e-misférica 11.2 – Caribbean Rasanblaj
Invited editor: Gina Athena Ulysse, Wesleyan University

Deadlines: completed essays due 15 September 2014; advance queries and abstracts welcome. Multimedia presentations and reviews also welcome.

Rasanblaj (n)
Resist the impulse to translate, pronounce it first. Think consciously of the sound. Let the arch of the r roll over the ah that automatically depresses the tongue; allow the hiss in the s that will culminate at the front of the teeth to entice the jaw to drop for the an sound while un-smacking the lips will propel the bl surrounding the depressed ah again ending with j. Play with its contours. Know what this word feels like in your mouth. In Haitian Kreyòl. 3 syllables. Ra-San-Blaj.

Defined as assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping, (of ideas, things, people, spirits. For example, fè yon rasanblaj, do a gathering, a ceremony, a protest), rasanblaj’s very linguistic formation subverted and resisted colonial oppression (M.Condé). << Consider that Article 16 of the 1685 French Code Noir forbade slaves of different masters to gather at any time under any circumstances >>. Its etymology and significations index the histories through which it emerged.

Rasanblaj: Catalyst. Keyword. Method. Practice. Project.

Rasanblaj issues a provocation to reframe discursive and expressive practices in the Caribbean (and its diasporas). Rasanblaj requires communal presence from the engaged to the radical, and is inter-active from the grassroots level rather than imposed from above. Considering the embodied visceral in the structural, it invokes Audre Lorde’s feminist erotic knowledge in its fullest dimensions from the political, to the sensual and spiritual (M. Sheller). It calls upon us to think through Caribbean performance and politics, recognizing the crossroads not as destination, but as point of encounter from which to move beyond. Indeed, with unequivocal evidence that the past and the future exist in the present (C.L.R. James, M-R. Trouillot), rasanblaj not only presupposes intent and method but also offers possibilities for other modalities and narratives. Thus, it allows us to contemplate the performative in subjectivity, agency, communities and citizenship that constitute Caribbean futures (B. Meeks), with the Marvelous and utopias imagined as possible realities (S. Césaire, J. Muñoz). An explicitly decolonial project, rasanblaj demands that we consider the limited scope of segregated frameworks to explore what remains excluded in this landscape full of life, yet ridden with inequities and dangerous memories (M. J. Alexander).

Please submit completed essays by September 15, 2014; advance queries and abstracts are most welcome. To submit multimedia presentations and reviews, please contact the editors with proposals not later than August 17, 2015, with texts and materials due September 15.

 For this issue, e-misférica will accept submissions in English, Spanish, Creole, French and Portuguese. All contributions, proposals, and consultations should be sent to the editors at [email protected]. Our guidelines and style sheet can be found at http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/participate.

Above from full, multi-lingual CFP available here.

Panel CFP for Northeast Modern Language Association
46th Annual Convention
Toronto, Ontario
April 30-May 3, 2015

Abstract Deadline: 30 September 2014; electronic submission via NeMLA site

For this panel, we invite participants to explore the rich cultural production of Caribbean artists (writers, musicians, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, dancers, etc.) of the last hundred years. How are we defining the Caribbean in the twenty-first century? How are we in conversation with each other? How do the arts portend the future of the region? We recognize ‘Caribbean’ to include the attendant international diasporas and welcome abstracts in all of the national languages spoken there.

For more information, contact panel chairs: Irline Francois and Vanessa Valdés ([email protected])

Call for Papers for manuscript submission for the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships which is published by the University of Nebraska Press.  This refereed, interdisciplinary journal will shed light upon the continuum of sexual expression of those of African descent.  Please submit narratives of qualitative and quantitative research efforts or of conceptual or clinical essays that seek to advance the field of sexology.

The first issue will be out in October, 2014 and so the deadline for manuscript review is 15 June 2014. 

For more information please visit their website here.

Submissions

Send manuscripts electronically using Microsoft Word to James C. Wadley, Ph.D at [email protected] and [email protected]

DEADLINE: 15 June 2014

Each manuscript must be accompanied by a statement that it has not been sent for publication or published elsewhere.  As an author, you are required to secure permission if you want to reproduce any figure, table, or extract from the text of another source.  All figures should be camera ready.

All parts of the manuscript should be typewritten, double-spaced, with margins of at least one inch on all sides.  Quantitative manuscripts should not exceed 30 pages total (including cover page, abstract, text, references, tables, and figures), with margins of at least 1 inch on all sides and a standard font (e.g., Times New Roman) of 12 points (no smaller).  Qualitative manuscripts should not exceed 40 pages. For papers that exceed page limits, authors must provide a rationale to justify the extended length in their cover letter (e.g., multiple studies are reported). Papers that do not conform to these guidelines may be returned with instructions to revise before a peer review is invited.

The manuscript files should be submitted in MS Word (Windows Vista users, please save your files as an earlier “.doc” filetype). Include (1) the manuscript title and running head; (2) all author names, affiliations, mailing addresses, and e-mail addresses (indicate who the corresponding author for the article should be); (3) any acknowledgments; and (4) brief biographical paragraphs (50 words or less) describing each author’s current affiliation and research interests.

Authors should also supply a shortened version of the title suitable for the running head, not exceeding 50 character spaces.  Each article should be summarized in an abstract of no more than 100 words.  Avoid abbreviations, diagrams, and reference to the text. Format for references and citations should conform to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition.  This may be ordered from the Publication Department, American Psychological Association, 750 First Street, NE, Washington D.C. 20002-4242, phone (202)336-5500, fax (202)336-5502.

Book Reviews
Book reviews should be sent to the attention of the editor (address above). Review essays as well as bibliographic articles and compilations are sought. Potential contributors of such material are advised to correspond with the editor.

Peer Review Policy
All research articles in this journal undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymous refereeing by two anonymous referees.

Message adapted from CFP announcement.

Afro-Latinos in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas

Deadline: 15 June 2014

Editors: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau (Virginia Tech), Jennifer A. Jones (Notre Dame), Tianna S. Paschel (University of Chicago)

How do ideas about, and experiences of, blackness travel across the Americas? How does this circulation of representations of blackness – through popular music, the internet, print media, and scholarship – influence local ideas of race and nation?  How does (im)migration to and within the Americas shape and reshape understandings about blackness? Afro-Latinos in Movement – an edited interdisciplinary volume being prepared for Palgrave Macmillan’s Afro-Latino Diasporas Series – seeks to answer such questions. A collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded chapters and original artwork, this book will examine African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latinos in the United States in order to explore broader questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism and diaspora in the Americas.  Afro-Latinos in Movement draws on previous works on race and blackness in Latin America and U.S. Latino communities, while also providing a uniquely hemispheric approach. The volume will build up from the U.S. context to critically examine how blackness, and more specifically afrolatinidad, is understood, transformed, and re-imagined across locales throughout the Americas. In this way, the volume emphasizes the multiple movements across geographic borders, and over time. Thus, Afro-Latinos in Movement will broaden and deepen the discussion on afrolatinidad in the Americas by providing a critical transnational approach to understanding blackness in the region.

Afro-Latinos in Movement will be arranged in three sections, each of which will emphasize the multidisciplinary aspect of this volume by incorporating a range of works including creative or biographical pieces. While the volume will highlight the circulation of ideas and identities across borders more generally, Afro-Latinos in Movement expects that about half of the contributions will center on Afrolatinidad in the United States.

To that end, Afro-Latinos in Movement invite manuscripts from both historical and contemporary perspectives that address topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• The role of social media and the internet in shaping afrolatinidad
• Afro-Latino cultural and political movements
• The impact of migration on understandings of afrolatinidad
• Representations of afrolatinidad in media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, digital media)
• Theoretical interventions on diaspora and transnationalism in the Americas

Submission Guidelines

Afro-Latinos in Movement invites complete manuscripts from all disciplines for inclusion in this volume, including relevant creative works.  All submissions (creative or scholarly) must be original.

All submissions are due by 11:59pm EST on 15 June 2014 and should include:

• Author(s) curriculum vitae as separate attachment;
• Manuscript title;
• Name, institutional affiliation, discipline, position or title, and contact information of author(s) including email address and phone number;
• Abstract of the paper or creative piece up to 200 words;
• Keywords (maximum of 6);
• All tables and illustrations;
• Brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly or professional biography of each author;
• Scholarly papers should be 5000 to 8000 words, inclusive of references;
• Poems, short stories, creative essays and biographical entries should be a maximum of 5000 words;
• Artwork should be sent jpeg format, compressed to no larger than 25 MB (larger formats will be used for publication).

Manuscripts should be submitted via electronic attachment (word or PDF file preferred) to: [email protected] with ‘Volume Submission’ in the subject line. CVs should be included as a separate document. Manuscripts may be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be reviewed continuously until the submission deadline. Final decisions will be issued to authors no later than 30th July 2014. Manuscripts will be published in English only.

Submitted manuscripts or artwork should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts will be reviewed by the editors for inclusion. Submissions will be continuously reviewed until the deadline. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page.

If you have any additional inquiries regarding the Call for Papers, submission guidelines, or volume series, please direct all inquiries to: [email protected]

 Adapted from CFP announcement.

Philosophy Born of Struggle XXI 2014 Annual Meeting

Forging Concepts through Struggle: The New Slave—Racism, Empire, and Sexual Violence.

31 October – 1 November 2014

Paine College, Augusta, Georgia.

Call for Papers

Submission Deadline: 1 August 2014

Submission Guidelines:  Email a Microsoft Word document including the title, abstract, institutional affiliation, rank or occupation, and email address to: [email protected]

Over the last decade, the worsening plight of Blacks in the United States has raised fundamental questions about reconciling democracy with poverty, freedom with statism and government surveillance, and the idea of racial progress with the routinized deaths/murders of Black men, women and children. These realities have led some to ask a deeper question: Did slavery ever really end, or do Blacks around the world still effectively live in chains?

The thought of Blacks as NEW SLAVES has led recent scholars to reformulate questions of race, class, and gender into more complex notions of empire, neo-liberalism, and sexual violence. This reformulation has drawn on and reshaped resources from a variety of sources. Africana philosophy, Latin American philosophy, (post) structuralism/ (post) colonialism, psychoanalysis, and anti-colonial thought have loomed large, as have the works of literary, visual, and performing artists.

The 2014 meeting of Philosophy Born of Struggle takes up these questions and resources. Hosted this year at Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, Philosophy Born of Struggle  asks for papers and panels looking to explore the complex obstacles towards freedom, or more accurately stated, how the conditions, values, and institutions PBOS have made synonymous to “being free,” have in fact concealed and consolidated the long afterlife of slavery.

Research questions include:  Continue reading CFP- Philosophy Born of Struggle XXI 2014

UPDATED Call for Papers: Special Issue of The Black Scholar on Race, Blackness, and the Dominican Republic

New deadline: Abstracts by 31 July 2014 and full article by 15 December 2014

Submissions should be sent to special guest editors, Raj Chetty ([email protected]) and Amaury Rodríguez ([email protected]).

Publication of the special issue is slated for late 2015. When preparing manuscripts, please follow The Black Scholar Submission Guidelines.

The editors of The Black Scholar welcome essays for a special issue examining the complexity of black cultural politics and identity in the Dominican Republic. This special issue seeks to analyze Dominican racial relations against the grain of the cross-disciplinary consensus, primarily U.S.-based, that focuses on Dominicans’ “negrophobia,” “anti-Haitianism,” and “self-hatred.” In this way, the issue inserts itself into a globally comparative Black Studies, including the articulations and disarticulations between blackness in the US, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

Aiming to include a cross-disciplinary group of writers, scholars, and activists from the Dominican Republic and Dominicanists from abroad, the issue invites essays on the following topics:

• Methodologies of studying blackness and Africanness in the Dominican Republic
• Archives/archaeologies of Dominican blackness
• Imperialism, blackness, and U.S.-Dominican relations
• Dominican Black transnationalisms: intra-Caribbean, inter-American, and African-Dominican
• Critical histories of antihaitianismo, Haitian-Dominican cultural relations, and/or Haitian-Dominican solidarity
• Race and blackness in Dominican popular cultural production
• Political economy of blackness vis-à-vis the Dominican Republic
• Racism, colorism, and white supremacy in Dominican social structures
• Perceptions of Dominicans by U.S. Blacks, Caribbeans, and/or Africans
• Dominican conceptualizations of diaspora: la diáspora in Dominican migration, African diaspora in a Dominican sense, diaspora in an Afro-dominican sense

The issue anticipates that the suggested topics in the list above, or relevant topics not listed, will engage scholars in Black/Africana Studies, Caribbean & Latin American Studies, Psychology, Literary Studies, Theater & Performance Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Political Science, Media Studies, Ethnomusicology, and History.

The issue will also feature poetry, art, and fiction by black- and Afro-affirming Dominican writers and artists, in English translation.

THE BLACK SCHOLAR is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal providing cogent articles that help the understanding of issues of social concern to black Americans and other peoples of African descent across the world. To provide full range for the development of black thought in a climate where fora are still limited, The Black Scholar emphasizes writings by black authors. The journal was launched in 1969 with the premise that black authors, scholars, artists and activists could participate in dialogue within its pages, “uniting the academy and the street.” Its editors have been dedicated to finding and developing new talent and continuing to publish established authors. TBS is now a refereed journal published with Routledge. Nonetheless, it retains its policy of publishing non-academic organic intellectuals from a variety of vocations and avocations.

For more on the journal’s history and philosophy, please visit its website.

Message adapted from circulated CFP. See original CFP here (Spanish version here).