellows will take residence between 1 June 2014 and 31 March 2015.
All Fellows will be expected to participate in a research colloquium and write a brief research report on their work at the Cuban Heritage Collection. Dissertations, any publications, or equivalent final products resulting from a fellowship award should include an acknowledgment of the CHC Fellowships support, and one copy should be deposited with the Cuban Heritage Collection.
Information on each of these award categories, eligibility, criteria, and how to apply is available at http://library.miami.edu/chc/fellows/announcement-2014. The application deadline for all categories is 1 February 2014.
The Sylvia M. Jacobs African Diaspora Studies Symposium
22-23 March 2014
North Carolina Central University, Durham NC.
CFP deadline: 15 January 2014
North Carolina Central University’s Department of History, in conjunction with the Global Studies Program and the College of Arts and Sciences, invites proposals for the Sixth Annual Dr. Sylvia M. Jacobs African Diaspora Studies Symposium, to be held March 22-23, 2014 on the campus of North Carolina Central University. This year’s theme, “Green is the New Black? ” will explore the ways that ideologies, structures, and institutions play a part in the development and persistence of racial disparities that both limit and prevent people of color from accessing natural resources and place communities of color at greater risk for negative outcomes of environmental hazards — otherwise known as environmental (or ecological) racism. Continue reading Green is the New Black?
Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, in collaboration with the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, is pleased to announce a one-year competitive postdoctoral fellowship for a scholar pursuing research in Caribbean Studies. Scholars working on comparative cultural studies of the Dutch or the French Caribbean, with focus on transnationalism, migration and/or queer feminist studies, are especially encouraged to apply but we welcome applications from all scholars who feel that their work would benefit from affiliation with Rutgers.
The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $65,000 as well as an annual research allocation of $3,000 and Rutgers University health benefits. The successful applicant must have the doctorate in hand at the time of application (defense date no later than May 31, 2014), be no more than three years beyond the Ph.D. (Ph.D. received on 2011 or later), and be able to teach one undergraduate course during their tenure at Rutgers. Position begins on July 1, 2014 and ends on June 30, 2015. Continue reading Postdoctoral Fellowship in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers
Keynote Speaker: *Brodwyn Fischer* (University of Chicago)
From the Call For Papers
Since the conquest, Latin America has been a distinctly urban region, and yet urbanization has always been a process fraught with ambiguity and
contradiction. From Pre-Columbian times, urban centers have served as central arenas for the contestation of political power, cultural
legitimacy, economic development, and social hierarchy. Latin America’s cities have stood at the nexus of regional and transnational forces. They
have served as both geographic and intellectual meeting places, where vibrant and often restive rural cultures have come into contact with forces
that reach well beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. As a result, scholars across the disciplines have long grappled with how to understand
urban space in Latin America. Continue reading Urban Explorations: Latin America’s Cities, Past & Present
November was a busy month for publications relevant to Caribbean Studies. Below is an annotated list with links to more information (or to the publication itself if it is open access). Open access publications listed first.
Image credit: Still from Touch (video, 2002), by Janine Antoni
The long-awaited return of the CRB after an almost two-year hiatus. This issue features the engaging book reviews that the publication is known for as well as short review articles on art and film, poetry from Shivanee Ramlochan and a conversation with Oonya Kempadoo.
Fall issue featuring: an essay by poet and author Kei Miller on dub poetry and the “sort of life” it may continue to have in the diasporas; a multi-media piece by choreographer Chris Walker and poet Danez Smith; and an essay by Bernard James on the tenuous and often fraught connections between Caribbean Americans and African Americans. This issue also includes book reviews, poetry, and an announcement of the winners and short list for the 2013 Small Axe Literary Competition.
This is the first issue of Moko, which is published from the Virgin Islands and “focuses on promoting fiction, poetry, visual arts, and criticism that reflect a Caribbean heritage or experience.” The planned publication schedule is November, March and July.
In the first issue, Moko includes art and writing from the following Caribbean contributors: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Florine Demosthene, Soyini Ayanna Forde, Manuel Mathieu, Dalton Narine, Celeste Rita-Baker, Colin Robinson, and Nilsa Wheatley.
Special tenth-year anniversary issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal on “Intellectual Formations: Locating a Caribbean Critical Tradition.” Many of the contributions began as presentations at the 31st West Indian Literature Conference (October 2012) which celebrated the 50-year anniversaries of independence in Jamaica and Trinidad. The issue includes essays from several recognizable names in Caribbean Literary Studies. The issue is divided into three parts:
Part I: First Reflections, Plenary Voices
Part II: “The Generation of 1968”
Part III: Locating a Tradition of West Indian Criticism
Open access. _____________________________
ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics, & Consciousness
Special issue on Caribbean women, guest-edited by Professor Opal Palmer Adisa. Includes creative works and scholarly essays from: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Helen Klonaris, Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming, Angelique V. Nixon, Toni Pressley-Sanon, Opal Palmer Adisa, and more.
Open access with registration. _____________________________
Contemporary Caribbean Visual Art & Culture. This issue features the work of a wide array of visual artists, including: Christopher Cozier, Simone Leigh, Satch Hoyt, Camille Chedda, Olivia McGilchrist, and Tristan Alleyne. ARC 8 also features writing from: Dominique Brebion, Marta Fernandez Campa, Carl E. Hazlewood, Qiana Mestrich, Marsha Pearce, Legacy Russell, and Jaret Vadera.
Print. Subscription-based. Preview available online. _____________________________
This issue features special sections on “Translating the Caribbean” (Guest-edited by Kaiama Glover and Martin Munro), a tribute to the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and “Visual Life of Catastrophic History.”
The Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center presents a day with Ian Baucom. there will be two events: A seminar at 12:00pm and a public talk at 4pm. Details from the circulated announcement below. The readings will be available for download here until 7 December.
Friday, December 6th Ian Baucom works on twentieth century British Literature and Culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and Black Atlantic literatures. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999, Princeton University Press), Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005, Duke University Press), and co-editor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (2005, Duke University Press). He has edited special issues of the South Atlantic Quarterly on Atlantic Studies and Romanticism, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively entitled The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life. Prof. Baucom received his Ph.D. from Yale University and taught there before joining the English Department at Duke. Prior to assuming the post of the Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute, he was Chair of English at Duke for three years.
12:00-1:30 – Seminar with Ian Baucom Room 5109 Please join us in discussing a portion of Prof. Baucom’s new book project in conversation with several readings which have shaped its development. The readings for this seminar are as follows (click on each to download):
1. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in a 2009 issue of Critical Inquiry.
2. Ian Baucom, “The Human Shore: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Natural Science”
3. The Introductory chapter of Tim Morton’s new book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
4. Ian Baucom, “History 4˚C: The Youngest Day” (which is his working introduction to his new project).
4:00-6:00 – Ian Baucom, “History 4˚C: Search for a Method” Room 9100 (Skylight Room)
“The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming,” Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently argued, has effected a collapse of the long-standing division between human and natural history. Where it has been the enduring conviction of the historical profession that the proper study of history begins at precisely the point at which human life organizes and separates itself from animal, natural existence, the planet’s looming ecological catastrophe, Chakrabarty indicates, has made that distinction void. Human history, human culture, human society have now come to possess a truly geological force, a capacity not only to shape the local environments of forests, river-systems, and desert terrain, but to effect, catastrophically, the core future of the planet as we enter into the long era of what the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and other climate researchers have called the “anthropocene.” As scholars across the disciplines have increasingly begun to argue, addressing the deep time of the anthropocene (both its deep history and its deep future) implies a fundamental interrogation (or re-interrogation) of many of our core concepts (“nature,” “politics,” “sovereignty” and the “human” key among them). As the coherence and plasticity of those concepts—particularly of the human–come under renewed pressure so too are there allied shifts toward a range of posthumanist understanding of the “task” (or tasks”) of the humanities and, consequently, of the relation of the humanities to the life and other natural sciences.
In this talk I take up some of those challenges, particularly as they address the question of framing a critical method adequate to the “situation” of the anthropocene. In so doing, I will argue that despite its enormously rich considerations of the multi-scaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe, thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multi-temporal ontology of the present that would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest, therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search for method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together (minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4˚.
This event is co-sponsored by the following entities at the CUNY Graduate Center: the Advanced Research Collaborative, the Center for the Humanities, IRADAC, the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.
CFP deadlines: Abstracts due 29 December; full papers due 28 February. Contact information below.
Below adapted from the CALL FOR PAPERS:
Following the sporadic series of conferences on the Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean since 1975 held mainly in Trinidad and Tobago, there is a plan to organise one conference every year in various parts of the region. Next year’s conference will be held in Belize from August 5 to 11, 2014 on the theme “The Indian Diaspora in Belize and the wider Caribbean.” This is the first conference of its kind to be held in this English-speaking country, and in Central America.
The conference aims to bring together academics, scholars, teachers and students at all levels with an interest in the Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean to discuss their research findings.
Space will be provided for less formal presentations from activists and practitioners in the field in order to contribute to the limited store of public knowledge on Indians in Belize.
Possible paper themes can include, but are not limited to history, migration, inter-ethnic marriages, culture loss, alcoholism, business, remittances, agriculture, education and gender.
These themes can be approached from a variety of disciplines, and can be inter- as well as multi-disciplinary. At least two-thirds of each paper to be presented must deal with Indians in Belize. Submitted papers will be assigned to particular panels according to similarities in theme, topic and discipline. Continue reading International conference on The Indian Diaspora in Belize and the wider Caribbean
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