The 2024 Caribbean Digital Virtual Artist’s Residency

Applications due: Monday, 1 April 2024

The Caribbean Digital (TCD) and Alice Yard invite applications for the annual virtual residency program for artists of the Caribbean and its diasporas who work in digital media. The residency aims to facilitate the development of new artworks in digital media that investigate ideas and practices in Caribbean Digital Humanities and engage with scholars in the TCD network and community. The residency is offered in conjunction with the annual Caribbean Digital (TCD) conference, an international event hosted annually at locations in the United States and the Caribbean since 2014, in partnership with Alice Yard, a contemporary art collective based at Granderson Lab in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. This program, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, offers a cash stipend to support research and creative work, curatorial mentorship, virtual studio visits, publication by a professional art writer to document artist’s work, and travel accommodations to present at the annual TCD conference in December 2024. 

For more information, including the requirements for submission and application form, please see our Call for Applications here: https://thecaribbeandigital.org/residency/ 

The deadline for applications is Monday, 1 April 2024

Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute (CDSsi)

The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) invites applications for their inaugural week-long residential digital humanities institute, to be held at the University of Miami in June 2023. The CDSC supports the growth and development of digital humanities scholarship, training, and infrastructure for the Caribbean and its diasporas. The Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute (CDSsi) will train scholars, at all levels, working at the intersections of Caribbean Studies and digital humanities. Thanks to a generous Mellon Foundation grant, the CDSC will be able to cover travel and accommodations for fellows selected for participation in the summer institute.

For more information, including the requirements for submission and application form, please see the Call for Applications

Our deadline for applications is Tuesday, 31 January 2023 and there will be a virtual information session on Tuesday, 17 January 2023. Register for that information session here.

CFP: The Future of West Indian Literature

The Future of West Indian Literature
40th West Indian Literature Conference and
11th Critical Caribbean Symposium
University of The Bahamas Nassau, The Bahamas
13th-15th October 2022

CFP: Abstracts due 16 May 2022 (extended deadline)
Notification of decision: 30 May 2022

The Future of West Indian Literature, Creative Practices, Culture, and Criticism is in flux as the Caribbean region faces new and old burdens and challenges. It is imperative that we consider how we address impending crises that include climate change and its impacts on the region, public health crises, cultural commodification in the global marketplace, Caribbean literary criticism and its metropoles, regional publishing, creative cultural studies, and the literary imagination. As Caribbean futures continue to be yoked to tourism and extractive and consumptive practices, the political and social needs of local residents are overlooked, often in favor of tending to visitors. How do literary scholars, West Indian writers at home and in the diaspora, tackle these realities through the critical discourses in the field? How might academic institutions engage more fully in these conversations and provide innovative interventions that benefit local economies, intellectual communities, and cultural production? These are some of the questions we will consider when we meet next in the Bahamas.

This will be a hybrid conference and proposers are encouraged to state which modality they would prefer. The abstract should state whether the presentation will be virtual or in-person. The conference organizing committee encourages submissions from literary scholars and critics, and from all sectors of the creative community. The proposal accompanying each paper/abstract should indicate how the work fits within one of the following thematic threads: Continue reading CFP: The Future of West Indian Literature

The Black Fantastic – Third Stone Journal CFP

CFPThird Stone Journal – Open call for scholarly articles of varying lengths and creative work
Deadline: Rolling
Submit: 3rdstonejournal@gmail.com

Across the African diaspora, art has been a form of expression and liberation at times of widespread cultural oppression, enabling artists of color to resist the tradition of silencing while preserving their histories, traditions, and more in ways that could be passed down intergenerationally. While much art worked to fulfill a political purpose by pushing for equality and liberty in oppressive cultures, other works aimed at achieving liberation by celebrating Black cultural forms, from the cutting-edge music of Erykah Badu to that of Janelle Monae. Eager to explore art as liberation among other topics, Third Stone accepts submissions year round of art, music, creative writing, short films, scholarship, digital content, and more on Afrofuturism, African-futurism, and the Black fantastic as explored both inside and outside of the borders of the United States.

Continue reading The Black Fantastic – Third Stone Journal CFP

CFP – Concept and Approaches to Whiteness in Latin America and the Caribbean – Special Journal Issue

CFP Deadline: 2 March 2020

“…In this proposed special journal issue, we approach race as a relational concept that not only involves oppressed ‘racial minorities,’ but also white populations who benefit from racial disparities in politically, socially, quotidian, and systemic ways. Seeking to provide a roadmap to examine racial privilege in Latin America and the Caribbean, in this Call for Papers, we encourage abstract submissions from humanists and social scientists whose work carefully examines whiteness in the region, while highlighting critical theoretical debates and empirical approaches…”

To view the full CFP and to submit, please refer to the website.

Above text adapted from email and website.

Call for Papers – Global Caribbean Studies: “Scapes”

CFP Deadline: 15 January 2020

The 2018 theme for the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference recognized the vast routes/roots that link the Caribbean to the hemisphere and the globe.  As many writers and literary scholars have noted, the immense bodies of water that appear to isolate belie the currents that intimately connect, and at times, destroy shelter, lands, and peoples. Deploying Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “scapes” that work to enable the exchange of ideas and information, we engaged a breadth of issues relevant to Caribbeanists in the region and its diasporas.   We are now soliciting papers from that conference for publication in an upcoming issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal.

Please upload your submission at anthurium.miami.edu/about/submissions/.

Above text adapted from email.

Call for Book Chapter Proposals — Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational

Deadline: 1 March 2020

“…This collection of essays on the literature or national allegories (Jameson) of the diaspora and the transnational plans to explore the sundry and geographically expansive ways Anglophone literatures by colonized subjects and emigrants negotiate diasporic spaces to create what Benedict Anderson sees as “imagined communities,” or what Homi Bhabha calls “home, a place uncannily oscillating between estrangement and engagement…. Papers will explore the lived experiences of emigrants of the diaspora within this specific linguistic and cultural area, and the extent to which these new and evolving spaces (physical, ontological, and metaphorical) represented in literature are rife with tensions concerning identify, language, and belongingness in the struggle for home…”

Themes could include but are not limited to:

  • restlessness and tensions
  • ambiguities
  • assimilation
  • resistance to total immersion
  • nostalgia, sentimentality, and homesickness
  • national schizophrenia
  • divided loyalties
  • intellectual capital
  • and geographical interstices—living uncomfortably in that space between two worlds, one perhaps dead and the other struggling to be born.

Please refer to the post for more information.

Contact:

Jude V. Nixon (Jnixon@salemstate.edu) and Mariaconcetta Costantini (mariaconcetta.costantini@unich.it), editors to the volume, or Victoria Echegaray (victoria.echegaray@vernonpress.com), Vernon Press editor.

Above text adapted from email and webpage.

CSA 2020 CFP: Identity Politics, Industry, Ecology and the Intelligent Economy in Caribbean Societies

CFP Deadline: 31 December 2019

Disruption is the new normal. In today’s so-called post-truth Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data where data is heralded as the “new oil,” the Caribbean faces old and new forms of complexity as the 21st century progresses. The complexities of race, ethnicity, class, language (both official and creole), skin color, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, religion and nationality continue to present challenges and contradictions in the pursuit of improving the lives of Caribbean people or towards inclusive ecological “development.” Yet, in an ever more globalized era of fast-paced technological advancements, AI has transformational potentialities that will affect the complexities that confront Caribbean development and go beyond those associated with the ticklish politics of identity. The combination of the swift pace of technological transformations and the effects of these on political, social and economic organization; on popular culture; and on cultural expression raise intriguing questions about how Caribbean life can be organized towards national, regional and even external development agendas. Moreover, the serious ecological challenges, most prominent of which is currently the threat of climate change, mean that sustainable practices must be at the center of economic development. Although balancing ecological concerns with more traditional approaches to “industry” for development poses challenges, even more daunting are shifts towards more digital and “high-tech” industrial and economic activities.  Cloud computing, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence, 3-D Printing, bio-technology, Nano-technology, intelligent machines, and block chain technologies are but some of the innovations that offer possibilities and perils, and add further layers of complexity to already complicated Caribbean realities. The CSA 2020 conference invites submissions from any disciplinary persuasion that seek to analyze, deconstruct and reflect on the technological transformations, the politics of identity and the somewhat contradictory ecological and industrial imperatives for “development” that combine to affect Caribbean societies and realities.

Conference themes:

Proposals are welcomed from the individual thematic areas presented below. Since the themes of the conference are interconnected, we also enthusiastically encourage proposals that explore the linkages between the conference thematic areas.  We will also consider proposals that go beyond or fall outside of the suggested thematic areas by exploring issues of significance for the Caribbean. However, priority will be given to proposals that seek to address the conference themes.

A. Identity Politics and Caribbean Development
B. Industry and Ecology
C. Industry and the Intelligent Economy

Please refer to the website for the full CFP and to submit an abstract, and direct any questions to: secretariat@caribbeanstudiesassociation.org.

Above text and image adapted from email and website.

 

Education and the Politics of Education in the Caribbean

CFP Deadline: 31 October 2019

This Call For Papers is for a Congress on the Caribbean that will take place in March 2020 in Erlangen (Bavaria), Germany. Questions and/or abstracts (up to 500 words in English, French, or Spanish) should be sent to the email address on the flyer: conference-caribbean2020@fau.de.

Above text and image adapted from email.

From Katrina to Michael: Disaster in the 21st-century Circum-Caribbean

20-21 February 2020
Florida State University

CFP Deadline: 30 September 2019 

Keynote speakers:
Yarimar Bonilla (Rutgers University), Laura Wagner (freelance anthropologist), and Mark Schuller (Northern Illinois University and Faculté d’Ethnologie – Université d’Etat d’Haïti)

Conference artist: Édouard Duval Carrié

To mark the 10-year anniversary of the Haitian earthquake, this conference proposes a regional approach to disaster that seeks to draw connections between 21st-century experiences of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, including the south-east U.S. and North Florida post-Michael. Continue reading From Katrina to Michael: Disaster in the 21st-century Circum-Caribbean

19th International Conference on Caribbean Literature

“Caribbean Literary Crossings, Critical Crossroads and Cross-Disciplinary Conversations”

13-15th November 2019
Bridgetown, Barbados

CFP Deadline: 15 July 2019 

From the recent treatment of the Windrush generation in Britain to the growing interest in the environmental humanities and the plantationocene, Caribbean literary arts continue to provide insights relevant to our lived experiences. From créolité to cross-cultural dialogue, the boundary-blurring aesthetic of the region is instrumental in throwing into relief fruitful connections important to our understandings of, for example, cultural and socio-political relationships.

Attentive to a region characterised by metaphors of change and interstices, the 19th International Conference on Caribbean Literature seeks to explore how crossroads, crossings and cross-fertilisations continue to be used to figure Caribbean futures. The main aim is to examine the kinds of connections to be developed between, for example, literature and law, speculative fiction and ethics, drama and medicine, poetry and marketing with a view to how these connections can be used to benefit Caribbean development and foster a productive commitment to literature, specifically, and the humanities in general. To this end, papers are therefore invited on topics related, but not limited, to: Continue reading 19th International Conference on Caribbean Literature

*UPDATED* 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

“HINTERLANDS : Journeys of the Imagination”

17-20th October 2019
University of Guyana, Turkeyen Campus
Georgetown, Guyana

CFP Deadline: 20 June 2019 


Image: “Palace of the Peacock – Homage to Wilson Harris”,
George Simon, Phibert Gajadhar, Anil Roberts,
University of Guyana (2009)

Among the most significant origins of West Indian Literature is The Discovery of Guiana (1597) by one of the “ancestral murderers and poets” (Walcott), Sir Walter Ralegh. The quest for gold, the dream of wealth and power inspired centuries of “history, fable and myth” (Harris), which saw Ralegh himself, and generations of West Indian writers in pursuit of the elusive El Dorado, hidden in the mysteries of the Guianese Hinterland. The “Interiors” (McWatt), the “heartland”, the rainforests – the “hinterland”, is that vast unfathomable region that is largely unexplored, untamed, dynamic; whose definition is yet incomplete and the subject of a continuing journey of exploration and of the imagination.

That is West Indian literature at this time. That is what this conference seeks to interrogate. It is the subject of the conference and a concept of Guyana – the country in which the 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference will be held.
Continue reading *UPDATED* 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

Louise Bennett Anthology

CFP Deadline: 1 August 2019

This Call For Papers is for an amazing Louise Bennett anthology that will be published end of 2019 to honor the 100th birthday of Jamaica’s folk icon. The anthology is seeking to gather 100 submissions from as many writers/ poets/ critics/ artists as possible. Questions should be sent to the email address on the flyer (misslou100igdsrco@gmail.com) or to Isis Semaj-Hall directly at isissemajhall@gmail.com

Above text and image adapted from email.

Caribbean Quarterly: Enough!

CFP Deadline: 1 August 2019

Caribbean Quarterly is now accepting submissions for Enough!, an issue dedicated to addressing child sexual abuse (CSA) in Caribbean culture through an examination of regional literature, film, art, music, and life writing. The journal is currently accepting articles (6000 words), poems (2 pages or less), short prose (1500 words or less), personal narratives (1500 words), and art (photographs, paintings, or drawings in jpeg format) focusing on CSA in the Caribbean.

This issue seeks to bring the art and scholarly communities as well as victims/survivors together to address the critical issue of CSA in the Caribbean region by initiating a conversation. This issue hopes to answer some questions, such as: Why is CSA so prevalent in the Caribbean, and what can be done to address it on a social, familial, and governmental level? Can the Caribbean transform its culture of accepting or concealing CSA? What are the historical origins of CSA culture in the Caribbean and can this narrative be altered? Is there a connection between gender and possible victimization in incidents of CSA in the Caribbean?

Some possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • CSA in Caribbean literature, film, art, poetry, music
  • CSA and the Caribbean media
  • Addressing CSA in the Caribbean on a socio-cultural level
  • Families and CSA in the Caribbean
  • Reaching victims/survivors of CSA in the Caribbean
  • Addressing CSA in the Caribbean through education
  • CSA in the Caribbean and the culture of young girls and older men
  • Educating boys and men in the Caribbean on CSA culture
  • Victims of CSA in the Caribbean and gender

Please submit an article proposal of 250 words or less to guest editor Camille Alexander at calexander@uaeu.ac.ae by August 1, 2019. Accepted proposals will receive responses by August 20, 2019 with final manuscripts due by December 1, 2019.

Submissions of prose, poems, art, and personal narratives may be submitted at any time before October 1, 2019; responses will be sent by December 1, 2019. For book review enquiries, please review the book list at http://www.uwi.edu/cq/reviews/booksreview.aspx and contact Caribbean Quarterly editor Kim Robinson-Walcott at kimberly.robinson@uwimona.edu.jm with your book selection preference.

For any additional enquiries about this issue of Caribbean Quarterly, please contact Camille Alexander, Assistant Professor, United Arab Emirates, University, calexander@uaeu.ac.ae.

Above text adapted from webpage.

Killens Review of Arts & Letters

Fall/Winter 2019 Issue
Theme: “Life at a Crossroads”

CFP Deadline:  19 July 2019

Overview of the Journal:

For the Fall 2019 issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, we seek submissions of creative nonfiction, fiction, essays, interviews, book reviews, poetry, memoir, photography, and visual artwork by writers and artists of the African diaspora that mediate on facing a challenging decision or a life-changing moment that has made an impact on future generations or contributed to the legacy of the Black experience throughout the African diaspora.

THEME DESCRIPTION: “Life at a Crossroads”

In the 1941 book 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, a combination of text and photographs that present a commentary on the hardships and aspirations of Blacks in America in the early 1900s, writer Richard Wright ends his prose with: “We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shall be with them.”

Since the publication of 12 Million Black Voices more than 74 years ago, there have been cultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical changes in America that have had a dramatic impact on the perspectives, beliefs, and livelihoods of people of the Black community. They have also left an indelible mark on American and world culture. Today, people of the Africa diaspora still stand at a crossroads, a time in which significant change and decision making are crucial to making a contribution to future generations and leaving a legacy to Black culture.

Please submit to only one category at a time:
essay, fiction, interview, poetry, prose, and art.
We aim to respond to your submission within two months time.

Submission Guidelines Continue reading Killens Review of Arts & Letters