Abstracts due June 10, 2013. Final submissions due by October 30, 2013.

Afrofuturism, is a transnational, diasporic, and cultural aesthetic that interrogates the past, present and future in literature, technology, art, or music, and challenges Eurocentric motifs of identity, time and space. While this approach has grown in the past decade, there has been limited engagement with Afrofuturism’s relationship to the discipline of Africana studies, or Africology.

We are soliciting scholarly research, theoretical essays, and applied studies that explore how the concept of Afrofuturism is related to Africana Studies for an anthology.

Manuscripts addressing the following themes will be given priority:

• The intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and technology in human interaction (i.e., examining identities, in communications and new technologies).

• Afrofuturism as philosophy and its impact on religion among African/Diapora communities (ie., metaphysics, theology, philosophy of science and ethics).

• The confluence between Afrofuturism, the environment, bio-sciences, transhumanism, and cyborg manifestations.

• The interstices of time, place, space, and home as metaphors for an Afrofuturist perspective or politics, especially in relation to neoliberal rhetorics of post-racialism, open data movements, radical transparency, crowd sourcing and other forms of political expression in the age of what some call “zombie” or “disaster” capitalism.

• Afrofuturism in relation to other futurisms; such as Rastafuturism, Chicanafuturism, Occidental futurism or Techno-Orientalism.

• Theories of Afrofuturism that explore aesthetics, literature, music, graphic arts, and performing arts, including graphic novels, sequential art, manga and anime.

Authors are to submit a 250-300 word abstract for consideration by the editors by June 10, 2013. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by July 10. Final submission will be due by October 30, 2013. Final submissions may not exceed 25 pages and must include: (1) detachable title page with names of author(s), academic position, institutional affiliation, full address, telephone number, fax number, and email address. All manuscript submissions must conform to the current Chicago Style format.

Queries and abstract submissions should be addressed to: Reynaldo Anderson, co-editor, Department of Arts and Sciences Room 208, Harris-Stowe State University, Saint Louis, MO, Email: [email protected] Office: 314-340-3691; and Charles E. Jones, co-editor, Department of Africana Studies, 3264 French Hall P.O. 210370 University of Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0730 e-mail: [email protected] 404-435-7429.

Via the Critical Caribbean Studies list-serv from Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Caribbean Philosophical Association  2013
ANNUAL MEETING
November 21–24, 2013

CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES ON PUERTO RICO AND THE CARIBBEAN
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Deadline for Submissions: 1 July 2013

Shifting the Geography of Reason X: Exploring Decoloniality at the Dawn of a Our Second Decade

For its ten-year anniversary meeting, the Caribbean Philosophical Association invites critical inquiries into existing forms of coloniality and the exploration of multiple forms of decoloniality in the areas of knowledge, power, being, and value in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They also welcome individual presentations and panels in each of the areas of emphasis over the past ten years. These are:

2003 (Barbados): Shifting the geography of reason
2004 (Puerto Rico): Gender, science, and religion
2005 (Montreal, Canada): Aesthetics, science, and language
2007 (Jamaica): Intellectual movements
2008 (Guadaloupe): Intellectual movements
2009 (Miami, U.S.A.): Migrations and diasporas
2010 (Cartagena, Colombia): Music, rhythm, and movement
2011 (New Brunswick, NJ, USA): The University, public Education, and the transformation of society
2012 (Trinidad and Tobago): Racial capitalism and the Creole discourses of Native-, Indo-, Afro-, and Euro-Caribbeans Continue reading Caribbean Philosophical Association 2013

Discourse – Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture

Call for Papers
Deadline 15 January 2014

After Glissant: Caribbean Aesthetics and the Politics of Relation

Two recent events have left an undeniable imprint on the critical analysis of Caribbean literary and cultural studies: the February 2011 passing of Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, perhaps the most influential Caribbean intellectual in the last fifty years, and the June 2012 opening of Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, an unprecedented, three-museum art exhibit in New York City that sought to showcase the cultural genealogies of the Antillean region and its diasporic offshoots.  Throughout five theme-based segments that examined aesthetic creation through the frameworks of race, ethnicity, nationality, geography, and popular culture, Crossroads of the World follows a deliberately fragmentary structure that echoes Glissant’s ideas on the Caribbean.  Instead of experiencing the exhibit as what he calls in Caribbean Discourse “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History,” spectators were confronted with an accumulation of “subterranean convergences” that traced cultural continuities not only between the archipelago and the continental territories that constitute the basin, but also with the metropolis.  Unsurprisingly, the exhibit catalogue’s main chapters conclude with an excerpt from Caribbean Discourse.  This textual fragment, which can be read as a memorial site in honor of Glissant, marks the significance of his vision not only for the curation of the show, but for Caribbean aesthetics as a “whole.”

The spirit of Glissant continues to stimulate creative and scholarly work on the historical fragments and possible futures that constitute the Caribbean’s heterogeneous cultural singularity: from the violent shocks of colonialism and the slave-based plantation system to the also violent dislocations experienced and represented by its peoples under neoliberal capitalism. Yet while scholars and artists carry on creatively appropriating Glissant’s theories, a new generation of cultural producers seeks to interrogate and transform the ways the region has been imagined and represented. Critical voices have also emerged from diverse fields to problematize the historical, cultural, political valence of Glissant’s work, especially his late writings, accusing him of abandoning the politics of decolonization he championed in his younger days and replacing it with an exclusively cultural and poetic vision.

Inspired by this debate and by how it performs ongoing tensions between aesthetics and politics within the field, we invite critical interventions that seek to analyze and explore Caribbean cultural production from the vantage point of this post-Glissantian moment.  What is the relationship of the Caribbean to colonial and post-colonial studies? In what new directions is Caribbean cultural production headed, directions that Glissant could not or did not anticipate?  What new understandings can we bring to the Glissantian understanding of History, or to such terms as “relation,” “filiation” and “diversion” (détour)?

Articles should be no longer than 7,500 words, and should be formatted according to the Chicago Style (Humanities) Format.

Deadline: January 15, 2014

Editors:

Kahlil Chaar-Pérez (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University) – [email protected]

Emily A. Maguire (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Northwestern University) – [email protected]

CFP Deadline: Abstracts and bios due 29 May 2013

Conference location and date:
The Place of Memory: Anglophone Diasporas in the 21st Century
3-4 October 2013, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

Conference description:
Diasporic studies have often made diaspora rhyme with nostalgia, focusing on the ways in which the loss of the homeland coincides with a dynamics of reminiscence inevitably triggered by that moment of loss. In this perspective, the diasporic subject is, to paraphrase Emmanuel Nelson, a “fossilized fragment that seeks refossilization.”

A large number of literary works but also of visual artistic creations and films undeniably deal with the difficulties inherent in adjusting to a new land, a fact which often makes it tempting for diasporians to seek to revive the homeland and keep it alive through an active process of re-membering. But there is a lot more to the dynamics of diasporization and remembrance than this rather obvious starting point. In recent years diasporic studies have opened up new areas of investigation which have either confirmed or put into question this link between nostalgia and diaspora. Trauma studies have evidenced the haunting presence of past events and their lingering presence in the lives of diasporians through trauma, and the nature of memory — its making, remaking and sometimes its packaging and “marketing” (Huggan) — has also constituted an area of investigation. Indeed, in the wake of geographer David Harvey’s concept of heritage culture, many critics have interrogated the validation and instrumentalisation of the margins, sometimes through a re-/creation of collective memories.

The conference seeks to position itself in this framework of emerging problematics and reassessment of the role, status and place of memory. Contributions are invited on a variety of topics relating to literature but also to different forms of cultural productions (eg the visual arts from films to installations) in the anglophone world. Continue reading The Place of Memory: Anglophone Diasporas in the 21st Century

Call for Manuscripts:
Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage
Maney Publishing and Left Coast Press

The Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage provides a focal point for peer-reviewed publications in interdisciplinary studies in archaeology, history, material culture, and heritage dynamics concerning African descendant populations and cultures across the globe. The Journal invites articles on broad topics, including the historical processes of culture, economics, gender, power, and racialization operating within and upon African descendant communities. We seek to engage scholarly, professional, and community perspectives on the social dynamics and historical legacies of African descendant cultures and communities worldwide. The Journal publishes research articles and essays that review developments in these interdisciplinary fields. Continue reading Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage

Caribbean InTransit, Issue 5, Call for papers

Deadline: 15 April 2013

Information below obtained from Caribbean inTransit announcement. For more information about the issue, about the journal, and/or about submissions, click here.

Special issue: “ANTITHESIS/SYNTHESIS: FINE ARTS AND CULTURAL HERITAGE”

Guest Editors: James Early, Diana N’diaye and Dominique Brebion

Are expressions of “fine art” and “cultural heritage” mutually exclusive, beneficial and/or interchangeable? There are a plethora of terms that seek to distinguish arts connected to “heritage” including such performance based genres as carnival regalia, genre paintings such as those created by Amos Ferguson and utilitarian arts such as basketmaking or fashion, from the arts taught historically in the academy- painting or sculpture. Continue reading Antithesis/Synthesis: Fine Arts and Cultural Heritage

SARGASSO

Global Cuba/Cuba Global: Worldly Perspectives from the 21^st Century

sx salon: a small axe literary platform invites submissions for Summer and Fall 2013. sx salon, launched in 2010 as part of the Small Axe Project, is an electronic publication dedicated to literary discussions, interviews with Caribbean literary figures, reviews of new publications (creative and scholarly) related to the Caribbean, and short fiction and poetry by emerging and established Caribbean writers. sx salon also houses the Small Axe Literary Competition, launched in 2009. Visit www.smallaxe.net/sxsalon to view past issues.

sx salon publishes a new issue every three months and invites submissions of the following for our Summer and Fall 2013 issues:

• Literary Discussions that engage issues relevant to Caribbean literary studies: 2,500 words. Anticipated discussions for Summer and Fall include “Chinese Caribbean Literature” and “Dub Poetry.”
• Book Reviews of recent (published no more than two years preceding the date of submission) creative literary works by Caribbean authors or scholarly works related to Caribbean literary studies: 1,200 words. Please contact [email protected] to query available books.
• Interviews with Caribbean literary figures: 2,500 words
• Poetry and Short Fiction that engage regional and diasporic Caribbean themes and concerns: up to 2 poems or fiction of up to 4,000 words

Deadlines are as follows: Summer issue – May 1; Fall Issue – August 1.

Please visit http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/submissions.php for more detailed guidelines for submissions.

INQUIRIES AND SUBMISSIONS

All inquiries and submissions should be sent electronically to the following addresses:

• Literary discussions, book reviews, interviews: Kelly Baker Josephs [email protected]
• Short fiction and poetry: Andrea Shaw [email protected]

Unleashing the Black Erotic: Gender and Sexuality—Passion, Power, and Praxis

September 17-21, 2013
The College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center and African American Studies Program
Historic Downtown Charleston, SC

Proposals due May 10, 2013; complete papers due by August 1, 2013

From the CFP:

I believe in the erotic and I believe in it as an enlightening force within our lives as women. I have become clearer about the distinctions between the erotic and other apparently similar forces. We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. And when I say living I mean it as that force which moves us toward what will accomplish real positive change.  
-Audre Lorde Continue reading Unleashing the Black Erotic (CFP)

CALL FOR PAPERS (Full article due 30 March 2013)

The editors of the Journal of Haitian Studies seek essays that reflect on or build upon the work of Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012). In analyses that combined anthropology, economics, and history, Trouillot’s work addressed the relationship between historicity and power, the epistemology of social sciences, and the historical evolution of Caribbean peoples. Contributors may want to consider the following topics:

Continue reading Special Issue on Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The 16th Triennial ACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies) Conference
St. Lucia, West Indies,
August 5 –9, 2013

CFP deadline: 15 December 2012

Information direct from CFP below:

“‘The current unbroken/ the circuits kept open’: Connecting Cultures and the Commonwealth”

In “Sometimes in the Middle of the Story,” a poem that revisits the perilous event of the Middle Passage, the eminent Walcott scholar, Edward Baugh, gives primacy to the connecting currents of the “ocean” as a central motif. While the sea is viewed as an archive of history as Nobel Laureate and St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott has argued, Baugh mobilizes this metaphor to both recognize the traumatic beginning of the colonial encounter in the Caribbean and the rich “refashioning of futures” of cultural connections that the Middle Passage engendered. No doubt the colonial encounter of slavery and indentureship in the Caribbean could have led to cultural enclosures, but in Baugh’s view, “the paths of ocean” represent connecting currents between and beyond the cultures of Africa, Asia, Europe and the Indigenous Caribbean. The sea, in particular, the Atlantic Ocean, was a site of treacherous travel and trade, yet that very sea is a source “connecting us still”. Continue reading Connecting Cultures and the Commonwealth, ACLALS Conference

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY:  Postdoctoral Fellowship – Revolutionary Studies

Application deadline: 1 December 2012

Modified text from email announcement below:

Brandeis University has received a Mellon Foundation grant to host a
year-long Sawyer Seminar, “Rethinking the Age of Revolution: Rights,
Representation, and the Global Imaginary,” during the 2013-2014 academic
year. The seminar, which will draw faculty from around the region and doctoral
students from the Brandeis campus, explores the American, French, and Haitian
revolutions in comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, with a particular
eye on the implications of the age of revolution in the early twenty-first century. Continue reading Brandeis University Postdoctoral Fellowship

Commodities, Capitalism and Culture: Latin America and Global Links

An annual conference presented by the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Stony Brook University

Friday, 12 April 2013

CFP below. Submission deadline: 8 February 2013.

Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ

Applications deadline: Friday, January 12, 2013

Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, in collaboration with the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies is pleased to announce a one-year competitive postdoctoral fellowship for a scholar pursuing research in Caribbean Studies. Scholars working on comparative cultural studies especially the Dutch or the French Caribbean, with focus on transnationalism, migration and/or queer feminist studies are encouraged to apply, but we welcome applications from all scholars who feel that their work would benefit from affiliation with Rutgers. The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $65,000 as well as an annual research allocation of $3,000 and Rutgers University health benefits. The successful applicant must have the doctorate in hand at the time of application (defense date no later than May 31, 2013), be no more than three years beyond the Ph.D., and be able to teach one course during their tenure at Rutgers. Continue reading Postdoctoral Fellowship in Critical Caribbean Studies