Philosophy Born of Struggle XXI 2014 Annual Meeting

Forging Concepts through Struggle: The New Slave—Racism, Empire, and Sexual Violence.

31 October – 1 November 2014

Paine College, Augusta, Georgia.

Call for Papers

Submission Deadline: 1 August 2014

Submission Guidelines:  Email a Microsoft Word document including the title, abstract, institutional affiliation, rank or occupation, and email address to: [email protected]

Over the last decade, the worsening plight of Blacks in the United States has raised fundamental questions about reconciling democracy with poverty, freedom with statism and government surveillance, and the idea of racial progress with the routinized deaths/murders of Black men, women and children. These realities have led some to ask a deeper question: Did slavery ever really end, or do Blacks around the world still effectively live in chains?

The thought of Blacks as NEW SLAVES has led recent scholars to reformulate questions of race, class, and gender into more complex notions of empire, neo-liberalism, and sexual violence. This reformulation has drawn on and reshaped resources from a variety of sources. Africana philosophy, Latin American philosophy, (post) structuralism/ (post) colonialism, psychoanalysis, and anti-colonial thought have loomed large, as have the works of literary, visual, and performing artists.

The 2014 meeting of Philosophy Born of Struggle takes up these questions and resources. Hosted this year at Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, Philosophy Born of Struggle  asks for papers and panels looking to explore the complex obstacles towards freedom, or more accurately stated, how the conditions, values, and institutions PBOS have made synonymous to “being free,” have in fact concealed and consolidated the long afterlife of slavery.

Research questions include:  Continue reading CFP- Philosophy Born of Struggle XXI 2014

UPDATED Call for Papers: Special Issue of The Black Scholar on Race, Blackness, and the Dominican Republic

New deadline: Abstracts by 31 July 2014 and full article by 15 December 2014

Submissions should be sent to special guest editors, Raj Chetty ([email protected]) and Amaury Rodríguez ([email protected]).

Publication of the special issue is slated for late 2015. When preparing manuscripts, please follow The Black Scholar Submission Guidelines.

The editors of The Black Scholar welcome essays for a special issue examining the complexity of black cultural politics and identity in the Dominican Republic. This special issue seeks to analyze Dominican racial relations against the grain of the cross-disciplinary consensus, primarily U.S.-based, that focuses on Dominicans’ “negrophobia,” “anti-Haitianism,” and “self-hatred.” In this way, the issue inserts itself into a globally comparative Black Studies, including the articulations and disarticulations between blackness in the US, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

Aiming to include a cross-disciplinary group of writers, scholars, and activists from the Dominican Republic and Dominicanists from abroad, the issue invites essays on the following topics:

• Methodologies of studying blackness and Africanness in the Dominican Republic
• Archives/archaeologies of Dominican blackness
• Imperialism, blackness, and U.S.-Dominican relations
• Dominican Black transnationalisms: intra-Caribbean, inter-American, and African-Dominican
• Critical histories of antihaitianismo, Haitian-Dominican cultural relations, and/or Haitian-Dominican solidarity
• Race and blackness in Dominican popular cultural production
• Political economy of blackness vis-à-vis the Dominican Republic
• Racism, colorism, and white supremacy in Dominican social structures
• Perceptions of Dominicans by U.S. Blacks, Caribbeans, and/or Africans
• Dominican conceptualizations of diaspora: la diáspora in Dominican migration, African diaspora in a Dominican sense, diaspora in an Afro-dominican sense

The issue anticipates that the suggested topics in the list above, or relevant topics not listed, will engage scholars in Black/Africana Studies, Caribbean & Latin American Studies, Psychology, Literary Studies, Theater & Performance Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Political Science, Media Studies, Ethnomusicology, and History.

The issue will also feature poetry, art, and fiction by black- and Afro-affirming Dominican writers and artists, in English translation.

THE BLACK SCHOLAR is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal providing cogent articles that help the understanding of issues of social concern to black Americans and other peoples of African descent across the world. To provide full range for the development of black thought in a climate where fora are still limited, The Black Scholar emphasizes writings by black authors. The journal was launched in 1969 with the premise that black authors, scholars, artists and activists could participate in dialogue within its pages, “uniting the academy and the street.” Its editors have been dedicated to finding and developing new talent and continuing to publish established authors. TBS is now a refereed journal published with Routledge. Nonetheless, it retains its policy of publishing non-academic organic intellectuals from a variety of vocations and avocations.

For more on the journal’s history and philosophy, please visit its website.

Message adapted from circulated CFP. See original CFP here (Spanish version here).

Call for Papers: Edited Collection on Black Women’s Internationalism

Editors: Tiffany M. Gill and Keisha N. Blain

Deadline: Completed manuscripts by 30 December 2014

Submitted electronically in Microsoft Word to [email protected]

Guidelines: Essays should be no more than 35 typed, double spaced pages (12 pt. font), including endnotes. Citations should follow the latest version of the Chicago Manual of Style. All entries should be accompanied by a title page and an abridged version of the author’s C.V.

Please direct all inquiries to the editors via email at [email protected]. For additional information, please visit the website here.

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 under-appreciated importance of women in shaping black internationalist movements and discourse(s) during the twentieth century. The editors are especially interested in manuscripts that reconceptualize internationalism beyond narrowly defined notions of political struggle to include consumption practices, leisure, and artistic expressions. The editors also seek manuscripts that expand the scholarly discourse on black internationalism to include the ideas and activities of the black working class. The editors encourage potential contributors to submit articles that explore topics that include but are not limited to the following: Continue reading CFP: Edited Collection on Black Women’s Internationalism

CCC Press (www.cccpress.co.uk) is showcasing new writing in English from around the world in their new series of country anthologies.  The World Englishes Literature (Fiction) series (www.new-ventures.net) has so far published anthologies of stories from Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Malaysia. The anthologies focus on the production of new writing (unpublished) in English or local Englishes, which is edited and presented with a critical introduction.  This is a call for the projected collection from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados.

Please send submissions by email to Tiffany Austin  [email protected] attached as a Microsoft Word document (Word count: 3000-8000 words).

Publication date: 1 July 2014

Message adapted from email announcement.

The Caribbean Digital
a small axe event

5 December 2014
Barnard College / Columbia University
New York, NY

Deadline for proposals: 1 June 2014

The transformation of the academy by the digital revolution presents challenges to customary ways of learning, teaching, conducting research, and presenting findings. It also offers great opportunities in each of these areas. New media enable oration, graphics, objects, and even embodied performance to supplement existing forms of scholarly production as well as to constitute entirely original platforms. Textual artifacts have been rendered literally and figuratively three-dimensional; opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration have expanded exponentially; information has been made more accessible and research made more efficient on multiple levels. Scholars are called upon, with some urgency, to adapt their research and pedagogical methods to an academic climate deluged by a superabundance of information and analysis. This has created opportunities for open-ended and multiform engagements, interactive and continually updating archives and other databases, cartographic applications that enrich places with historical information, and online dialogues with peers and the public.

The need for such engagements is especially immediate among the people of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Information technology has become an increasingly significant part of the way that people frame pressing social problems and political aspirations. Aesthetic media like photography and painting—because they are relatively inexpensive and do not rely on literacy or formal training—have become popular among economically dispossessed and politically marginalized constituencies. Moreover, the Internet is analogous in important ways to the Caribbean itself as dynamic and fluid cultural space: it is generated from disparate places and by disparate peoples; it challenges fundamentally the geographical and physical barriers that disrupt or disallow connection; and it places others and elsewheres in relentless relation. Yet while we celebrate these opportunities for connectedness, we also must make certain that the digital realm undermine and confront rather than re-inscribe forms of silencing and exclusion in the Caribbean.

In this unique one-day public forum we intend to engage critically with the digital as practice and as historicized societal phenomenon, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that evermore intensely reconfigure the social and geographic contours of the Caribbean. We invite presentations that explicitly evoke:  

• the transatlantic, collaborative, and/or interdisciplinary possibilities and limitations of digital technologies in the Caribbean 

• metaphorical linkages between the digital and such Caribbean philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic concepts as “submarine unity,” the rhizome, Relation, the spiral, repeating islands, creolization, etc.

• gendered dimensions of the digital in the Caribbean 

• the connection between digital technologies and practices of the so-called Caribbean folk

• specific engagements with digital spaces and/or theories by individual Caribbean artists and intellectuals

• the ways in which digital technologies have impacted or shaped understandings of specific Caribbean political phenomena (e.g. sovereignty, reparations, transnationalism, migration, etc.)

• structural means of facilitating broad engagement, communication, and accessibility in the Caribbean digital context (cultivation of multilingual spaces, attentiveness to the material/hardware limitations of various populations)

Both traditional papers and integrally multimedia papers/presentations are welcome. We also welcome virtual synchronous presentations by invited participants who cannot travel to New York City to attend the event. Selected proceedings from this forum will be published in the inaugural issue (September 2015) of sx:archipelagos – an interactive, born-digital, print-possible, peer-reviewed Small Axe Project publication.

Abstracts of 300 words and a short bio should be sent to Kaiama L. Glover and Kelly Baker Josephs ([email protected]) by 1 June 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by 1 August 2014.

Call for Book Chapters:

Vodou: I Remember: The Idea of Vodou in Haitian Thought, Literature, Music, and Art, edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cleophat

Deadline: 23 May 2014

If you would like to contribute to this important volume, along with your CV, please submit a 300 word abstract to [email protected] or [email protected] 

Please send original and unpublished essays for this book. Successful applicants will be notified before the end of June 2014.

Since its creation in the New World, arguably, it can be said that the Afro-Haitian Religion of Vodou—as a “Haitian genius”—has been represented as an “unsettling faith” and even a “cultural paradox” throughout Haitian history—from 17^th century colonial Saint-Domingue to 21^st century postcolonial Haiti—as expressed in Haitian literature, thought, law, politics, painting, and Haitian art. An “idea” of Vodou has emerged from each of these cultural symbols and representations, and intellectual expressions. The Vodouist discourse not only pervades every aspect of the Haitian life and experience, it has had a momentous impact on the evolution of Haitian intellectual, aesthetic, and literary imagination as well as on Haitian theological discourse.  In addition, with the emergence of and great interest in Haitian studies in North America, the need to explore all dimensions of the Haitian life and writing, particularly of the Haitian religious experience in Vodou, is critical and important for current and future scholarship, as well as for students of culture, history, and religion.

Consequently, an open invitation goes out to interested scholars and writers to contribute a book chapter to a new volume tentatively called Vodou: I Remember: The Idea of Vodou in Haitian Thought, Literature, Music, and Art. This project is interdisciplinary both in nature and content. The goal is to explore how Haitian writers, artists, cultural critics, intellectuals, and theologians have imagined and engaged the Vodou religion and spirituality, and correspondingly, constructed their own ideas of the Afro-Haitian Religion. The emphasis of this volume is on “the idea and representation of Vodou.”  The contributor should be mindful of the cultural, socio-economic, and political context which gave birth to different visions and ideas of Vodou. The book is divided in four parts as follows: Part I: Vodou and Haitian intellectuals and cultural critics, Part II: Vodou and Haitian Women, Part III:Vodou and Haitian Theologians, and Part IV: Vodou and Haitian art, painting, (folkloric) dance, and music (mizik rasin [“roots music”]).

Potential topics to be addressed include (but are not limited to) the following: Continue reading The Idea of Vodou in Haitian Thought, Literature, Music, and Art

Call for Papers: Re-Memory/Remembering: Indian Women in Caribbean Colonies

Deadline: 300 word abstract by 21 March 2014

Send to Mayuri Deka: [email protected] and Alison Klein: [email protected].

Although Kemla Persad-Bissessar, a woman of Indian descent, was recently elected Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, the role of Indian women in Caribbean history remains largely invisible. However, the last decade has seen a dramatic increase of writers such as Ramabai Espinet, Peggy Mohan, and Gauitra Bahadur pushing against this invisibility. These authors imagine the experiences of the thousands of Indian women who labored under indenture on British plantations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often structuring their stories by overlapping events from the present with memories of the past.

The panel invites papers that examine depictions of Indian women in the indenture period of the Caribbean, considering the ways these texts bring the lives of these women back into public memory. They are especially interested in papers that explore the ways these women negotiated constricting gender roles and life in a new country to construct a sense of home.

Message adapted from email.

Call for Papers – Afro-Latinos in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas

Submission deadline: by 11:59pm EST on 1 June 2014

Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) invites complete manuscripts from all disciplines for inclusion in this volume, including relevant creative works. All submissions (creative or scholarly) must be original. Manuscripts may be from historical or contemporary perspectives and address topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• The role of social media and the internet in shaping afrolatinidad
• Afro-Latino cultural and political movements
• The impact of migration on understandings of afrolatinidad
• Representations of afrolatinidad in media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, digital media)
• Theoretical interventions on diaspora and transnationalism in the Americas

Proposals should include: Continue reading Afro-Latinos in Movement

Reworking Freedom : Graduate Student Workshop on Re-Centering the Enslaved in Histories of the Americas

CFP Deadline: 16 May, 2014

The workshop will be held in mid-to-late October 2014 at Columbia University.

Proposals are welcomed from a variety of disciplines. Papers are invited that discuss themes as diverse as, though not limited to, maroons, rebels, and runaways; botanical, medical, and scientific knowledge of the enslaved; relationships between enslaved Africans and indigenous Americans, indentured Indian, Chinese, and European migrants; religious practices of the enslaved; the enslaved and abolitionism; the enslaved and revolutions in the Americas. Participants are welcome to propose traditional papers, but the program is especially interested in presentations that break with traditional forms, including interdisciplinary and collaborative projects and projects that emphasize community engaged research.

Continue reading CFP-Reworking Freedom: Re-Centering the Enslaved in Histories of the Americas

“Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality? Religion and the Burdens of Black Sexual Politics”

Columbia University
Institute for Research in African-American Studies
23-24 October, 2014

CFP deadline: 15 April, 2014.  Please submit a detailed abstract of your paper or panel to [email protected]

On October 23-24, 2014, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University will convene Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?  Religion and the Burdens of Black Sexual Politics, a two day critical dialogue among scholars and practitioners on two topics that have often remained marginal within the broader discourses of African-American Studies: religion and sex. The conference will take place in New York City; on the campus of Columbia University and with partnering community organizations. Continue reading IRAAS Fall 2014 Conference Call For Proposals

Latin@ Cultural Studies at CUNY: Past, Present, & Future
25 April 2014
LaGuardia-CUNY
31-10 Thomson Ave. Long Island City, Queens

CFP Deadline: Proposals due 27 February 2014

This one-day conference endeavors to ignite a productive, interdisciplinary conversation among CUNY’s established and emerging scholars who are working in any field related to Latina/o (Latin@) Cultural Studies. Hosted by LaGuardia Community College-CUNY in Queens–home to one of the fastest growing and diverse Latina/o populations in the country–this conference aims to provide a space for scholars, students and community members to engage the broad range of Latina/o artistic and cultural production in New York City and across the Americas.

This landmark event will also feature a reading by writer Ernesto Quiñonez, CUNY alumnus and nationally recognized fiction writer, and remarks on the state of Latina/o Cultural Studies at CUNY by Suzanne Oboler, Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at John Jay College. CUNY alumnus and playwright/director Carlos Serrano will be presenting a performance during the complimentary lunch for registered attendees provided by LaGuardia-CUNY.

For proposal formats and submission information visit the Latin@ Cultural Studies at CUNY website.  CUNY faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and community members are encouraged to submit individual or group proposals.

*Free for CUNY faculty, students and community members*