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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.

Assistant or Associate Professor in African American and Africana Studies and Environmental Justice

Application Deadline: Review of applications begins December 1, 2019.

The University of Kentucky in Lexington is in the second year of a multi-year hiring plan to build a more inclusive curriculum, diversify our faculty, support our Program in African American and Africana Studies, and to contribute to our new undergraduate major in that program. Faculty will have tenure homes in departments relevant to their training and research focus and will actively help build and support the AAAS program. Last year we hired seven new faculty and this year we plan to hire additional faculty in diaspora studies, black feminisms, environmental justice, ethnomusicology, and the economics of inequality. This ad is explicitly a call for applications for a position in Environmental Justice.

The program in African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) invites applications for an Assistant or Associate Professor with a specialization in social science approaches to Environmental Justice to begin August 2020. The successful applicant’s tenure home is open, and will be discipline-specific to include the departments of Anthropology, Geography, Sociology, or other departments in the College of Arts and Sciences (https://www.as.uky.edu/).

They seek candidates who center Black perspectives and experiences in areas such as environmental racism, (feminist) political ecology, racialized landscapes, cultural memory, community response to disaster and disaster recovery, critical development studies, conservation, climate justice, land rights and territorial politics, political activism, and/or social justice. Applicants who include community engagement, participatory research or other qualitative approaches in their research programs are especially welcome. Area of geographic specialization is open.

Applicants should have PhD in hand by July 2020.

Application Instructions:

Applicants should submit the following:

  1. a letter of application
  2. a current CV
  3. one writing sample
  4. a teaching portfolio, which should include a teaching statement, sample course syllabi, and sample teaching/course evaluations (upload under Specific Request 1)
  5. a diversity statement (upload under Specific Request 2)

Also provide the names and contact information for three references when prompted in the academic profile. This information may be utilized to solicit recommendation letters from your references within the employment system.

Questions about the search should be addressed to the search committee chair, Professor Lisa Cliggett, lisa.cliggett@uky.edu.

Above text adapted from webpage.

 

 

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholars-in-Residence Fellowships

Application Deadline: December 1, 2019

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a unit of The New York Public Library, invites applications for its Scholars-in-Residence Program for the 2020-2021 academic year.

The program offers long-term and short-term research fellowships to scholars and writers pursuing projects in African diasporic studies in fields including history, politics, literature, and culture.

Long-term fellowships provide a $35,000 stipend to support academics and independent scholars who work in residence at the Schomburg Center for a continuous period of six to nine months. Fellows are provided with individual office space, research assistance, and access to the unparalleled resources of the Schomburg Center. In addition to pursuing their own research projects, fellows also engage in an ongoing interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, sharing their research with one another in a weekly work-in-progress seminar. While in residence, they are also exposed to the vibrant intellectual life of the Schomburg through its public exhibitions, panels, screenings, and events.

Short-term fellowships are open to postdoctoral scholars, independent researchers, and creative writers (novelists, playwrights, poets) who work in residence at the Center for a continuous period of one to three months. Short-term fellows receive a stipend of $3000 per month.

Requirements: The program is intended for scholars requiring extensive, on-site research with collections at the Schomburg, the pre-eminent repository for documentation on the history and cultures of peoples of African descent around the globe. Fellows are expected to be in full-time residence at the Center during the award period and to participate in scheduled seminars and colloquia. Persons seeking support for research leading to degrees are not eligible under this program. Current candidates for advanced degrees must be scheduled to complete and receive their degree before the start date of the fellowship.

This program is made possible in part through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation.

Application Instructions:

A complete application must include:

  • The Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Application.
  • A 1500-word description of the proposed study.
  • Curriculum vitae (limit to 3 pages).
  • Names of references (long-term fellows must submit three recommendation letters; short-term fellows must submit a minimum of two letters). References will receive an e-mail instructing them how to upload their recommendations.

For more information and to apply , please visit: schomburgcenter.org/scholarsinresidence

Above text adapted from webpage.

Assistant Professor in African and African Diasporic History

Application Deadline: Screening of applications begins December 5, 2019. Review of applications may continue until the position is filled.

The Department of History at The University of Memphis invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor, with a specialization in African and African diasporic history, starting in Fall 2020. The department seeks to further strengthen its core program in African American history with the addition of a faculty member focusing on Africa and the African diaspora, with a preference for specialists in the precolonial era.

The successful applicant will be expected to teach upper-division and graduate courses in African and African diasporic history as well as a survey course in World, African American, or U.S. History. Normal teaching load is 2/2. The Department of History is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty, and we therefore welcome applicants who are from groups that are historically underrepresented.

PhD required by the time of appointment.

The Search Committee will conduct preliminary interviews by video conference the second week of January 2020.

Application Instructions:

Applications must include:

  • Letter of application (“Cover Letter”)
  • CV
  • Writing excerpt from book/dissertation/article (“Other Document 1”)
  • Academic transcript (“Other Document 2”)
  • Contact information (including email address) for three professional references (“References List”)

Above text adapted from website.

Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and African American and Africana Studies

Application Deadline: Review of applications will begin November 20, 2019 and position will remain open until filled.

The University of Kentucky in Lexington is in the second year of a multi-year hiring plan to build a more inclusive curriculum, diversify our faculty, support our Program in African American and Africana Studies, and to contribute to our new undergraduate major in that program. Faculty will have tenure homes is departments relevant to their training and research focus and are expected to actively help build and support the AAAS program. Last year we hired seven new faculty (https://aaas.as.uky.edu/uks-new-faculty-hires-taking-african-american-africana-studies-next-level-0). This year we plan to hire additional faculty, in diaspora studies, black feminisms, environmental justice, ethnomusicology, and the economics of inequality. This ad is explicitly a call for applications for a position in Women of Color Feminism/Critical Race Theory, with an emphasis on Black Feminisms.

The Program in African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky seek applications for a full-time, tenure-track, assistant professor who will actively contribute to the undergraduate and graduate programs and the research profiles of both units. We seek to hire a scholar in the area of Women of Color Feminism/Critical Race Theory, with an emphasis on Black Feminisms. Possible sub-specialties might include—but are not limited to—areas such as diasporas, environmental justice, migration studies, indigenous feminisms, transnational feminist studies, hip hop feminism, and decolonial methodologies within black studies.

Candidates are expected to have a PhD in hand by August 15, 2020.

Application Instructions:

Applicants should submit the following:

1) a cover letter including a statement of research and teaching interests that shows strong engagement with both GWS and AAAS
2) curriculum vitae
3) one publication or professional paper (upload as Specific Request 1)
4) diversity statement: in 1-2 pages, applicants should reflect on their commitments, approaches, and insights related to inclusion, diversity, and equity (upload as Specific Request 2).

Also provide the names and contact information for three references when prompted in the academic profile. This information may be utilized to solicit recommendation letters from your references within the employment system.

Above text adapted from website.

 

2020-2021 AADS Dissertation Fellowship – Boston College: Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences: African and African Diaspora Studies

Application Deadline: 8 January 2020 (11:59PM EST)

Boston College’s African & African Diaspora Studies Program (AADS) announces its dissertation fellowship competition.  Scholars working in any discipline in the Social Sciences or Humanities, with projects focusing on any topic within African and/or African Diaspora Studies, are eligible to apply.  We seek applicants pursuing innovative, preferably interdisciplinary, projects in dialogue with critical issues and trends within the field.

This 2020/2021 fellowship includes a $30,000 stipend; access to highly subsidized health insurance through Boston College; a $1,500 research budget; a $3,000 moving expense allotment, and a fully equipped, shared office.  The fellow must remain in residence for the 9-month academic year, deliver one public lecture, and teach one seminar course.

The fellow will also be compensated for teaching the course with a taxable service stipend. The fellow will have full access to BC’s seven libraries as well as several rare book and manuscript collections.  Of particular interest is the Nicholas M. Williams Caribbeana Collection, consisting of materials from and about Africa, Jamaica, and the British West Indies.  The fellow can also benefit from the Apprenticeship in College Teaching and Dissertation Bootcamp programs—both of which are completely voluntary—as well as events and installations sponsored by programs in International Studies, American Studies, Asian American Studies, Islamic Civilization and Societies, and the internationally renowned McMullen Museum.

Qualifications

Eligible applicants must be currently enrolled in a PhD Program and be ABD by the start of the fellowship year. US Citizens, Permanent Residents and International Students are encouraged to apply.

Application Instructions:

Submit all application materials – including letters of recommendation – by Wednesday, 8 January 2020 at 11:59 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) via Interfolio.

Applications must include:
1) a 3000 word project proposal that includes a plan for completion and description of how this fellowship will assist applicant in achieving future professional goals
2) a 25 page MAXIMUM writing sample
3) a CV
4) three letters of recommendation, one of which must be from the dissertation advisor

Above text adapted from webpage.

CSA 2020 CFP: Identity Politics, Industry, Ecology and the Intelligent Economy in Caribbean Societies

CFP Deadline: 31 December 2019

Disruption is the new normal. In today’s so-called post-truth Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data where data is heralded as the “new oil,” the Caribbean faces old and new forms of complexity as the 21st century progresses. The complexities of race, ethnicity, class, language (both official and creole), skin color, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, religion and nationality continue to present challenges and contradictions in the pursuit of improving the lives of Caribbean people or towards inclusive ecological “development.” Yet, in an ever more globalized era of fast-paced technological advancements, AI has transformational potentialities that will affect the complexities that confront Caribbean development and go beyond those associated with the ticklish politics of identity. The combination of the swift pace of technological transformations and the effects of these on political, social and economic organization; on popular culture; and on cultural expression raise intriguing questions about how Caribbean life can be organized towards national, regional and even external development agendas. Moreover, the serious ecological challenges, most prominent of which is currently the threat of climate change, mean that sustainable practices must be at the center of economic development. Although balancing ecological concerns with more traditional approaches to “industry” for development poses challenges, even more daunting are shifts towards more digital and “high-tech” industrial and economic activities.  Cloud computing, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence, 3-D Printing, bio-technology, Nano-technology, intelligent machines, and block chain technologies are but some of the innovations that offer possibilities and perils, and add further layers of complexity to already complicated Caribbean realities. The CSA 2020 conference invites submissions from any disciplinary persuasion that seek to analyze, deconstruct and reflect on the technological transformations, the politics of identity and the somewhat contradictory ecological and industrial imperatives for “development” that combine to affect Caribbean societies and realities.

Conference themes:

Proposals are welcomed from the individual thematic areas presented below. Since the themes of the conference are interconnected, we also enthusiastically encourage proposals that explore the linkages between the conference thematic areas.  We will also consider proposals that go beyond or fall outside of the suggested thematic areas by exploring issues of significance for the Caribbean. However, priority will be given to proposals that seek to address the conference themes.

A. Identity Politics and Caribbean Development
B. Industry and Ecology
C. Industry and the Intelligent Economy

Please refer to the website for the full CFP and to submit an abstract, and direct any questions to: secretariat@caribbeanstudiesassociation.org.

Above text and image adapted from email and website.

 

Ebony G. Patterson | …to dig between the cuts, beneath the leaves, below the soil… | Hales New York

Opening Reception:
6pm – 8pm
24 October 2019
Exhibition:
October 24 – December 20, 2019
Hale’s New York
547 West 20th Street

Gallery installation shot

Hales is delighted to announce …to dig between the cuts, beneath the leaves, below the soil…, an exhibition of recent works by Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 Kingston, Jamaica). In her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Patterson continues with her exploration of gardens, an essential arc of her practice. This exhibition comprises of a new series of monumental paper collages which take their departure from Patterson’s celebrated touring solo exhibition, …while the dew is still on the roses…, which first opened at Pérez Museum of Art Miami (November 2018), and is currently on view at Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (through January 5, 2020).

Patterson began working on the collages in this exhibition in her studio in Jamaica, before completing them on a residency at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR, in 2019. In Patterson’s work, she explores the idea of the garden as both real and imagined, in relation to the procurement and legacies of postcolonial space:

“I am interested in how gardens – natural but cultivated settings – operate with social demarcations. I investigate their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land and death.”
(Ebony G. Patterson, 2018)

In …to dig between the cuts, beneath the leaves, below the soil… Patterson continues to deftly combine splendor with danger. Framing the garden as an active site of power, Patterson explores it as a metaphor for postcolonial space and an extension of the body. Juxtaposing visibility and invisibility; death and survival, Patterson’s works remain filled with an overwhelming sense of hope – in the toughest of circumstances, life will always grow.

Above text and image adapted from email and website.

Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition

7pm – 9pm
30 October 2019
The People’s Forum
320 West 37th Street

This year marks the publication of the English translation of Nathalie Etoke’s Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition. In richly poetic prose Etoke considers pain singing the happiness to come, memories of forgetting, and on va faire comment? She argues that Africana melancholy is distinct. Rooted in collective and historical experiences of enslavement, colonization, and neocolonialism marked by loss of land, freedom, language, culture, and self. Put differently, expropriation of labor and of land also annihilated age-old cycles of life. Considering what to do in the wake of such annihilation, Etoke explores how diasporic Africans reconcile that which has been destroyed with what is newly introduced, framing this inherent tension as the character of Africana historical becoming. On October 30th, Etoke will read from and speak about her newly translated work while Lewis R. Gordon, who authored its new foreword, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will address the continued relevance of its searching diagnoses.

Suggested donation: $6/$10/$15, no one turned away for inability to pay.

Above text and image adapted from email.

Education and the Politics of Education in the Caribbean

CFP Deadline: 31 October 2019

This Call For Papers is for a Congress on the Caribbean that will take place in March 2020 in Erlangen (Bavaria), Germany. Questions and/or abstracts (up to 500 words in English, French, or Spanish) should be sent to the email address on the flyer: conference-caribbean2020@fau.de.

Above text and image adapted from email.