7th to 9th February 2019
Female Orphan School, Parramatta South Campus
Western Sydney University
Sydney, Australia

CFP Deadline:  30 September 2018

SPEAKERS:
Michael Bucknor (University of the West Indies, Mona)
Alexis Wright (University of Melbourne)
Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique)
Anna Cristina Pertierra (Western Sydney University)

The next of our biennial Australian Association for Caribbean Studies conferences will be held at Western Sydney University in conjunction with the Australian Research Council funded project Other Worlds. Our theme, ‘Caribbean Meridians’, spotlights the ways in which Caribbean worlds are made and the relations and alignments these worlds have with worlds elsewhere. AACS conferences are interdisciplinary and papers on all topics are considered, including from the natural sciences. Recent conferences have taken the themes of ‘Land and Water’ (Wollongong, 2015) and ‘Interiors’ (Canberra, 2017). For 2019 we are encouraging presenters to think about the ‘meridians’ that connect the peoples, cultures, ecologies, and histories of the Caribbean with those of other places around the globe.

Continue reading Caribbean Meridians Conference

15th to 17th November 2018
Hostos Community College
City University of New York

CFP Deadline:  15 September 2018

Dedicated to poet Rhina P. Espaillat
Opening Remarks by Daisy Cocco de Filippis, President, Naugatuck Valley Community College

Keynote Speaker: Maria Harper-Marinick, Chancellor, Arizona Maricopa Community Colleges
Plenary Speaker: Dr. Marcos Charles, former President Bronx County Medical Society, retired Prof Albert Einstein College of Medicine & honorary Prof Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo

Theme: Dominicans on the Map: Heritage, Citizenship, Memory and Social Justice

Born nearly two decades ago, the Dominican Studies Association (DSA) offers its eighth biennial congress as the occasion to usher in the organization and the field of study that it was born to promote to the next level. This eighth iteration looks to examining areas of inquiry, geographies of knowledge, research questions, and critical paradigms that its founders could hardly have fathomed when they first resolved to insist that the scholarly exploration of the Dominican experience merited a place in the US academy. After some trail-blazing, DSA wishes now to serve as a platform to new generations of scholars with quests of their own, which, in a best-case scenario, they will advance by building on the accomplishments and transcending the drawbacks of their precursors, while remaining attached to the founding ideal of using the study of the Dominican experience as a forum to foster the cause of humanity. Care for humanity implies attention to social justice, diversity, and inclusion, inclusion understood not merely as the phenotypes of bodies that differ from ours but also the knowledge that those bodies have produced, all of which we need as no part of our species can believably claim sole possession of the wisdom required for our collective survival.

Continue reading VIII Biennial Dominican Studies Association Conference

CFP Deadline:  30 September 2018

Migration is one of the largest topics of our time. Its motivations and effects on the migrants and the host nations have prompted complex and fundamental discussion in much of the world in recent years. The volume we imagine takes this discussion as a backdrop and turns the readers’ attention to the complexity of migration in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. In this geographic area, migration has a long history and has always included a back and forth between different islands in response to economic and/or political problems in the homelands. Within this sociopolitical, historical, psychological, and linguistic context, we decided to examine the motivations and effects of migration by the example of the Dominican diaspora in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Since the 1960s, the end of the era of the Dominican dictator Trujillo, Dominican migration increased immensely, especially to Puerto Rico and the mainland US. In particular, migration to Puerto Rico is interesting from the research perspective, as two historically and linguistically very similar groups start existing in the same geographic space. But also, the existence of Dominican migration to the US offers a wide field of inquiry.

To this end, we would like to invite you to contribute to this volume, tentatively titled: The Dominican diaspora in Puerto Rico and the U.S. The span of research is purposefully broad, in order to offer the reader as complex a picture as possible on the topic of Dominican migration. Scholars who are currently doing research on the linguistic, social, psychological, and historical effects of Dominican migration to Puerto Rico and the US are welcome to submit a 300-word abstract in English or Spanish of their original, unpublished manuscripts in both PDF and Word files to esuarezb@shepherd.edu by September 30^th, 2018.

Continue reading Edited Volume on the Dominican Diaspora

13th to 16th February 2019
University of the West Indies
Mona Campus, Jamaica

CFP Deadline:  30 September 2018

The University of the West Indies and Birmingham City University are delighted to announce the staging of the 6^th Global Reggae Conference under the theme Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture II. Hosted as a premier biennial event by the Institute of Caribbean Studies and the Reggae Studies Unit inside Jamaica’s Reggae Month, this conference will engage academics within a wide field of scholastic orientations and practice. This event comes as part of larger project on music and cultural innovation and black popular culture through which both Universities have engaged in a partnership to expand scholarship and outreach through community engagement, experimentation, archive building, exhibitions, among others. Continue reading 6th Global Reggae Conference: Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture II

26th October 2018
Centre for Intergrated Caribbean Reseach
University of London
London, UK

CFP Deadline:  10 August 2018

How have Caribbean queer perspectives and Caribbean LGBTQI activism changed since Our Caribbean? What new insights and social/political realities have emerged since the publication of this groundbreaking 2008 collection of lesbian and gay writing from the Antilles? The Race in the Americas (RITA) group, in collaboration with UCL, is proud to announce an event marking the tenth anniversary of Our Caribbean.

Continue reading Our Queer Caribbean Forum

4th October 2018
The University Inn and Conference Centre
University of the West Indies
St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

CFP Deadline: 15 August 2018

Working from the notion that “lessons learned” can contribute to the creation of policies that promote sustainable futures, this conference on Caribbean energy policy, societies, and law welcomes the submission of research and conceptual papers that speak to the successes, difficulties, and failures associated with oil and gas production in the region.

Continue reading Caribbean Energy Policy, Societies, and Law Conference

Fall/Winter 2018 Issue
Theme: “Gathering at the Waters: Connecting Family and Community through Literature and Art”

CFP Deadline:  31 July 2018

Cover and Table of Contents of Fall/Winter 2017 Killens Review

The theme of “Gathering at the Waters” connotes bringing together family and communities to
look at the ways in which we affect and are part of each other’s lives. For the upcoming issue of
the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Fall/Winter 2018, we want to continue that
exploration of “connecting family through literature and art” in the works of writers of the
African diaspora. We seek submissions of creative nonfiction, fiction, essays, interviews, book
reviews, poetry, memoir, photography, and visual artwork on the subjects of family, community,
and unity in narratives that tell of healing, nurturing, cleansing, and reflection in the times we
live in.

Continue reading Killens Review of Arts & Letters

23rd November 2018
University of the West Indies
Cave Hill Campus, Barbados

CFP Deadline: Abstracts of 250 words and a brief biographical note must be submitted by 29 June 2018

Continue reading Caribbean Science/Speculative Fiction Symposium

CFP: Special issue of Ariel: a Review of International English Literature, slated for publication in 2020
Due dates: 250-word abstracts due August 1, 2018; final articles due January 15, 2019.

Call for Papers

This special 50th anniversary issue of Ariel: a Review of International English Literature,  will unpack the tensions and interrelationships between postcolonial studies and Indigenous studies. When Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin published The Empire Writes Back (1989), the ensuing recognition of Canada and the United States as products of imperialism and colonization necessarily provoked questions about the people who preceded settlers. Indigenous literary studies became recognized as a necessary missing piece of those conversations. However, the vocabulary and approaches of postcolonial theory often failed to address–or even obstructed–questions that Indigenous literary scholars, particularly those with community obligations, needed to consider. Ariel’s 50th Anniversary Issue is an opportunity to reconsider the trajectory of discussions among Indigenous and postcolonial studies scholars and practitioners. At this historical juncture of increased visibility of issues concerning Indigenous rights, migration, displacement, and global imperialism among other pressing urgencies, now is the moment to return to these debates and recast the dialogue.

Continue reading Special issue: Intersections of Postcolonial studies and Indigenous studies

3rd to 6th October 2018
Miami, Florida

CFP Deadline: 1 June 2018

This year’s conference recognizes 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 hope to engage a breadth of issues relevant to Caribbeanists in the region and its diasporas. Throughout the conference our aim will be to explore the intersections between disciplinary approaches to problems that are borne out of the shifting tides of globalization and cultural expression.

Continue reading 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference *Deadline Extended

19th to 20th June 2018
London, UK

CFP Deadline: 20 April 2018

The Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies (CCDS), in collaboration with the Eccles Centre at the British Library, is hosting its third ‘Diasporic Dialogues’ conference on 19th – 20th June, 2018. The conference will be held at the Knowledge Centre, British Library, London, UK. The deadline for panel and paper proposals is 20 April 2018.

Confirmed Keynote: Professor Robert F. Reid-Pharr, City University of New York

Continue reading ‘Seamed by its own bitter juice’: Voice, Visibility, Literacies – Diasporic Dialogues’ Conference

CFP Deadline: 30 September 2018

In their 2003 book Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean (University of the West Indies Press) Fred Reno and Holger Henke argued – along with various contributors – that political culture in the Caribbean was circumscribed by “a great complexity of social relations and the influence of such variables as race, ethnicity, migration and multi-faceted dependency (for example, of institutional mimicry, strategies of reproduction of metropolitan model by local elites, socio-economic conditions, popular culture) on politics.”  In this reader they then asked questions such as “What role do race, historical experience, ethnic fragmentation and economic conditions play?  How can civil society – and, thus, the people – come to play a greater role in the political process?”

Much has changed in the last fifteen years and new dimensions exerting palpable influence on the region’s and its various and diverse national units’ political life that warrant renewed attention and examination.  Henke and Reno are now tempted to argue that in this age of social media and instant access to information the very nature of civil society is experiencing profound changes.  At the same time, the rise of the notion of so-called fake news and the open questioning by many of the – for well-functioning democracies – critical role of the media, and of experts and watchdog institutions poses a severe challenge for the political culture of Caribbean states. Continue reading Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean