Author: Kelly Baker Josephs

Margins to Mainstream: US Latino/a Performance

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.

Hew Locke: The Wine Dark Sea

Hew Locke’s first solo exhibition in New York
24 February – 1 April 2016

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art
37 West 57th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10019
Ph 212 517 2433
info@etnahem.com
Hours: Monday-Friday 10am-5:30pm.

Hew Locke

 

Edward Tyler Nahem is pleased to present Hew Locke’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The Anglo-Guyanese artist who lives in Great Britain and spent his formative years in Guyana, consistently explores themes of race, colonialism, displacement, the creation of cultures, and the visual codes of power, drawing on a deeply personal visual language.

Hew Locke: The Wine Dark Sea will present new works by the artist that highlight Locke’s acclaimed sculptures of boats, which occupy an important place in his personal iconography. ‘The wine dark sea’ is a description of the Mediterranean used by Homer throughout The Odyssey, and the phrase is repeated by Derek Walcott in his epic poem Omeros set mainly in the Caribbean, and referencing characters from The Iliad. Locke’s visual poem likewise points up the universality of many of our experiences.

This new series of twenty-five vessels of varied scale and hues will be suspended from the ceiling, creating a flotilla at eye level. Incorporating contemporary and historically resonant vessels – clippers and container ships, battleships and lifeboats – Locke will create a spectacular sculptural environment. Locke’s work articulates this environment as filled with hope, potential prosperity and gratification, as well as despair, anguish, and suffering. This narrative resonates deeply with the tides of refugees fleeing to the sea from war, oppression, and poverty, but also with those viewers for whom migration and displacement are part of family history. A ship is a symbolic object; vessel of the soul, means of escape, both safety and danger. According to Locke, “We’re all floating on the same ocean. As a child and young man I sailed the Atlantic. At sea, a twist of fate can send a super-yacht down – it can be an equalizer between rich and poor.”

Locke’s multi-media practice includes large-format installation, painting, sculpture, photography and tapestry and has been called a “’mental Moulinex,’ or food processor, into which experiences are tossed, mixed around, and transformed into chimerical creations.” (ArtNews, April 2014). Related works include his celebrated For Those in Peril on the Sea, 2011, in the collection of the Peréz Art Museum Miami and The Tourists, 2014, an installation commissioned by the Imperial War Museum for the museum ship HMS Belfast, London.

Born in Scotland, Locke grew up in Georgetown, Guyana before returning to Britain for his university education. His work has been exhibited around the globe, most recently at Tate Britain, and in Runnymede, UK where he was commissioned to make a permanent memorial to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. Locke’s work is represented in the collections of Tate Gallery (UK), the Brooklyn Museum (New York), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (US), Kansas City Collection (US), the RISD Museum (Rhode Island), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), and the British Museum (London) amongst others.

Image above – The Wine Dark Sea, (boat BB), 2016, mixed media with custom hand embroidery, 76 x 33 x 98cm

Above adapted from press release and email announcement.

The Work of Paule Marshall Today (CFP)

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

Deadline for abstracts: 1 April 2016

Full papers due: 1 August 2016

Marshall

This special issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal seeks papers and reflections on the work of Paule Marshall, situating the author and her writings within the canons of Caribbean, American, African-American, and/or Women’s literature. In particular, we are interested in contributions that consider how, and why, Marshall’s work remains vibrant today, near sixty years after her first publication.

Born in Brooklyn of Barbadian parentage, Marshall has made major contributions to each of these canons via seven works of fiction, a memoir, and several essays on writing and culture. From her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), through her recently published memoir, Triangular Road (2009), Marshall’s writings have poetically evoked the Afro-Caribbean experience in the region and in the Caribbean diaspora. Given the broad spectrum of her oeuvre, her work regularly appears on syllabi across various disciplines in the humanities, attesting to the contemporary significance of her work. Despite this reach and relevance, or perhaps in some ways because of it, scholarship on Marshall remains limited to individual voices in monographs and scattered articles, obscuring the ongoing impact of her contribution to literature and the humanities more broadly. Therefore, this special issue aims to present a rich and diverse examination of how Marshall’s writings continue to speak to today’s personal, national, and global anxieties surrounding, amongst others, questions of race, nation, family, gender, and sexuality.

We are open to scholarly papers, reflections, and creative work covering any of these questions, as well as others not stated above. We are especially interested in submissions that consider Marshall’s less studied texts and/or her work in building the next generation of African & African Diaspora literary community while on faculty at New York University.

Prospective contributors should email 300-500 word abstracts by 1 April 2016. Final versions of accepted papers will be due 1 August 2016. All completed manuscripts must be submitted for peer review via the Anthurium electronic submissions system. Please send abstracts and all inquiries to Kelly Baker Josephs (kjosephs@york.cuny.edu).

***

About the special issue editor: Kelly Baker Josephs is Associate Professor of English at York College/CUNY. She specializes in World Anglophone Literature with an emphasis on Caribbean Literature. Her book, Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2013), considers the ubiquity of madmen and madwomen in Caribbean literature between 1959 and 1980. She is the editor of sx salon: a small axe literary platform and manages The Caribbean Commons website.

About the Journal: Anthurium, a peer reviewed Caribbean Studies Journal founded in 2003, publishes original works and critical studies of Caribbean literature, theater, film, art, and culture by writers and scholars worldwide exclusively in electronic form.

 

 

 

 

Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti In the Age of Revolution

Ada Ferrer Book Talk

3 February 2016
2:30pm
Rutgers University-Newark
Dana Room
4th Floor of the Dana Library
185 University Avenue, Newark, NJ

9781107697782

Historian Ada Ferrer is a Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. In her talk, Professor Ferrer will read from her most recent book, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014). In 2015, this title received the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, as well as three awards from the American Historical Association: the Friedrich Katz Prize, the Wesley-Logan Prize, and the James A. Rawley Prize.

This lecture is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception with light refreshments.

The event is sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Rutgers University-Newark.

Above adapted from announcement on the RU-Newark Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies event page.

 

Toward a Borderless Indigenous Community (CFP)

The Eighth Annual Charles Town International Maroon Conference: Toward a Borderless Indigenous Community

23 – 26 June 2016
Asafu Yard, Charles Town
Portland, Jamaica

CFP deadline: Abstracts (250-300 words) due by 1 March 2016 to fbotkin@towson.edu (extended deadline)

maroonconference2016-2

Call for Papers

Indigenous communities offer models of collective sustainability, territorial sovereignty, ecological justice, and cultural persistence, keenly appealing to a world threatened by environmental rapine and ideological warfare.  The Eighth Annual Charles Town International Maroon Conference aims to build a global indigenous community without borders.  Legacy of the recently deceased Colonel Frank Lumsden, leader of the Charles Town Maroons, this vision of global unity among geographically distinct yet politically allied indigenous communities advances an alternative to global disaster that combines transnational commonality with cultural specificity and political purpose. This conference solicits papers and participants committed to this vision of cross-cultural engagement, exchange, and creativity, especially work directed toward creating terms of unity among diverse indigenous peoples that might provide models for collective sustainability and persistence for the world at large.

A central focus of this year’s conference will be the experience of indigenous women.  Gloria Simms, known also as Gaa’man Mama G, will present a keynote address on the cultural legacy of Nanny, the great Maroon leader.  Founder of the Maroon Indigenous Women’s Circle, tireless women’s activist, and bearer of the highest honorific title among Maroons in Jamaica, Mama G recently portrayed Nanny in a documentary film by Roy Anderson entitled Queen Nanny: Legendary Maroon Chieftainess.  A screening of the film will follow her address, with its director and producer in attendance.

Taking place in the Asafu Yard, the Charles Town International Maroon Conference explores the issues, values, and practices of Maroons and Indigenous peoples around the globe.  It considers the ways these practices and values have endured, transformed, and resonated in the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, South America, Europe, the United States and Africa. Offering a unique combination of scholarly panels and cultural events, it aims bring together descendants of Maroons and Indigenous Peoples with scholars interested in Maroon heritage and indigenous cultures.

Issues to consider might include, but are not at all limited to:

  • Indigeneity
  • Marronage
  • Land Rights
  • Geography and Culture
  • Language and Literature
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Cultural heritage
economics
  • Laws and legality
  • DNA

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words by February 15, 2016, or inquiries to fbotkin@towson.edu

Above adapted from emailed announcement.

Renee Cox: Revisiting the Queen Nanny Series

Exhibition: 22 January – 14 April 2016
Curated by Rich Blint
Columbia University
Russ Berrie Pavilion
1150 St. Nicholas Avenue (@168th Street)
Regular Viewing Hours: Mon – Fri, 9 am–6 pm

 

Renée Cox, River Queen, (from the Queen Nanny of the Maroons series),
Digital inkjet print on watercolor paper, 42 x 42, (2004).
Renee Cox: Revisiting the Queen Nanny Series
Renee Cox: Revisiting the Queen Nanny Series offers selections of photographs from this striking series produced by Renée Cox in 2004 as an opportunity to reconsider the artist’s remarkable visual representation of one of the most important and seemingly unlikely figures in the late-17th and early-18th Century Americas. The spiritual and military leader of the Maroon outpost, Nanny Town—a once flourishing fugitive community who refused bondage could trade and farm outside of the brutal confines of plantation life—Nanny is remembered in both the popular imagination and in scholarly circles as a committed freedom fighter and keen military strategist. She led numerous raids on plantations to free upwards of one thousand enslaved Africans, as well as to burn crops and destroy the equipment that fueled the massively profitable and deeply exploitative enterprise that was New World slavery. Given the Maroons’ strategic location, Nanny and her brothers were able to thwart, for nearly two decades, repeated attempts to destroy the town until a not wholly embraced treaty was signed with the British.

The images presented in this series reveal Cox’s obsession with self-fashioning and the significance and power of the female gaze in the context of the post-colonial and the still-prevailing Enlightenment notions of what constitutes Western womanhood. At once self-possessed, forceful, and illusive, these photographs interrupt the authority of the camera and challenges the viewer to consider practices of seeing and consumption as Cox restages the community and life of this singular figure now heralded as a national hero.

There will also be a Renee Cox Lecture at Yale University on 3 February.

Renee Cox was born in 1960 in Colgate, Jamaica. She lives and works in New York. She has received an award from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Aaron Matalon award at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She was also chosen to participate at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program (1992–1993) and had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art (1993), Whitney Museum of American Art (1993), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1995), Alrdich Museum (1996), New Museum (1999), Venice Biennial, Smithsonian Accostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture (2000), Brooklyn Museum (2001) and Studio Harlem Museum (2005 and 2012).

Above adapted from the Columbia University School of the Arts events page.

Renee Cox Lecture

3 February 2016
6:30pm
Yale School of Art
36 Edgewood Avenue, Room 204

New Haven, CT 06515

***
For nearly 30 years Renee Cox has used the photographic medium to explore the contemporary female body. Often using her own image she has taken viewers on a journey through the multiplicity of womanhood as it engages history, class, race , sex and technology within an evolving American society still struggling to reconcile the African-American image beyond a painful history of discrimination and stereotypes. To this end Cox’s was featured in the documentary film “Through A Lens Darkly” by Thomas Allen Harris (2014), broadcast on PBS (2015)

Sponsored by the Black Pulp! exhibition and Yale University’s Initiative for Race, Gender and Globalization and its director Professor Hazel Carby (AfAm Studies), Renee Cox will give an All School Lecture in the School of Art on her journey as an artist, photographer and woman.

Renee is also the focus of a current Columbia University exhibition, Renee Cox: Revisiting the Queen Nanny Series (22 January –  14 April 2016) by Curator Rich Blint. The show offers selected photographs from the artist’s “Queen Nanny Series” from 2004 in which the artist personifies the 17th-18th century black woman.

Renee Cox was born in 1960 in Colgate, Jamaica. She lives and works in New York. She has received an award from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Aaron Matalon award at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She was also chosen to participate at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program (1992–1993) and had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art (1993), Whitney Museum of American Art (1993), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1995), Alrdich Museum (1996), New Museum (1999), Venice Biennial, Smithsonian Accostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture (2000), Brooklyn Museum (2001) and Studio Harlem Museum (2005 and 2012).

Presented by Black Pulp! & Initiative in Race, Gender and Globalization
Open to the General Public

Above adapted from the Yale University Initiative on Race, Gender and Globalization event page.

Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine

Newly published special issue of Yale French Studies (Number 128)

Edited by Kaiama L. Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

chauvet

Description of issue:

This issue considers the oeuvre of Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916–1973) as a prism through which to examine individual and collective subject formation in the postcolonial French-writing Caribbean, the wider Afro-Americas, and beyond. While both Vieux-Chauvet and her corpus are situated in the violent space of mid-twentieth century Haiti, her work articulates the obstacles to claiming legitimized human existence on a global scale. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume examine Vieux-Chauvet’s positioning within the Haitian public sphere, as well as her broader significance to understanding gendered and racialized postcolonial subjectivities in the twenty-first century.

Editor bios:

Kaiama L. Glover is associate professor at Barnard College and the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon.

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is assistant professor at the City College of New York and the author of Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History.

____________________________________________________________

Table of Contents

Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine

Editor’s Preface
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Kaiama L. Glover – “Marie Chauvet Untethered”

Interrogating the Literary Institution

Thomas C. Spear – “Marie Chauvet: The Fortress Still Stands”
Régine Isabelle Joseph – “The Letters of Marie Chauvet and Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction”

Dystopian Visions: Social (In)justice and the (In)human Spirit

Martin Munro – “Marie Chauvet the Prophet: Writing the Haitian Apocalypse”
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken – “‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’: Between Narratology and Philosophy in Marie Chauvet’s Les Rapaces”
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert – “‘All Misfortune Comes from the Cut Trees:’ Marie Chauvet’s Environmental Imagination”
Colin Dayan – “The Dead Meat of Fiction, or, Writing in a Belittered World”

Writing Intimate Spaces: Unhomely Incursions on the Postcolonial Pscyhe

Kaiama L. Glover – “A Woman’s Place is in…The Unhomely As Social Critique in Marie Chauvet’s Fille d’Haïti”
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley – “Theorizing Black Queer Femininity through Chauvet’s La Danse sur le volcan”
Andrew Asibong – “The Divided Crypt: Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Marie NDiaye and the Hybridization of Haunting”

Associate Professor of Caribbean Literature and/or Latino/a Literature

Florida Atlantic University has announced an open faculty position for Caribbean literature. The deadline for applications is 29 February 2016. 

fau

Job description

Associate Professor of Caribbean Literature and/or Latino/a Literature

The Department of English at Florida Atlantic University invites applications for an Associate Professor to begin August 2016. Candidates must have teaching and research interests in Caribbean Anglophone Literature and/or U. S. Latino/a Literature. Candidates who combine these areas will be given special consideration. In regard to U. S. Latino/a literatures, special attention will be given to candidates whose work speaks to the culture and geography of South Florida.

We seek a candidate who will balance high-quality scholarship, excellence in teaching, and committed service. Faculty typically teach a 3-2 course schedule. Faculty teach and mentor graduate students in the department’s Master’s Degree programs as well as the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters interdisciplinary Ph. D. program. Ideally, the new hire will also contribute substantially to the university’s developing Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Initiative.

Requirements include a Ph. D. in English or Comparative Literature, or related field, at time of appointment, publication record in field, and relevant teaching experience at the college level. Send letter, vita, three letters of recommendation, and a writing sample to english@fau.edu, with the subject line, “Caribbean/Latino search.” Applications must be submitted by 29 February 2016. Applications must also be submitted online at http://jobs.fau.edu, position number 01004271. A copy of the candidate’s transcript must be attached to the jobs.fau.edu submission. A background check will be required for the candidate selected for this position.

FAU serves a culturally and ethnically diverse six-county region in Southeast Florida (Broward, Indian River, Martin, Okeechobee, Palm Beach, and St. Lucie counties) whose total population is more than five million people. FAU is an Equal Opportunity/Equal Access Institution and respects diversity in all its forms. FAU has recently been named a Hispanic-serving Institution by the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.

 

Above adapted from emailed announcement.

Between Two Worlds: Jean Price-Mars, Haiti, and Africa CFP

Book chapters sought for anthology to be edited by Celucien L. Joseph, PhD

Deadline: 300 word abstract by 29 February 2016, emailed to (celucienjoseph@gmail.com)

Call for Papers

Jean Price-Mars (1876 – 1969), Haitian physician, ethnographer, diplomat, educator, historian, politician, was a towering intellectual in Haitian history and cultural studies, and a Pan Africanist who called to reevaluate the contributions of Africa in universal civilizations and to revalorize African retentions and cultural practices in the Black diaspora, especially on Haitian soil. Through his writings, Price-Mars, whom Leopold Sedar Senghor called “the Father of Negritude,” sought to establish connecting links between Africa and the Black Diaspora, and the shared history and struggle between people of African descent in the Diaspora.

For many scholars, Price-Mars is the father of Haitian ethnology and Dean of Haitian Studies in the twentieth-century, and arguably, the most influential Haitian thinker that has graced the “Black Republic” since the death of Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin in 1911. In Haitian thought, Price-Mars has exercised an enduring intellectual and ideological influence on the young Haitian intellectuals and writers of the generation of the American Occupation in Haiti (1915-1934) and the post-Occupation culture from the 1930s to 1970s. He is especially known for launching a cultural nationalism and an anti-imperial movement against the brutal American military forces in Haiti.

The writings of Price-Mars were instrumental in challenging the Haitian intellectual of his leadership role in the Haitian society, and in promoting national consciousness and unity among Haitians of all social classes and against their American oppressor. Comparatively, his work was a catalyst in the process of shaping and reshaping Haitian cultural identity and reconsidering the viability of the Afro-Haitian faith of Vodou as religion among the so-called World religions. His thought anticipated what is known today as postcolonialism and decolonization.

Moreover, scholars have also identified Price-Mars as the Francophone counterpart of W.E.B. Du Bois for his activism, scholarly rigor, leadership efficiency, and his unremitting efforts to challenge Western racial history, ideology, and white supremacy in the modern world. Unapologetically, Price-Mars challenged the doctrine of white supremacy and the ideological construction of Western history by demonstrating the equality and dignity of the races and all people, and their achievements in the human historical narrative. As Du Bois, he was a transdisciplinary scholar, boundary-crosser, and cross-cultural theorist; in an unorthodox way, he had brought in conversation various disciplines including anthropology, ethnography, geography, sociology, history, religion, philosophy, race theory, and literature to study the human condition and the most pressing issues facing the nations and peoples of the world, as well as the possible implications they may bear upon us in the postcolonial moment.

Between Two Worlds: Jean Price-Mars, Haiti, and Africa is a special volume on Jean Price-Mars that reassesses the importance of his thought and legacy, and the implications of his ideas in the twenty-first century’s culture of political correctness, the continuing challenge of race and racism, and imperial hegemony in the modern world. Price-Mars’ thought is also significant for the renewed scholarly interests in Haiti and Haitian Studies in North America, and the meaning of contemporary Africa in the world today. This volume explores various dimensions in Price-Mars’ thought and his role as medical doctor, historian, anthropologist, cultural critic, public intellectual, politician, pan-Africanist, and humanist.

Hence, the goal of this book is fourfold: 1) The book will explore the contributions of Price-Mars to Haitian history, thought, culture, literature, politics, education, health, etc., 2) This volume will investigate the complex relationships between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in Price-Mars’ historical writings, 3) It studies Price-Mars’ engagement with Western history and the problem of the “racist narrative,” and 4) Finally, the book will highlight Price-Mars’ contributions to Postcolonialism, Africana Studies, and Pan-Africanism.

Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance in the first week of April 2016. We are looking for original and unpublished essays for this book. Translations of Price-Mars’ works in the English language are also welcome. Potential topics to be addressed include (but are not limited to) the following:

Price-Mars as Historian
Price-Mars’ engagement with Western history
Price-Mars’ interpretation of Haitian history
The function of Haitian heroes and heroines in Price-Mars historical writings
The Origin (s) and History of Haiti and Dominican Republic in Price-Mars’ works
Particularism and Universalism in Price-Mars’ historical writings
Price-Mars as Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual in Haitian Society
Price-Mars as cultural theorist and literary critic
The role of Price-Mars’ thought in the Haitian Renaissance in the first half of the twentieth-century
Price-Mars and the Crisis of Haitian Intellectuals
Price-Mars and the Crisis of Haitian bourgeoisie-elite
Price-Mars, Vodou, and the Haitian culture
The Haitian peasant in the writings of Price-Mars
The Education of the Haitian masses in the writings of Price-Mars
The problem of Race in Price-Mars’ writings
Haitian Women in the thought of Price-Mars
Price-Mars’ contributions as Medical doctor in Haitian society.
Price-Mars as Politician
The Political career and goals of Jean Price-Mars
Price-Mars, Haiti’s Ambassador to the nations
Price-Mars and the American occupation and American imperialism
The political philosophy and democratic ideas of Price-Mars
Nationalism and Patriotism in Price-Mars’ thought
Price-Mars as Pan-Africanist
African history or the meaning of Africa in the writings of Price-Mars
The Black Diaspora in the thought of Price-Mars
Price-Mars’ Postcolonial Rhetoric and Linguistic Strategy
The Vindication and Rehabilitation of the Black Race
The Role and Contributions of Pre-colonial African civilizations to world civilizations
Price-Marsian Negritude or Blackness

About the Editor

Dr. Celucien L. Joseph is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Indian River State College. He received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Texas at Dallas, where he studied Literary Studies and Intellectual History. Professor Joseph also holds an M.A. in French language and literature from the University of Louisville. In addition, he holds degrees in theological and religious studies. He serves in the editorial board and Chair of The Journal of Pan African Studies Regional Advisory Board; he also the curator of “Haiti: Then and Now.” He edited JPAS special issue on Wole Soyinka entitled “Rethinking Wole Soyinka: 80 Years of Protracted Engagement” (2015). Dr. Joseph is interested in the intersections of literature, history, race, religion, theology, and history of ideas.

Above adapted from H-Net announcement.

 

 

Journal of West Indian Literature now online

The Journal of West Indian Literature is now available online. Starting with Vol 23 , issues 1 & 2 (April/November 2015), JWIL will be fully online and available for purchase in PDF format. For a limited time (as in, go get it now now now) the first issue is available for free here. Below is more information from the editorial board about the journal, its history, the transition to online, and this special offer (TOC of free-for-now issue also below).

JWIL currentissue_23

The Journal of West Indian Literature has been published twice-yearly by the Departments of Literatures in English of the University of the West Indies since October 1986. Edited by full-time academics, the journal originated at the same time as the first annual conference on West Indian Literature, the brainchild of Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris and Mark McWatt. It reflects the continued commitment to provide a regional and extra-regional forum for the dissemination and discussion of anglophone Caribbean literary and artistic culture. Initially featuring contributions from scholars in the West Indies, it has become an internationally recognized peer-reviewed academic journal.

JWIL’s editorial board welcomes articles in English that are the result of scholarly research in literary textuality (fiction, prose, drama, film, theory and criticism) of the English-speaking Caribbean; comparative assessments of non-Anglophone Caribbean texts are also accepted, provided that translations into English of the relevant parts of such texts are incorporated into the submission. JWIL will also publish book reviews.

In 2011, founding editor Mark McWatt celebrated JWIL’s twenty-fifth year of publication as a regional, UWI-led Caribbeanist project invested in highlighting and critically examining the prolific literary production of the Anglophone Caribbean. McWatt observed at the time that there was talk about the journal, which printed its first volume in 1986, “becoming exclusively an on-line publication” in the interests of international recognition and access. Of course, things moved slowly when the editors were all full-time academics juggling multiple responsibilities across the three campuses of the University of the West Indies, but only four years afterward, JWIL has indeed transitioned to an online platform. http://www.jwilonline.org/ is the journal’s first website, and it will be the platform for the first online volume: the double-issue Vol. 23 Nos. 1&2, which will appear in late December 2015, and will be open access for a limited time.

Table of Contents for latest issue:

“I Married My Mother”: Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then
Daryl Cumber Dance

On Scanning Louise Bennett Seriously
Ben Etherington

The Interplay of Political and Existential Freedom in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance
Tohru Nakamura

Pamela Mordecai’s Poetry: Some Questions for Further Consideration
Stephanie McKenzie

“Your journey, even when bumpy,/will be sweet”: Jamaica in Kei Miller’s A Light Song of Light
Bartosz Wójcik

“Our words spoken among us, in fragments”: Austin Clarke’s Aesthetics of Crossing
Paul Barrett

Sounding Out Spirit Thievery in Erna Brodber’s Myal
Anne Margaret Castro

Reading the Critical Pastoral in Lovelace’s Salt and Roffey’s White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Erin Fehskens

Book Reviews

Jean Goulbourne
Parable of the Mangoes
Aisha T. Spencer

Marlon James
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Philip Nanton

Vladimir Lucien
Sounding Ground
Laurence A. Briener

Notes on Contributors

On Caribbean Archaeology, Conservation and Material Culture

Archaeological Society of Jamaica, George Lechler & Karen Thompson-Spence Memorial Symposium
University of the West Indies, Mona
16-17 March 2016

On Caribbean Archaeology, Conservation and Material Culture

CFP deadline: 11 December 2015 (though extensions seem available)

The Archaeological Society of Jamaica will be holding its 14th Symposium, with a half day meeting on Conservation on the afternoon of Wednesday, 16 March 2016, and an all day meeting on Thursday, 17 March at the Multifunctional Room, Main Library, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica.

Proposals are invited for individual papers or panels on Caribbean Archaeology, Conservation, and Material Culture, broadly conceived. Papers on Heritage, Archives and Museums will also be welcome. Given Mr. Lechler’s and Ms. Thompson-Spence’s interests, papers on the history of collections and on Jamaican archaeology would be particularly welcome. These should include the presenter(s) name(s), a title and an abstract. Please also indicate if you will need equipment beyond Microsoft Power Point. The first call has a deadline of 11 December 2015.

There will be an opportunity for members to display paintings, drawings or photographs inspired by archaeology and history at the Symposium. Proposals are also invited for poster sessions.

Send e-mails to Dr. James Robertson, President, ASJ, james.robertson@uwimona.edu.jm or to ASJ Board Member Zachary Beier, zachary.beier@uwimona.edu.jm

Paper copies may be sent to Dr. Robertson or Mr. Beier, at the Department of History & Archaeology, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica.

A membership of the A.S.J. is not required to submit a proposal. There will be a registration fee of J$1000.00, for ASJ members J$800.00, or for students and pensioners, J$500.00, payable at the conference.

Above adapted from an emailed first call for papers.

Haiti in the Hispanophone Caribbean literary imaginary

Deadline: Proposal due 15 January 2016 and full article (2000-2500 words) due 1 April 2016

photo credit: Image taken from page 52 of 'British Possessions and Colonies.

CFP: Haiti in the Hispanophone Caribbean literary imaginary 

In her masterful 2012 study, From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam J. A. Chancy issues a stunning, and accurate indictment of the fields of American, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies for their disciplinary exclusion of Haiti. She writes that her aim is “to highlight the ways that racist essentialism has demarcated Haitians and other groups of African descent within the Caribbean as subalterns without agency” (xv). In an effort to contribute to the correcting this exclusion, sx salon: a small axe literary platform seeks discussion essays for a special section on Haiti in the literatures of the Spanish Caribbean. We welcome writings that represent the literary relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, between Haiti and Cuba (the subject of Ada Ferrer’s 2014 work Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution), and between Haiti and Puerto Rico.

This special section on Haiti in the Hispanophone Caribbean literary imaginary is slated for publication in 2016. Discussion articles are typically 2000-2500 words and offer targeted exploration of the topic. sx salon, launched in 2010 as part of the Small Axe Project, is an electronic publication dedicated to literary discussions, interviews with Caribbean literary figures, reviews of new publications (creative and scholarly) related to the Caribbean, and short fiction and poetry by emerging and established Caribbean writers. Visit www.smallaxe.net/sxsalon to view past issues and for submissions guidelines.

Proposals for this special section are due by 15 January 2016 and full discussion articles will be due by 1 April 2016. Please send proposals to Vanessa K Váldes at vkv@smallaxe.net.

 

photo credit: The British Library on Flickr, “Image taken from page 52 of ‘British Possessions and Colonies [with maps].”

A Haunting Refrain: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism

Nijah Noel Cunningham
Assistant Professor, Hunter College
presents work at the CUNY Africana Forum

November 5, 2015, 4:15 PM
Room C205
Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

Livestream: http://videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/

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A Haunting Refrain: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism

What happened to the future possibilities that once animated the longings for black and anticolonial revolution? How do we think about futurity in the context of freedom’s nonarrival? What form do utopian aspirations take when political possibilities appear exhausted? Living in the aftermath of revolutionary times, how might we remember what could have been? Working at the convergence of literature, performance theory, and visual culture, this paper considers the “afterlives” of black radical politics by way of an engagement with For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm, a collection of poems compiled and edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Burroughs following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, and a photograph of Betty Shabazz and two of her daughters at the 1967 Black Arts Convention in Detroit. This paper interrogates the normative logic of reproductive futurity that frames the legacy of Malcolm X and structures the redemptive accounts of a black nation to-come narrated in the wake of his death. Rather than reproduce masculinist imaginaries of black revolution or recuperate promises of political redemption, this paper mobilizes the work of elegy and photography to open up nascent worldings that linger in the present like a “haunting refrain.”

Presented by IRADAC, the CUNY Africana Forum invites CUNY faculty to freely engage with scholars and laypersons on issues concerning the African Diaspora worldwide.

Refreshments will be served.