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 kbj@smallaxe.net 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 kbj@smallaxe.net
• Short fiction and poetry: Andrea Shaw andreashaw@smallaxe.net

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

7th Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD)

CFP deadline: January 15, 2012

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
October 30 – November 2, 2013

Transformative Visions:
Confronting Change and Creating Opportunity in Africa and the African Diaspora

Creative response to change and challenge has long been a hallmark of the African diaspora experience, from the multiple ways enslaved peoples carved autonomous spaces across the Americas and Caribbean, to the use of new technologies to move politics and re-imagine communities throughout Africa and the African diaspora today. In 2013, the seventh biennial conference of the Association for the Study of the World Wide African Diaspora (ASWAD) will take place in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. The conference aims to address how transformative visions, past and present, have been brought to bear on the challenges confronting peoples of Africa and the African diaspora, from historically overlooked individuals to mass movements. How have African diaspora people marshalled activism, spirituality, creativity, and the unique resources of diaspora to re-fashion challenges into new opportunities? How are diasporic solidarities and fissures affected by global conflicts and movements? ASWAD seeks creative explorations of diaspora through innovative framings, methodologies, and discourses as we address these questions. We welcome submissions from all disciplines on both historical and contemporary topics and on all geographic areas including Africa, the Americas and Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Paper and panel proposals that incorporate new categories of diasporic analysis and that stimulate discourse across traditional boundaries are encouraged, as are roundtables and panels on diaspora and comparative diaspora studies.  Continue reading ASWAD 7th Annual Biennial Conference

Writing through the Visual/Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean

Center for African Studies 2013 Conference
March 7‐9 2013

CFP deadline: 100 to 200‐word abstract and panel proposal by November 1, 2012

This two‐day conference at Rutgers University (New Brunswick) is designed to foster trans‐disciplinary understanding of the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. It will explore the varied patterns of cultural, and especially writing, formations and practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted on the cultures and peoples of this trans‐Atlantic region that includes countries such as Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Comoro Islands, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo (DR), Dominica, Guadeloupe, Guiana, Haiti, Louisiana (USA), Mali, Martinique, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Seychelles. Special attention will be paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non‐material culture to tell “stories” of great significance, co‐mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the “classical” and the “popular” in new ways.  Possible topics for the conference include (but are not limited) to the following: Continue reading Writing through the Visual/Virtual (CFP)

Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora
The African-American Studies Collective
Emory University, Atlanta, GA
February 8-9, 2013

CFP Deadline for abstracts: October 7, 2012

From CFP:

Was it why I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619? Was it the tug of all the lost mothers and orphaned children? Or was it that each generation felt anew the yoke of a damaged life and the distress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien?
–Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

We are not the same. I am an alien.
–Lil’ Wayne, “Phone Home”

Born out of a desire to articulate the position of Black bodies in the Americas as well as the African Diaspora writ large, “Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora” continues conversations initiated among members of the African American Studies Collective at Emory University.  Of particular concern are the ways in which the African Diaspora–as climactic environments, biological/zoological/botanical/geographical subjectivities, or colonized economies–has been made alien from within as well as without, and the ways that the major discursive trajectories of race, space, and sex have contributed to this mapping.  The conference explores such questions as: how do we begin to understand the ways in which race, space, and sex configure “the alien” within spaces allegedly “beyond” markers of difference? What are some ways in which the “alien from within as well as without” can be overcome, and how do we make them sustainable? In doing so, this conference also seeks to provide a forum for discussion on what Afro-Diaspora Studies as a field and as a network of analytical approaches can further contribute to the examination of the positions of Blacks around the world. Continue reading Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora

“Maroon Lands, Laws, and Cultures”:
The Fifth Charles Town International Maroon Conference,
Portland, Jamaica
20-23 June, 2013

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2012

The Fifth Charles Town International Maroon Conference, “Lands, Laws, and Cultures,” invites papers that explore the relationships between place and tradition in Maroon communities throughout the Atlantic world. Issues to consider might include: Continue reading The Fifth Charles Town International Maroon Conference

Announcing The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize for creative writers. Deadline for submissions is 30 September, 2012, at 6 pm (TT time).

Information from the Bocas Lit Fest site:

The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize is an annual award which allows an emerging Caribbean writer living and working in the Anglophone Caribbean to devote time to advancing or finishing a literary work, with support from an established writer as mentor. It is sponsored by the Hollick Family Charitable Trust and the literary charitable trust the Arvon Foundation, in association with the non-profit organisation the Bocas Lit Fest.