Author: Teanu Reid

Brand Jamaica Edited Volume

CFP Deadline: 5 January 2018

We are seeking submissions for consideration for publication in the volume “BRAND JAMAICA”: Re-Imagining Jamaica’s National Image & Identity (under contract with University of Nebraska Press).

The volume offers a critique of the existing models within which Jamaica’s global image is framed. As Jamaica recognizes more than half a century as an independent nation, the time is apt for Jamaican authorities to interrogate, deconstruct and re-imagine how they constitute the nation’s public image, and the way they project the nation in the world. The volume offers such a rethinking. It problematizes the current tourism model of “sun, sand and sea”, particularly within the context of post-coloniality, and examines the ways in which it excludes and obscures other crucial aspects of Jamaica’s public international image and ignores the unintentional images, vistas, and stereotypes it creates. The primary aim of the volume is to highlight some of the problematic aspects of Jamaica’s nation branding project and advocate for a paradigmatic shift in the model of nation branding Jamaica undertakes – one which is more comprehensive, complete, and offers a critical articulation of the nation that locates the Jamaican people at the center and acknowledges, if not addresses, the realities of Jamaica.

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Andrew W Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies

Review of applications will begin on 1 February 2018

The Africana Studies Program at Bowdoin College invites applications for a one-year Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in African Studies (Sub-Saharan West Africa) or African Diaspora Studies (West Africa and some area, or areas, of the Atlantic World, excluding the US) to begin July 1, 2018. The field is open to applicants from any academic discipline. Fellows are expected to teach three courses, that include a combination of introductory and intermediate lectures and seminars, and to participate in the life of the program.

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My Music My Culture: The Caribbean Diaspora in Brooklyn

7:00pm – 8:30pm
1 December 2017
EOJ Auditorium
Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Admission: $20 at the door or online

My Music, My Culture: The Caribbean Diaspora in Brooklyn takes audiences on a journey through the music of the Caribbean diaspora in Brooklyn, with a focus on the music of Trinidad and Tobago. A musical adaptation of and ode to her recently published ethnographic memoir, East of Flatbush, North of Love, artist-scholar Danielle Brown, Ph.D. teaches the audience about the history and culture of Trinidad and Tobago the same way that she was taught—through song. Accompanied by a 4-piece band, Brown interweaves the music of the U.S., Trinidad and Tobago, and the larger Caribbean region to tell an immigrant story—made more poignant by the times in which we are living—and reveal how the legacy of colonialism and imperialism continues to impact people of color today.

Above text and images adapted from email.

The Caribbean Digital IV

6:00pm – 6:00pm
30 November – 1 December 2017
University of Virginia

In our evening keynote conversation and over the course of our day of multiform panel presentations, participants engage critically with the digital as praxis, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that evermore intensely reconfigure the social, historical, and geo-political contours of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Presenters consider the affordances and limitations of the digital with respect to a wide range of disciplines and methodologies. Discussions pick up themes addressed in our 2014 inaugural event and, subsequently, during our 2015 and 2016 events – many of which currently feature in our first and second issues of sx archipelagos, the peer-reviewed Small Axe Project publishing platform dedicated to Caribbean digital scholarship and scholarship of the Caribbean digital.

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Readings with Rosamond King

ROSAMOND S. KING is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist. She is the author of the critical book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. She is an associate professor of English at CUNY Brooklyn College and a scholar of African and Caribbean
sexuality, literature, and performance.


Rosamond King, photo by Arnold Adler 

King will be reading from her latest book, Rock | Salt | Stone. All readings are free and open to the public. Copies of Rock | Salt | Stone will be available for purchase at all of the readings, or at Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or your favorite neighborhood bookstore!

7pm – 9pm
14 November 2017
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton St., Brooklyn NY

Reading with Anne Lai, Celina Su, and Samantha Zighelboim.
Sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

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Langston Hughes Festival at The City College of New York

16 November 2017
Aaron Davis Hall
City College of New York, CUNY


Zadie Smith

The Langston Hughes Festival has been in existence since 1978.  Its mission is to celebrate and expand upon the literary legacy of the poet laureate of Harlem, James Langston Hughes .  We award the Langston Hughes Medal to the most distinguished writers associated with the African diaspora.  The medal is presented as the culmination of a day of salons, scholarly conferences and symposia in celebration of the legacy of Langston Hughes, as well as a creative performance in tribute to the honoree and an interview of and reading by the honoree. We also sponsor a Choral Speaking Festival for students grade K through 12.

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A Reading and Conversation with Marlon James

Part of The Distinguished Writers Series

6:30pm
7 November 2017
West Building – Faculty Dining Room
Hunter College, CUNY

Marlon James is the author of three novels, including the 2015 Man Brooker Prize winning A Brief History of Seven Killings. Born in Jamaica, James lives and teaches in Minneapolis, where they established “Marlon James Day” to honor his literary success. The Guardian called his second book, The Book of Night Women, “easily one of the best Jamaican novels ever written.”

This event is free and open to the public but reservations are required.
To RSVP email [email protected] or call 212-772-4007.

Above image and text adapted from webpage.

 

Imperialism and Latin America: Land Grabbing of Garífuna Communities

6:30pm – 8:00pm
26 October 2017
CUNY Graduate Center – Room C198


Cover book art for Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America and Imperialist Canada. 

This panel will analyze the relationship between emergent imperialisms in Canada and the dispossession and resettlement of the Black-Indigenous Garífuna peoples in Honduras.

The Garífuna is a matrifocal differentiated culture born in St. Vincent of the union of Arawak Amerindians and Africans who escaped slavery and reached the other side of the Atlantic as free people. Women are a central force in the fight to preserve the Garífuna ancestral territory, which OFRANEH leads since 1978. Continue reading Imperialism and Latin America: Land Grabbing of Garífuna Communities

The Iyanifa Debate: Cuban, African, and American Diasporic Heteronationalisms

4:30pm – 6:00pm
16 October 2017
Burr Hall – 216
Princeton University

Princeton’s department of Spanish and Portuguese presents Aisha Beliso-De Jesús (Anthropology, Harvard University) “The Iyanifa Debate: Cuban, African, and American Diasporic Heteronationalisms.”

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Latin American Studies, American Studies, Department of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Latino Studies.

Above text and image adapted from webpage.

Caribbean Cosmopolis: Timeports of Modernity

9:00am – 6:00pm
12 – 13 October 2017
Room 1008 Humanities
Stony Brook University

This conference will examine the changing modes and meanings of time, temporality (or time’s passing) and futurity in Caribbean cultural production from the 15th century to the present. It will bring together a cross-disciplinary and inter-hemispheric group of scholars to explore the Caribbean as a crucial space of time-making, calibration and reinvention. The conference will also provide a platform to convene around the current emergency in the region, where the response to natural disasters entails a recourse to both colonial imaginaries and narratives and 21st century technocratic discourses of expertise and efficiency.

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Unnatural: Environmental Disasters and Domination in the Contemporary Caribbean

5:00pm
4 October 2017
Hamilton Hall – 420
Columbia University

A discussion with:
Natasha Lightfoot (Columbia University), Monxo Lopez (CUNY Hunter College), Tami Navarro (Barnard College), Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University), Michael Ralph (New York University), and Keisha I. Weil (Temple University)

Registration is free and open to the public. No registration is necessary. Seating is first come, first seated.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race DEcolonization Series, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Institute of Latin America Studies Greater Caribbean Center.

Above text and image adapted from webpage.

PROMESA: The Fiscal Crisis in Puerto Rico and the Debt of Artists

1:00pm – 2:30pm
14 October 2017
El Museo del Barrio

Admission is Free, however a $5 minimum donation will be taken at the entrance.
To RSVP, click here.

As part of the OCCUPY MUSEUM: Debtfair exhibition on view in Las Galerias, join us for a special panel discussion about the research-based project, featuring works by 10 artists from Puerto Rico, organized by Occupy Museums. The discussion will focus on the debt crisis, the implications of Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) and artists’ relationship to this economic reality in Puerto Rico.

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