7th Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD)

CFP deadline: January 15, 2012

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
October 30 – November 2, 2013

Transformative Visions:
Confronting Change and Creating Opportunity in Africa and the African Diaspora

Creative response to change and challenge has long been a hallmark of the African diaspora experience, from the multiple ways enslaved peoples carved autonomous spaces across the Americas and Caribbean, to the use of new technologies to move politics and re-imagine communities throughout Africa and the African diaspora today. In 2013, the seventh biennial conference of the Association for the Study of the World Wide African Diaspora (ASWAD) will take place in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. The conference aims to address how transformative visions, past and present, have been brought to bear on the challenges confronting peoples of Africa and the African diaspora, from historically overlooked individuals to mass movements. How have African diaspora people marshalled activism, spirituality, creativity, and the unique resources of diaspora to re-fashion challenges into new opportunities? How are diasporic solidarities and fissures affected by global conflicts and movements? ASWAD seeks creative explorations of diaspora through innovative framings, methodologies, and discourses as we address these questions. We welcome submissions from all disciplines on both historical and contemporary topics and on all geographic areas including Africa, the Americas and Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Paper and panel proposals that incorporate new categories of diasporic analysis and that stimulate discourse across traditional boundaries are encouraged, as are roundtables and panels on diaspora and comparative diaspora studies.  Continue reading ASWAD 7th Annual Biennial Conference

Writing through the Visual/Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean

Center for African Studies 2013 Conference
March 7‐9 2013

CFP deadline: 100 to 200‐word abstract and panel proposal by November 1, 2012

This two‐day conference at Rutgers University (New Brunswick) is designed to foster trans‐disciplinary understanding of the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. It will explore the varied patterns of cultural, and especially writing, formations and practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted on the cultures and peoples of this trans‐Atlantic region that includes countries such as Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Comoro Islands, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo (DR), Dominica, Guadeloupe, Guiana, Haiti, Louisiana (USA), Mali, Martinique, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Seychelles. Special attention will be paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non‐material culture to tell “stories” of great significance, co‐mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the “classical” and the “popular” in new ways.  Possible topics for the conference include (but are not limited) to the following: Continue reading Writing through the Visual/Virtual (CFP)

Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora
The African-American Studies Collective
Emory University, Atlanta, GA
February 8-9, 2013

CFP Deadline for abstracts: October 7, 2012

From CFP:

Was it why I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619? Was it the tug of all the lost mothers and orphaned children? Or was it that each generation felt anew the yoke of a damaged life and the distress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien?
–Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

We are not the same. I am an alien.
–Lil’ Wayne, “Phone Home”

Born out of a desire to articulate the position of Black bodies in the Americas as well as the African Diaspora writ large, “Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora” continues conversations initiated among members of the African American Studies Collective at Emory University.  Of particular concern are the ways in which the African Diaspora–as climactic environments, biological/zoological/botanical/geographical subjectivities, or colonized economies–has been made alien from within as well as without, and the ways that the major discursive trajectories of race, space, and sex have contributed to this mapping.  The conference explores such questions as: how do we begin to understand the ways in which race, space, and sex configure “the alien” within spaces allegedly “beyond” markers of difference? What are some ways in which the “alien from within as well as without” can be overcome, and how do we make them sustainable? In doing so, this conference also seeks to provide a forum for discussion on what Afro-Diaspora Studies as a field and as a network of analytical approaches can further contribute to the examination of the positions of Blacks around the world. Continue reading Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora

“Maroon Lands, Laws, and Cultures”:
The Fifth Charles Town International Maroon Conference,
Portland, Jamaica
20-23 June, 2013

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2012

The Fifth Charles Town International Maroon Conference, “Lands, Laws, and Cultures,” invites papers that explore the relationships between place and tradition in Maroon communities throughout the Atlantic world. Issues to consider might include: Continue reading The Fifth Charles Town International Maroon Conference

Announcing The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize for creative writers. Deadline for submissions is 30 September, 2012, at 6 pm (TT time).

Information from the Bocas Lit Fest site:

The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize is an annual award which allows an emerging Caribbean writer living and working in the Anglophone Caribbean to devote time to advancing or finishing a literary work, with support from an established writer as mentor. It is sponsored by the Hollick Family Charitable Trust and the literary charitable trust the Arvon Foundation, in association with the non-profit organisation the Bocas Lit Fest.

Remapping the Black Atlantic (Conference)
Diaspora: (Re)Writings of Race and Space

DePaul University
April 12-14, 2013
Abstracts due October 20, 2012

From conference announcement:

It has been two decades since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) which marked a pivotal shift in our understanding of the experience of transnational Black modernity. More than simply understanding Black experiences from around the Atlantic basin as being marginal to or derived from the culture of modernity, Gilroy argued that for over a century and a half, Black intellectuals have travelled and worked in a transnational framework that precludes anything but a superficial association with their country of origin. Expanding on DuBois’ crucial notion of “double consciousness,” Gilroy argued for a modernity broad enough in, scope not simply including the marginal positions of slaves, but also positing the “ungenteel” aspects of slavery and terror as fundamentally crucial to understanding modernity itself. Since the publication of Gilroy’s influential book, there has been a lively and sustained engagement in rethinking the history of African Diaspora and indeed the history of modernity itself. Continue reading Remapping the Black Atlantic

A workshop for junior researchers to be hosted by the Society of Caribbean Research (SoCaRe) and the Institute of Romance Languages at the Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany).

January 23-25,  2013 (Application deadline July 31)
Hannover, Germany

The workshop aims to provide an opportunity for junior researchers (especially doctoral and postdoctoral candidates) to present their projects and engage in interdisciplinary cooperation on current perspectives regarding decolonial gender issues within Caribbean Research. Presentation languages are English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

See full CFP here for more information.

Please send paper abstracts (300 words) to [email protected] by July 31, 2012.

50th Anniversary Conference
University of Glasgow

May 10-11, 2013 (Abstracts due by October 31, 2012)

Regularly cited as one of the great sports books of the twentieth
century, C.L.R. James’ Beyond a Boundary (1963) is, by his own
famous definition, about far more than cricket. Developing a concern to
understand sport as part of a much wider social and political context (a
concern first articulated in his earlier writings for the Glasgow Herald),
James’ study is part-autobiography, part-historical study and partpolitical-
call-to-arms written against the backdrop of the decolonisation
struggles. His reflections thus reach out into a critical account of racism
and imperialism, into wider questions of aesthetics and popular culture,
and into the struggle for revolutionary social change which was the
enduring concern of his life. Crucially, James insisted that such
questions were not simply of concern to academics or to experts, but
were also a central part of what drew ordinary men and women to
sport.

Much loved, and widely read, James’ study has also been the subject of
searching criticism: he has been accused, among other things, of a
failure of critical judgement in relation to cricket’s role in the moral
framework of empire, of a lack of attentiveness to gendered
inequalities, and of a naïve faith in the spontaneity of popular political
resistance.

This conference is convened on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of
the publication of Beyond a Boundary, with the intention of both
celebrating and questioning, drawing out the book’s intellectual
legacies and identifying the issues it leaves unanswered. We would
welcome original papers dealing with any aspects of Beyond a
Boundary. These might include:

• critical engagement with or reinterpretation of James’ arguments
• studies of the production and reception of the book itself
• interpretations, via James, of contemporary sport
• reflections on the transnational responses to James’ text
• discussion of Beyond a Boundary within James’ wider corpus and in relation to his political practice
• papers reporting on the use of James’ insights and methods in social research, in teaching, in journalism or in political activism.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Andy Smith:
[email protected] by October 31, 2012.

In keeping with James’ own practice, we would ask potential speakers to avoid unnecessary technical jargon,
and to prepare papers intended for a general audience.

Already confirmed keynote speakers for the conference are Mike
Brearley (former England Test captain and previously President of the
British Psychoanalytic Society), and Wai Chee Dimock (Department
of English, Yale) and Robert A. Hill (History, UCLA and C.L.R.
James’ Literary Executor).

An International Conference

Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University, 14-16 February 2013

Confirmed speakers: Arnold Antonin, J. Michael Dash, David Geggus, Dany Laferrière, Kettly Mars, Rodney Saint-Eloi. Bob Shacochis

Conference artist: Édouard Duval Carrié

Special closing event: Dany Laferrière at 60, a celebration

Despite its long periods of economic and political isolation, Haiti has always been an important global center, and a particularly modern entity. Born out of the anticolonial struggles of displaced peoples, an amalgam of diverse languages and cultures, it is quintessentially and irrevocably a creation of global modernity. In the earliest days of the nation, Haiti was not considered by its leaders as an anomalous state or an accident of history, but as an integral part of the Americas and of the broader world. Haiti was the center of a new energy that upset established orders across the globe, throwing up a set of challenges, changes, and paradoxes, the effects of which can still be felt to this day. In Haiti’s subsequent history, it has remained a global center, and its triumphs and struggles and their implications and meanings have always overflowed their immediate temporal and spatial contexts. Refusing to be seen as an aberration, a freak of history, Haiti and its meanings still exceed and go beyond its Caribbean borders, and have shaped the history and culture of the broader Americas and the world in significant, if often hidden and obscured ways. Moreover, contemporary globalization continues to have a significant impact on Haiti as it adjusts and responds to the political and social upheaval of the past decade.

This conference develops questions explored in the events organized by the Leverhulme Trust-funded Oxford Caribbean Globalizations project. Its aim is to bring to light Haiti’s role in shaping history, culture, politics and thought beyond its borders and throughout its history. Importantly, too, we aim to understand how the broader developments in global history and associated processes of globalization have impacted on Haiti. The global frame incorporates other frames, including the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Atlantic World; and we also invite proposals that consider Haiti’s position in any of these other geographical, continental and regional frames. Most generally, we welcome proposals for papers that offer new understandings of Haiti’s place in the world, and the world’s place in Haiti. The conference is interdisciplinary, and we encourage proposals for single papers and panels that offer innovative new approaches that relate to the following, non-exhaustive list of possible themes:

• The Revolution as a global event
• Haiti’s natural history and environmentalism
• Aristide and the Global Left
• Haitian music in the diaspora
• Haitian religion in the diaspora
• Global religious movements in Haiti
• Haitian visual art and its global presence
• Global commerce and its effects on Haiti
• Haiti in global literature
• Haiti in travel writing
• Haiti in film
• Global aid organizations and Haiti
• Global responses to disasters in Haiti
• The 2010 earthquake and its after-effects

To submit a proposal for a paper or a panel, please visit the following page: http://www.fsu.edu/~icffs/haiti_call_paper.html

Deadline for submissions: September 14, 2012.

For further information, please contact Martin Munro, [email protected] or Charles Forsdick, [email protected]