Category: CFPs

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

Continue reading The Black Fantastic – Third Stone Journal CFP

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.

CFP Deadline: 15 January 2020

The 2018 theme for the 37^th 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.

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.

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 21^st 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.

 

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.

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

“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

“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

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.

CFP Deadline: 1 August 2019

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

CFP Deadline: 15 June 2019

Label Me Latina/o is an online, refereed international e-journal that focuses on Latino Literary Production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal invites scholarly essays focusing on these writers for its biannual publication.

Scholarly submissions should be between 12-30 pages, double-spaced, 12 point font and should follow the MLA Style Manual. Please use End Notes rather than Footnotes and place page numbers in the upper right hand corner. Original, unpublished submissions in Microsoft Word (PC compatible format) should be sent electronically to both of the co-directors: Kathryn Quinn-Sánchez ksanchez@georgian.edu and Michele Shaul shaulm@queens.edu
Continue reading Label Me Latina/o

CFP Deadline: 15 June 2019

The Editors of African and Black Diaspora announce a Call for Papers on Black Intellectuals and the Making of the Atlantic World for a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

During the three decades between the end of World War I and 1950, Black intellectuals (from Africa, Caribbean, the United States), cultural workers, students, artists and political activists forged new conceptions of self beyond the confines of the colonial matrix and forged anti-colonial political and cultural organizations, as well as journals and newspapers, and created wider solidarity networks with progressive organizations and movements in the center of Empire. The new spaces they developed in London, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin etc. … increased the interactions among Black intellectuals in the colonial metropole which functioned as a site of anti-colonial resistance against racism and colonialism. In the process, Black intellectuals and artists, created a dynamic and transnational spaces in which “cultural exchange, production and belonging” (Gilroy 1993) were forged across space and time in the making of the modern Black Atlantic world. Indeed, Black intellectuals during the period and since used a wide variety of cultural productions, and artistic works as a form of language artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance as a rich continuum of cultural exchange that imaginatively reinvented, re-created, and restored the centrality of African diaspora in the making of the modern Black Atlantic world.

The Editors of African and Black Diaspora are seeking papers that examine the development of Black intellectual movements and the various political and cultural networks they developed in the colonial metropolis and how these networks were activated, nurtured to conveyed transnational dialogue among people of the African descent. In what ways have these networks both real and imagined become spaces of knowledge and memory? What cultural resources and political practices were deployed to “improvising new lives…, creating new possibilities … and decolonizing” the metropolis itself (Schwarz, 2003). What political discourse and cultural resources were developed to resist the colonial empire both at home and abroad?

Continue reading Black Intellectuals and the Making of the Atlantic World