The Caribbean Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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.

 

 

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.

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.

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.