Call for submissions to multi-generic anthology

CFP deadline: 30 March 2015

From emailed CFP:

Despite signs of economic recovery, millions of Americans from all walks of life are still experiencing tough economic times. With the reduction in food stamps and other welfare benefits, rise in college tuition across the nation, and continued high unemployment among some of the most marginalized in our society ( the poor, the elderly, and the youth, for example) many people are still having difficulty making ends meet. In addition, racial tensions have gotten even higher than usual fueled by recent incidents of racial profiling and police brutality, and nationwide protests against these incidents by a wide cross section of people.

Our anthology, Tough Times in America, aims to provide a platform for telling diverse stories about “tough times” from multiple perspectives. We will accept true stories, as well as “fictionalized” versions of real life events. This collection aims to preserve and document narrative accounts of the anger, fear and frustration that most Americans are feeling due to massive job losses, loss of homes, loss of healthcare, reduced retirement benefits, police profiling and police brutality, etc. We also hope to document the hope and gratitude that bloom even in the midst of despair—true testaments to the tenacity of the human spirit. Significantly, we would like this collection to reflect the diversity of America in the 21st century, and so we welcome submissions from people from all ethnicities, racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.

Fiction should be between 1500 to 4000 words. Times New Roman or similar sized font (12 point). Stories must be previously unpublished in any form, including print, web etc. Each story should be identified within the geographic location/landmark of the city in which it is set. We will consider stories from all around the Americas (yes, this includes the Caribbean and Latin America). For our poetry selections, we will consider up to 3 poems per author. We welcome established as well as unpublished writers who would like to represent their experiences or the experiences of their friends and loved ones as well as fictional accounts. Deadline for submissions: 30 March 2015.

Please send your submissions to: Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley: (weirsole@fiu.edu) and Max Freesney Pierre (prrmax@yahoo.com).

Dr. Weir-Soley is an Associate Professor of English at Florida International University. She is the author of First Rain, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings, and co-editor of the anthology Caribbean Erotic (Peepal Tree Press).

Max Freesney Pierre is an Adjunct Professor of English at Florida International University and a former administrator at Miami-Dade College. Pierre is a poet/writer/journalist, the author of Tambours de la Mêlée, Fée Caraïbe, Soul Traveler and Le chant de l’apaisement.

Call for Papers

African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group

Theme: Theatre and Performance in African/Caribbean Cultures of Democracy

International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) Conference,

 Hyderabad, India, 5-10 July 2015

The African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance (ACTP) Working Group will meet during the forthcoming IFTR conference in Hyderabad from 5^th to 10^th July 2015. The IFTR conference theme, “Theatre and Democracy”, invites participants to explore how theatre engages democracy with attention to various historical and culturally specific practices, institutions, notions, principles, etc. (See the IFTR Hyderabad website at http://www.iftr2015hyd.in for full details).

For the 2015 meeting of the African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group of IFTR, we call for papers that respond to the wider conference theme with African and Caribbean perspectives. Our theme, “Theatre and Performance in African/Caribbean Cultures of Democracy,” is concerned with that which links ideas and practices of democracy to the cultural domain of human life, i.e., to the matrices of human interaction in which signifying (especially, creative-expressive) practices inform and facilitate how people make, shape and understand the world around them. How, for instance, does theatre and performance (including the power relations and structures within theatre and performance making itself) replicate, reinvent, represent, reinforce, challenge or undermine democratic ideas and practice in African and Caribbean societies? We anticipate that proposed papers will explore theatre and performance in Africa and the Caribbean as key aspects of the cultural domain in which democracy is defined: as important sites where the scope and meanings of inclusion, marginalization, representation, access, political legitimacy, power, authority, control, censorship, freedom, voice, rights, etc. are contested, negotiated or consolidated within/against the frameworks of beliefs, values, traditions, customs, conventions, and/or protocols.

Please note:

Intending participants are invited to submit abstracts (maximum 250 words) for papers they wish to discuss at the 2015 IFTR conference in Hyderabad. Papers are welcome from within and across disciplines, including but not limited to Theatre and Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology. We welcome co-authored papers and collaborative presentations.

The abstract submission deadline is 31 January 2015. Abstracts can only be submitted through the abstract submission page at Cambridge Journals Online (http://journals.cambridge.org/iftr). You will have to be a current IFTR member or register in order to submit an abstract. The site will prompt you to join or renew your membership of IFTR. This has to be done by 31 January 2015otherwise your paper cannot be accepted for the conference.  For more information on this process, please visit: http://www.iftr2015hyd.in

The working group works by circulating papers in advance in order to make the most of the time and opportunity for discussion and engagement with those papers. Therefore, members whose abstracts are accepted will be required to submit their paper for circulation to members of the working group by 8 June 2015. This can be a work-in-progress (draft) version of the paper and must not exceed 4000 words.

Please forward this call for papers to colleagues who you think may be interested. Information about the working group can be found at http://www.firt-iftr.org/working-groups/theatre-and-cultural-studies/african-and-caribbean-theatre-and-performance

Conveners for the forthcoming meeting of the working group are:

·      David Donkor (dadonkor@tamu.edu) Texas A&M University, Texas, U.S.A.

·      Ekua Ekumah-Asamoah (eekumah@googlemail.com) University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana

Announcement above received via email.

Caribbean Military Encounters

Editors Shalini Puri and Lara Putnam invite papers for a multidisciplinary humanities anthology that explores the Caribbean as a militarized region.

CFP deadline: Proposals due 15 December 2014; full papers due 31 May 2015

From the CFP:

We hope to include essays from disciplines such as Art History, Cultural Studies, Literature, Media, Musicology, and Performance Studies.  Some essays might explore cartoons, art, music and literature that touch upon the militarization of everyday life.  Additionally, the collection will include testimonies and personal narratives gathered from Caribbean citizens and foreign and Caribbean military personnel.  We especially welcome contributions that draw on illuminating anecdote, narrative nuance, texture, and voice.

Our focus on lived experience, everyday life, and artistic and political cultures from across the numerous language areas of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean distinguishes our approach from that which is dominant in Policy Studies and Security Studies.  Our approach also differs from those strands of leftist or nationalist scholarship in which resistance to militarization has taken the form of a reluctance to explore the topic except via “agonistic narratives” (Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees 11) that highlight opposition and sidestep complicity, co-implication, and reluctant or strategic participation.  We are as interested in the creative ways disenfranchised populations claim the precarious possibilities militarization offers as we are in opposition to militarization expressed in the arts, everyday life, and organized politics; practices of complicity as well as of critique.  

Please send indication of interest, 500-word proposals (or longer work), contact information, and bios of 75 words by 15 December 2014.  Consideration by editors for inclusion in the volume will be based on the complete paper, which will be due 31 May 2015.  Final acceptance will depend on peer review.

Above adapted from emailed CFP

Proposals and papers should be sent by email to puri.shalini@gmail.com

African and Diasporic Spiritual Soundscapes
Harvard University | Friday, 3 April 2015 | 8 am – 5 pm
Film Festival Saturday, 4 April, Noon – 4pm

CFP deadline: 19 December 2014

The African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA) presents its third day-long conference on the theme African and Diasporic Spiritual Soundscapes. Coined by R. Murray Schafer, the term soundscape refers to a combination of sounds that inhabit an environment. Songs, stomps, chants, claps, rhythmic breaths, animal sounds, ringing bells, prayers, shaking rattles, shouts, laughter, rustles of leaves, pounding of pestle on mortar, and more comprise the soundscapes of African and Diasporic Religious practice. This conference will investigate and celebrate these sounds, the aural tapestries they weave, and the ways in which they are integral to our understandings of the worldsenses contained in these rich traditions with topics including but not limited to:

• African and Diasporic religious perspectives on noise, music, and sound
• Theories and meanings of the use of music and sound in ritual
• Ethnomusicological case studies on music and sound in  African and Diasporic traditions
• Comparative studies juxtaposing types of sound or the use of similar sounds across traditions

Submissions should center on one or more African Indigenous (Ndebele, Yoruba, Kongo, Dagara, Eedyi, Igbo, Shona, etc.) or African Diasporic (Vodou, Lukumi, Umbanda, Shango Baptist, Kumina, Revival Zion, etc.) spiritual/religious traditions. Scholar-practitioner perspectives are welcomed. Panel proposals are encouraged. Graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply.

For consideration, please submit a 500 word abstract, a 100-250 word bio, and Curriculum Vitae by 19 December 2014. Panel proposals should include a 300-500 word description of the panel and all of the above information for each participant.

Submit abstracts at www.ADRSA.com/conference

For inquiries contact info@ADRSA.org

Find out more about the ADRSA at www.ADRSA.org

Above adapted from emailed CFP.

Edited Collection on Twentieth Century Black Women’s Internationalism

CFP deadline: Completed manuscripts due 30 December 2014

Editors: Tiffany M. Gill (University of Delaware) and Keisha N. Blain (Penn State)

The scholarship on the Black International has been predominately male-centric, emphasizing individuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Paul Robeson and C.L.R. James. With few exceptions, black women have been marginalized in historical narratives of black internationalism, which center on the global visions of black people in the United States and their sustained efforts to forge transnational collaborations and solidarities with people of color from across the globe. This volume is a collection of essays that analyze the gendered contours of black internationalism and explore the creative and critical ways women articulated black internationalism during the twentieth century. Highlighting the writings, speeches, performances, activism, and overseas travel of a diverse range of female actors, this collection moves black women from the margins to the center of the historical narrative. However, this anthology does more than just expand the paucity of scholarship on black women and internationalism. Indeed, this volume is both an assessment of the field as well as an attempt to expand the contours of black internationalism theoretically, spatially, and temporally. In contrast to studies that confine black internationalism to foreign policy agendas and political insurgencies, this collection captures the shifting meanings, complexities, and varied articulations of the term.

The editors seek historical essays that employ a gender analysis, foreground black women’s voices, and reveal the underappreciated importance of women in shaping black internationalist movements and discourse(s) during the twentieth century. Continue reading Twentieth Century Black Women’s Internationalism

Genetics/Heritage: New Perspectives on the Study of Atlantic Slavery
23-25 April 2015
International Slavery Museum
Liverpool, UK

Deadline for Submissions: 250-word abstracts due 1 December 2014

From the organizers:We invite contributions to Genetics/Heritage, an international
conference on that brings together perspectives from population
genetics, archaeology, anthropology, and history. We are seeking
20-minute presentations that highlight cutting-edge research from
genetics and heritage to showcase the productive results of
collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. Papers that focus on the
history and contemporary legacies of the transatlantic slave trade are
particularly welcome.

The conference is funded by the EUROTAST, a Marie Curie Initial
Training Network and supported by the International Slavery Museum in
Liverpool. The event will also feature a keynote address from
Professor Alondra Nelson, Columbia University, and will take place the
23-24 of April, 2015 at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool,
with a community workshop on April 25th.

Proposals for papers (20 minutes in length) should be submitted as an
abstract (250 words max) by 1 December.

Please submit your abstract here.

Above adapted from email announcement. Please see the organizers’ website for more details:
GENETICS/HERITAGE.

“More Than White, More Than Mulatto, More Than Black”:
Racial Politics in Cuba and the Americas

26-28 February 2015
Florida International University
Modesto A. Maidique Campus

Deadline for submissions: 31 October 2014

CFP from conference website:

The Cuban Research Institute (CRI) of Florida International University continues its tradition of convening scholars, students, and other persons interested in the study of Cuba and Cuban Americans by announcing its Tenth Conference. We encourage the submission of panels and papers concentrating on any aspects of the main conference theme, but will consider all submissions relevant to the history, economy, politics, culture, society, and creative expression of Cuba and its diaspora. Continue reading Racial Politics in Cuba and the Americas