Author: Kelly Baker Josephs

Call for Papers for edited anthology:

Teaching Haiti Beyond Literature: Intersectionalities of History, Literature and Culture 

CFP deadline: 500 word abstract due by 25 June 2016; Full draft due by 10 January 2017

In “Poem for the Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere”, poet Danielle Legros Georges chants: “Oh poorest country, this is not your name/ You should be called beacon, and flame.” Haiti, the only country with the last name of “poorest country in the Western hemisphere” is often at the crossroads of either been venerated in History as the First Black Republic or being pitied. Latin American historian Philippe Zacaïr notes that Haiti is “only respected in books as opposed to real life.” The essays in this volume will focus on how to teach about Haiti and its complex history and culture from a transdisciplinary perspective. Its main goal is to provide best practices and practical suggestions for teaching about Haiti from multiple lenses including art, art history, cultural studies, film, gender, history, literature, and sociology to name but a few areas of interest. The volume also seeks critical essays that center on “Fatal assistance” (a term used by filmmaker Raoul Peck) to highlight the problematic of humanitarian aid and NGOs, service learning, volunteerism and disaster tourism in Haiti. Continue reading Teaching Haiti Beyond Literature: Intersectionalities of History, Literature and Culture

Special issue of Caribbean Review of Gender Studies

Guest Editors: Savitri Persaud and Fatimah Jackson-Best

CFP deadlines: Abstracts due by 30 September 2016; Manuscripts due by 6 January 2017

Call for papers

My legs were at a 45 degree angle each. I was in a wheelchair for a while after I had corrective surgery to fix it. This is basically the end result… But it’s fine. It’s cute now. Guys fantasize about it now, because I “walk wine” and girls try to walk like me… Basically, I mean my legs are double jointed. And you can put them in different positions. I’m saying, ‘My vagina is made different, and it will make you feel different, and it will make you feel like it’s not one, but actually two vaginas.’
– Tifa, Jamaican Dancehall Artiste [Interview with thefader.com]

Continue reading Disability, Mental Health, and Disablement

The Caribbean Digital III

a Small Axe Project event
2 December 2016
Barnard College / Columbia University
New York, NY 

Deadline for proposals: 15 July 2016

The transformation of the academy by the digital revolution presents challenges to customary ways of learning, teaching, conducting research, interpreting documents and presenting findings. It also offers great opportunities in each of these areas. New media enable oration, graphics, objects, and even embodied performance to supplement existing forms of scholarly production as well as to constitute entirely original platforms. Opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration have expanded enormously; information has been made more accessible and research made more efficient on multiple levels. Scholars are called upon, with some urgency, to adapt their research and pedagogical methods to an academic climate deluged by a superabundance of information and analysis. This has created opportunities for open-ended and multiform engagements, interactive and continually updating archives and other databases, cartographic applications that enrich places with historical information, and online dialogues with peers and the public. Continue reading The Caribbean Digital III

Book Series: Afro-Latin@ Diasporas
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (https://www.palgrave.com/us/series/14759)

Series Editors: Miriam Jiménez Román, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere and Edward Paulino

CALL FOR BOOK MANUSCRIPTS

The Afro-Latin@ Diasporas book series aims to gather scholarly and creative writing on the African diasporic experience in Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. We publish between 2-3 books annually, since our inception in 2013.

The Editors welcome book-length unpublished manuscripts addressing all aspects of Afro-Latin@ life and cultural expression throughout the hemisphere, with a strong focus on U.S. Latin@s of African descent. We will also consider relevant work on the transnational Brazilian and Haitian experiences. We will be considering manuscripts in any and all humanities and social science disciplines, as well as a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches. The peer-reviewed Series will also include fictional and poetic work, though the emphasis will be on critical historical and sociological analysis on a broad range of topics including religion, history, literature, theory, biography and scholarship in sociology, politics and economics. We especially welcome works on issues of class, gender and sexuality, in addition to studies of the transnational Afro-Latin@ experience. Doctoral dissertations must be converted into manuscript format in order to be considered.  We will not consider manuscripts that have been submitted to multiple publishers simultaneously.

Publications are in English, but we also will consider book proposal in Spanish (subject to the author securing resources for full manuscript translation into English). The Series editors are pleased to consider book proposals. The proposal must include your name, title, institutional affiliation (if applicable), and contact information as well as a 3-4 page prospectus, Table of Contents, Submission Timeline and a sample chapter.

The Series editors take between 6-10 weeks for manuscript and proposal review before decisions are made to send the work further to Palgrave for peer-review and contract consideration.

Please send all enquiries to the editors at:  afrolatinodiasporas@gmail.com

Call for Conference Papers

CLR James Now!
Friday, 4 November 2016
CUNY Graduate Center
New York, NY

Deadline for proposals: *** updated deadline*** 15 June 2016

CLR James’s life spanned almost the entire 20th century. He was part of Trotsky’s circle in Mexico in the 1930s and Stuart Hall’s in the 1970s. A fulcrum of leftist thought for the past fifty years, James was an influential advocate of social change from below. James was a product of the colonial process and an early resister of it, and he recognized that the Global South as a generator of political innovation rather than a container for received ideas. As a theorist of British imperialism and what has come to be called the Black Atlantic, James helps us reorient the geographic perspective of American Studies towards the Caribbean and expands what blackness can mean in the United States.

A novelist, playwright, theorist, sports writer, literary critic voracious reader, and polymath intellectual, James forces us to challenge the narrow boundaries of academic life on the one hand and resist the lure of sectarianism in political organizing on the other. In his embrace of cricket, he claims the cultural capital of the colonizer for the post-colonial subject.  His critique of Soviet communism as “state capitalism” anticipated the emergence of China as a state-run free market, just as his fascination with the Haitian revolution theorized the inextricable connections between racialization and divide-and-conquer class politics that is a focus of the Black Lives Matter campaign.

What can CLR James tell us now?

The organizers invite proposals for presentations on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Can every cook govern? Revolutionary possibilities past and present
• CLR James and “friends”: overlaps, influences, and influenced: Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Hall, Spivak, Said, Davis, Padmore, Dunayevskaya, James and Grace Lee Boggs, and more
• James and his “enemies”: conflict, opposition, surveillance, suppression
• James at the margins, James at the center, James in the black Atlantic
• Migration, diaspora, deportation, flight
• James’s critique of state socialism, from the USSR to Cuba to the Chinese Communist Party
• James and the “studies”: postcolonial, (post)marxist, transnational, gender, sexuality
• Critiquing James

Please use this Survey Monkey link to submit abstracts (250 words maximum) for the conference by 15 May 2016.

For any questions or concerns about the symposium or call, please email Justin Rogers-Cooper at jrogers@lagcc.cuny.edu. Please help advertise and create discussion for the symposium using the social media hashtag #CLRJamesNOW

Cosponsored by the New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) and the CUNY Institute for Research on the African Diaspora and Caribbean (IRADAC)

Afro-Digital Connections: Afro-Latino and Afro-Descendant Cultural Production in the Digital Age

An edited collection

CFP deadline: Abstracts due 1 May 2016

Editors: Eduard Arriaga and Andrés Villar (Western University, Ontario)

Two decades ago, scholars in fields such as communication and information studies questioned the way social relations would be adapted to the increasing importance of global digital networks and to the tools used for digital communication. Maizies (1999) has inquired whether universal access, if granted, to processes of communication and representation that incorporate other processes of production, distribution, and consumption within global digital networks will be negotiated or imposed. This issue remains current because of the ubiquity of paradigms such as those of Big-Data, Cultural Analytics, and the Digital Humanities. These paradigms are fuelled by the increasing importance of digital networks (for example, social networks, financial corporations, etc.) and the centrality of their users as sources of information.

In the Americas (North, Central and South) and the Caribbean, the issue becomes more nuanced due to the central role played by race and ethnicity in the construction of political and social relations that are reflected in people’s daily lives. Over the last two decades or so, the region has witnessed the emergence of ‘minority’ artists, activists, and organizations that take advantage of digital tools that are now more accessible: mobile technologies and social media tools increasingly allow these actors to supply their own images and self-representations. This edited book will explore the way Afro-Latin@, Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean writers, artists, activists and organizations – NGO’s, grassroots communities, etc.- have adopted online digital tools and mobile technologies to create self-representations, question traditional images, and connect with communities around the globe that share similar ethno-social perspectives. This book also seeks to shed light on contemporary processes of memory creation, artistic representation, ethnic connection, digital cultural production and resistance/reparation in order to understand how ethnic communities -particularly Afro-descendant ones- are adapting these tools to their own cultural and political practices. To that end, we invite manuscripts that address Afro-Digital Connections topics including the following:

* African and Afro-descendant digital activism
* African and Afro-descendant digital art, digital performance, and digital literature
* Digital humanities and reparations for Afro-descendant communities
* Oral histories and digital archives
* Theoretical interventions exploring ethnicity/race and digital technologies
* Digital interventions that reconfigure African and Afro-descendant symbolic imaginaries.
* Critical perspectives on digital inclusion
* Digital actions against police brutality and government violence

Submission Guidelines: If interested, please submit proposals in Spanish, English or Portuguese (300-500 words) and (one-page) CVs to Eduard Arriaga (earriag@uwo.ca or earriaga@alumni.uwo.ca) or Andrés Villar (avillar2@uwo.ca) by 1 May 2016. When submitting your abstract, please use “Contribution Volume Afro-Digital Connections” as the subject line.

Above adapted from ASWAD email announcement.

Call for abstracts for MLA 2017 Proposed Special Session:

“Margins to Mainstream: US Latino/a Performance”

This proposed special session for the 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia will focus on the genre of US Latino/a performance, which can include performance poetry, drama, performance art, and/or film. Submissions that focus on mainstream productions (Broadway, Hollywood, and/or US Latino/a ethnic traditions) as well performances on the margins of these sites are encouraged. The panel will engage with issues of genre as well as questions of authenticity, sexuality, language, history, politics and the marketplace. Submit 250 word abstracts and 2-page CVs by 1 March 2016 to Elena Machado Sáez (e.machado@bucknell.edu). Participants must be MLA members by 7 April 2016.

Above adapted from emailed announcement.