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Upcoming Event – An Evening of Poetry: Voices Across the Diaspora

The Blue Flamingo Literary Festival’s Evening of Poetry: Voices across the Diaspora, features seven poets from across the African diaspora whose voices are an important contribution to global literature. Their readings will address broad and compelling themes across the landscape of the human experience.

Date & Time: Friday, 20th November 2020 @ 6:00 P.M.
You can register for this event here.

Featured Poets:
Fabian Adekunle Badejo
Marion Bethel
Dr. Christian Campbell
Kendel Hippolyte
Dr. Simone Savannah
Dr. Ian Strachan
Sonia Williams

Hosted by the University of the Bahamas

 

 

Upcoming Event: The Jamaica Gaily News Archive Launch

The Jamaica Gaily News (JGN) was the publication of the first gay activist organization in the anglophone Caribbean, the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM) in Jamaica. Join us as we celebrate the launch of the JGN archive at the Digital Library of the Caribbean. We will hear from the following panelists as they share their reflections on this moment in Jamaica’s history.

Date & Time: Friday, November 20th, 2020 from 1:00-3:00pm (EST)
You can register for the event here.
You can view the collection here.

Panelists
Vidyaratha Kisson – Coordinator, Caribbean International Resource Network
Larry Chang – Co-Founder of GFM and JGN Editor
Donna Smith – GFM member and JGN columnist
Glen McDaniel – GFM member and JGN columnist
Jennifer French-Parker – Jamaican reporter

Moderator
Matthew Chin, Assistant Professor Women, Gender & Sexuality, University of Virginia

For more information, please contact Matthew Chin at mc4hz@virginia.edu

This event is sponsored by the Department of Women Gender & Sexuality and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia

Special Issue – Parallax: Performing Futures in the African Diaspora: Time, Ritual, Ceremony

Abstracts: due 26 November 2020
Submit: via email to the editor, Jason Allen-Paisant (J.Allen1@leeds.ac.uk).

Call for Papers

This special issue will explore Afro-diasporic performance practices as a major philosophical site for ‘future-thinking’ around Black lives in the contemporary moment. It will shed light on a form of ‘future-thinking’ in the African diaspora that foregrounds the idea of ‘duties to the dead’. This kind of ‘future-thinking’ is commensurate with a relationship to the dead that emphasizes memory’s presentness in embodied realities and presents History as an embodied archive. Continue reading Special Issue – Parallax: Performing Futures in the African Diaspora: Time, Ritual, Ceremony

Upcoming Event: Digital Puerto Rican Studies: Social Scholarship, Mapping, & Archives

Please join the Puerto Rico Syllabus this Friday, October 23rd for “Digital Puerto Rican Studies: Social Scholarship, Mapping, and Archives,” a virtual event and discussion sponsored by LASA-Puerto Rico. Register below:

This event represents the launch of the new website for The Puerto Rico Syllabus, a digital resource for critical thinking and teaching about the Puerto Rican Debt Crisis. In addition to discussing the new “decolonial design” and future plans, The #PRSyllabus will also be in conversation with the leaders of three other digital projects that contribute to Puerto Rican Studies and provide resources for broad publics.

Digital Puerto Rican Studies: Social Scholarship, Mapping, and Archives this Fri, Oct 23rd, 6:00 PM (EDT) | This event will take place on Zoom. Register here to access the link to Zoom.

This event spotlights four digital projects that contribute to Puerto Rican Studies and provide resources for broad publics: The Puerto Rico Syllabus, Proyecto historias orales cayeyanas: Vivencias y resistencias, Visualizando El Apoyo Mutuo: Solidaridad en acción, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean-Archivo Histórico de Vieques.

The event will include moderated discussion about each project, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

This event is sponsored by LASA Puerto Rico, with media co-sponsorship by the Puerto Rico Syllabus project led by Dr. Yarimar Bonilla as part of the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Add to the conversation by using #DigitalPRStudies

Continue reading Upcoming Event: Digital Puerto Rican Studies: Social Scholarship, Mapping, & Archives

Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora

New book announcement: Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora, edited by Grace Aneiza Ali. Please find the description, the table of contents, and the chapter descriptions below. The book can be accessed (free in PDF form at the time of this posting) here.

Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Liminal Spaces is an intimate exploration into the migration narratives of fifteen women of Guyanese heritage. It spans diverse inter-generational perspectives – from those who leave Guyana, and those who are left – and seven seminal decades of Guyana’s history – from the 1950s to the present day – bringing the voices of women to the fore. The volume is conceived of as a visual exhibition on the page; a four-part journey navigating the contributors’ essays and artworks, allowing the reader to trace the migration path of Guyanese women from their moment of departure, to their arrival on diasporic soils, to their reunion with Guyana.

Eloquent and visually stunning, Liminal Spaces unpacks the global realities of migration, challenging and disrupting dominant narratives associated with Guyana, its colonial past, and its post-colonial present as a ‘disappearing nation’. Multimodal in approach, the volume combines memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, photography, art and curatorial essays to collectively examine the mutable notion of ‘homeland’, and grapple with ideas of place and accountability.

This volume is a welcome contribution to the scholarly field of international migration, transnationalism, and diaspora, both in its creative methodological approach, and in its subject area – as one of the only studies published on Guyanese diaspora. It will be of great interest to those studying women and migration, and scholars and students of diaspora studies.

Continue reading Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora

Caribbean Studies Journals – Summer 2020 Publications

The following Caribbean Studies journals published new issues this summer:

Caribbean Quarterly – Volume 66, Issue 2, June 2020
Small Axe – Volume 24, Number 2, July 2020
PREE Caribbean Writing – Issue 5, June 2020
SX Salon – Issue 34, June 2020

Below you will find details of each new issue:

Continue reading Caribbean Studies Journals – Summer 2020 Publications

NGC Bocas Virtual Lit Fest

No registration, tickets, or social media required!

The event will stream on the following days and times (Atlantic GMT-4):

Friday 18 September 4:30pm – 8:45pm

Saturday 19 September 12 noon – 9:00pm

Sunday 20 September 10:30 – 8:30pm

2020 is a milestone year for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest: the tenth year of Trinidad and Tobago’s national literature festival, which has grown into the Anglophone Caribbean’s biggest annual literary celebration.

The 2020 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, running from 18 to 20 September, will go down in history for another reason: it’s the first-ever entirely virtual and online version of the festival, with 80 participating writers and speakers and a programme of free events livestreamed via the Bocas Lit Fest website and on social media.

Many of the 2020 festival events focus on recently published books, some of which will be launched by their authors in this virtual format. Book-lovers can look out for appearances by T&T authors such as Ingrid Persaud, Caroline Mackenzie, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Monique Roffey, and Andre Bagoo, alongside writers from the broader Caribbean, including Jacob Ross, Canisia Lubrin, John Robert Lee, and 2020 OCM Bocas Prize winner Richard Georges.

The opening day of the festival, 18 September, has been dubbed Future Friday, presenting a showcase of emerging and established Caribbean speculative fiction writers, exploring the question of what the disruptive events of 2020 mean for the Caribbean in the coming decades and centuries. Organised in partnership with the newly established Caribbean Futures Institute — an international project bringing together writers and scientists — Future Friday will be headlined by a discussion event with star writers Karen Lord, Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, and Malka Older.

Continue reading NGC Bocas Virtual Lit Fest

National Caribbean American Heritage Month Webinar Series

U.S. Embassy Guyana in  collaboration with Caribbean Studies Association celebrated National Caribbean American Heritage Month with a webinar series under the theme: “Caribbean-American Connections, Social Justice and Shared Dreams”.

  • June 16: Caribbean – American cultural connections: cultural forms, cultural industries and social justice.
  • June 23: Caribbean contributions to race, gender, sexuality and social justice in the USA and the Caribbean.
  • June 30: The Caribbean diaspora’s role in building just Caribbean and American futures.

Above adapted from: CSA Newsletter – August 2020

CFP – Francosphères Journal – The “Trembling” of Édouard Glissant

Open Call for Papers: Édouard Glissant – Special issue of Francosphères Journal (December 2021).

Deadline for ABSTRACTS: 1 October 2020

Deadline for ARTICLES (MHRA Style): 1 February 2021

Submit to: jegoussoj@hollins.edu

Publication: December 2021 in Francosphères

“Le monde a toujours été un perpétuel devenir [The world has always been in perpetual becoming]” says Édouard Glissant in 1994 in an interview published in the journal Passages (12). Here, he announced the grounds of the “unpredictable”, “disconcerting”, “complex”, and “intricate” nature of what constituted for him “l’objet le plus haut du poème [the highest purpose of the poem]” (La Terre le Feu l’Eau et les Vents. Une anthologie de la poésie du Tout-monde, 19). However, if the world was a double object of poetry and thought for Glissant, it was also subject to variations in different and successive forms during the course of its literary production (poetry, essay, novel, theater play …). Although imagined and thought of as a “totality”, the world could just as well be “unique” as Glissant writes in his first essay, Sun of Consciousness (1956), asserting then “que tout être vient à la conscience du monde par son monde d’abord ; d’autant universel (pour parler large) qu’il est particulier ; d’autant généreux et commun qu’il a su devenir seul, et inversement ? [that every being comes to the consciousness of the world through his world first; as universal (broadly speaking) as it is unique; as generous and common as it became solitary, and vice versa?]” (18).

Continue reading CFP – Francosphères Journal – The “Trembling” of Édouard Glissant

Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean – Podcast

Conversations/Podcast – Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean

Current Episodes feature: Naomi Jackson, Alexis Gumbs, & Staceyann Chin.

About the Podcast:

“An outgrowth of the popular “live” Critical Caribbean Feminisms events, which since 2015 have been bringing together established and emerging writers from the Caribbean and its diasporas, WRITING HOME is an ode to the Americas very literally writ large. Each episode features an exceptional contemporary cultural actor in conversation with hosts Kaiama L. Glover and Tami Navarro and aims to trace the geographies of resistance that ground our feminist practices of diaspora. The beauty, humor, and hope that animate these encounters are a welcome antidote to the heartbreak of the present moment.”

Above adapted from: Writing Home website

The Black Fantastic – Third Stone Journal CFP

CFP – Third Stone Journal – Open call for scholarly articles of varying lengths and creative work
Deadline: Rolling
Submit: 3rdstonejournal@gmail.com

Across the African diaspora, art has been a form of expression and liberation at times of widespread cultural oppression, enabling artists of color to resist the tradition of silencing while preserving their histories, traditions, and more in ways that could be passed down intergenerationally. While much art worked to fulfill a political purpose by pushing for equality and liberty in oppressive cultures, other works aimed at achieving liberation by celebrating Black cultural forms, from the cutting-edge music of Erykah Badu to that of Janelle Monae. Eager to explore art as liberation among other topics, Third Stone accepts submissions year round of art, music, creative writing, short films, scholarship, digital content, and more on Afrofuturism, African-futurism, and the Black fantastic as explored both inside and outside of the borders of the United States.

Continue reading The Black Fantastic – Third Stone Journal CFP

CFP – Concept and Approaches to Whiteness in Latin America and the Caribbean – Special Journal Issue

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.

Boyhood and Masculinity in Contemporary Guyanese Film

Date: Monday, 3 February 2020
Time: 6:00PM – 9:00PM
Location: King Juan Carlos I Center, 53 Washington Sq S, New York, NY 10012

This event is free and open to the public, ID required at the entrance. RSVP here.

Event Description: The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) present two film screenings — of ANTIMAN and The Seawall — and a conversation with directors Gavin Ramoutar and Mason Richards, Dr. Sheril Antonio film scholar and Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy and Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy, on the issues of boyhood and masculinity and migration within the Guyanese and Caribbean diaspora.

About the Films:

In Gavin Ramoutar’s short film ANTIMAN, Anil, an introverted young teen navigates the pressures by his father to become a cricket player to prove his masculinity. Privately, he must reconcile his love for an older boy while living in a homophobic village in a Guyanese countryside.

In Mason Richards’ short film The Seawall, ten-year-old Malachi prepares to leave Guyana and his beloved grandmother for the United States. As he wrestles with the impending rupture from his motherland, the film poignantly examines how migration — from a young boy’s perspective — fragments a family. Continue reading Boyhood and Masculinity in Contemporary Guyanese Film

Call for Papers – Global Caribbean Studies: “Scapes”

CFP Deadline: 15 January 2020

The 2018 theme for the 37th 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.

Call for Book Chapter Proposals — Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational

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.