Multiple Textualities: Imagining the Caribbean Nation
College of the Bahamas
10-12 October 2013

Deadline EXTENDED: 50-100 word abstracts due by 4 August 2013. 

From the Call for Papers:

Charles V. Carnegie in his multimodal text, Postcolonialism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands, argues that “nationalism both presumes and demands a fundamental sameness, whether through a common pledge of loyalty to a set of civic principles or through supposedly shared primordial characteristics such as language or ethnicity.” His text urges Caribbeanists to question the inflexibility of nationalist dialogues that construct West Indian identities. This and other recent critiques of nationalist discourse draw attention to the limitations of nationalism in conceiving and constructing individual and communal West Indian experiences. Continue reading West Indian literature Conference 2013 – deadline extended

CULTURE/IDENTITY/POLITICS: ÉLOGE DE LA CRÉOLITÉ, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ON
International Conference, 21-23 October 2014
Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University

CFP in both English then French below. Deadline for proposals is 1 March 2014.

Confirmed Speakers: Dominique Chancé (University of Bordeaux), Françoise Lionnet (UCLA), H. Adlai Murdoch (Tufts University), Richard Price (College of William and Mary), Sally Price (College of William and Mary) 

Since its publication in 1989, Éloge de la créolité has had decidedly mixed fortunes: generally received with enthusiasm on its first appearance, it rapidly became very controversial and has subsequently been widely critiqued to the extent that one wonders whether it retains any capacity at all to illuminate the cultures of Caribbean and Creole societies.

To mark the 25th anniversary of its publication, this conference poses that very question, and foresees three broad areas of discussion: first, the fortunes of the Éloge itself and the subsequent work of its authors; second, the ways in which the Éloge has been received by and influenced other “Creole” authors and cultures; third, other theorizations of Caribbean identity and culture that have developed over the past 25 years.  Continue reading Éloge de la créolité, Twenty-five Years On

The trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff), in association with RBC Royal Bank, invites applications for the third annual RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion.

Deadline for applications: 12 July 2013

From the circulated announcement:

Mission and objective
RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion is an intensive development programme that provides ten selected filmmakers from the Caribbean and its diaspora with the opportunity to learn from film professionals. It will be held over four days during the ttff/13 (17 September–01 October 2013). Focus will include group discussions on a range of topics concentrating on the artistic side of narrative filmmaking, sharpening the skills and abilities of participants. There will be a particular emphasis on enhancing the filmmakers’ creative voice and storytelling capabilities.
Each filmmaker will enter Focus with a concept for a feature-length narrative film, from which they will be expected to develop a detailed treatment.

Pitch session and competition
At the end of Focus, the facilitators will choose their top five participants. These five participants will be given an opportunity during the ttff/13 to pitch their project to a jury at a public event. The participant with the best project and pitch, as determined by the jury, will win a cash prize of TT$20,000.

Eligibility
Focus is open to Caribbean filmmakers (citizens of Caribbean countries living and working in the Caribbean); filmmakers of the diaspora (persons of Caribbean descent resident outside of the Caribbean who intend to shoot at least part of their prospective project in the region); and international filmmakers living and working in the Caribbean. Applicants must have completed at least one narrative film (short or feature-length), but no more than two narrative features.

Applications
All applicants must submit a maximum five-minute excerpt of a previous film (narrative short or feature) on DVD, stating their role(s) on the film (writer, director and/or creative producer). They must also submit their résumé and a cover letter stating, in 100 words or less, the concept of the project they would be bringing to Focus and what makes it unique. Participants will be determined based on the strength of all three of these items.

Applications should be sent via email to [email protected]

The deadline for applications is 12 July, 2013. Successful applicants will be notified by 01 August.

Expenses
All selected participants will be provided with the materials for the immersion, lunch, a festival pass (which provides access to all film screenings and industry events), and invitations to festival-related activities. Participants not residing in T&T will be allocated accommodation (inclusive of breakfast), and local transport to and from festival-related activities.
Photo caption: Participants in the 2012 RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion

The University of Texas Africa Conference
African Diasporas: Old and New
April 3-6, 2014

CFP deadline: Abstracts due 31 November 2013

From the organizers:

We are now inviting scholars to submit conference papers and full panel
proposals for the 2014 conference on African Diasporas: Old and New. The
goal of this conference is to create an interdisciplinary dialogue
concerning Africa and Africans throughout the world from both historical
and contemporary approaches. This conference seeks to bring together a vast
array of scholars on a variety of academic levels to discuss the complex
experiences of African descended peoples across the globe.

What is the African Diaspora? How are old and new diasporas discussed in a
variety of disciplines? How can we conceptualize the African Diaspora? What
is the role of the African Diaspora in modern politics? How do various
groups within old and new African diasporas conceptualize themselves in
relation to others? How do diasporic voices shape conceptualizations of
individual and collective identities? What will the African diaspora look
like in the future?

Some potential topics may include: Continue reading African Diasporas: Old and New

Radical Caribbeans / Los Caribes Radicales: Repositioning Caribbean Life

Conference on Identity, Culture and Social Practices
October 3-5, 2013
Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute, Tulane University
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

CFP deadlines: Abstracts due by 15 June 2013; Notification by 5 July 2013.

(From The Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute at Tulane University)

Read the official Call for Papers (PDF) here.

We welcome papers that address any facet of the Caribbean radicalis and radical approaches to Caribbean identity, culture and social practices. Papers may focus on one country or invoke comparative strategies of any regions contained in the greater Caribbean, beyond the confines of the Caribbean sea, northeast of the Florida straits and into the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, and south, along the Atlantic coast, past Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil. Papers may be in English, Spanish, French or Portuguese, though English is preferred.

If you are interested in participating, please send a 250 word abstract as an attachment to either of the email addresses listed below by June 15th, 2013. Include the title of your paper, your name (and the names of any co-presenters), institutional affiliation, phone number, mailing and email address. Papers for presentation should be no more than than 20 minutes and may be considered for publication. If submitting a panel for consideration, please include a top sheet with panel title, participant names and a brief abstract of the panel topic in addition to the individual paper proposals.

Notification of acceptance to the conference will be made by July 5, 2013.

For more information on the conference, location and arrangements, visit the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute website for updates.

Submit abstracts by June 15 to:
[email protected]
[email protected]

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: [email protected] 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: [email protected] 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 Continue reading Caribbean Philosophical Association 2013

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) – [email protected]

Emily A. Maguire (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Northwestern University) – [email protected]