Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, in collaboration with the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, is pleased to announce a one-year competitive postdoctoral fellowship for a scholar pursuing research in Caribbean Studies. Scholars working on comparative cultural studies of the Dutch or the French Caribbean, with focus on transnationalism, migration and/or queer feminist studies, are especially encouraged to apply but we welcome applications from all scholars who feel that their work would benefit from affiliation with Rutgers.
The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $65,000 as well as an annual research allocation of $3,000 and Rutgers University health benefits. The successful applicant must have the doctorate in hand at the time of application (defense date no later than May 31, 2014), be no more than three years beyond the Ph.D. (Ph.D. received on 2011 or later), and be able to teach one undergraduate course during their tenure at Rutgers. Position begins on July 1, 2014 and ends on June 30, 2015. Continue reading Postdoctoral Fellowship in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers
Keynote Speaker: *Brodwyn Fischer* (University of Chicago)
From the Call For Papers
Since the conquest, Latin America has been a distinctly urban region, and yet urbanization has always been a process fraught with ambiguity and
contradiction. From Pre-Columbian times, urban centers have served as central arenas for the contestation of political power, cultural
legitimacy, economic development, and social hierarchy. Latin America’s cities have stood at the nexus of regional and transnational forces. They
have served as both geographic and intellectual meeting places, where vibrant and often restive rural cultures have come into contact with forces
that reach well beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. As a result, scholars across the disciplines have long grappled with how to understand
urban space in Latin America. Continue reading Urban Explorations: Latin America’s Cities, Past & Present
November was a busy month for publications relevant to Caribbean Studies. Below is an annotated list with links to more information (or to the publication itself if it is open access). Open access publications listed first.
Image credit: Still from Touch (video, 2002), by Janine Antoni
The long-awaited return of the CRB after an almost two-year hiatus. This issue features the engaging book reviews that the publication is known for as well as short review articles on art and film, poetry from Shivanee Ramlochan and a conversation with Oonya Kempadoo.
Fall issue featuring: an essay by poet and author Kei Miller on dub poetry and the “sort of life” it may continue to have in the diasporas; a multi-media piece by choreographer Chris Walker and poet Danez Smith; and an essay by Bernard James on the tenuous and often fraught connections between Caribbean Americans and African Americans. This issue also includes book reviews, poetry, and an announcement of the winners and short list for the 2013 Small Axe Literary Competition.
This is the first issue of Moko, which is published from the Virgin Islands and “focuses on promoting fiction, poetry, visual arts, and criticism that reflect a Caribbean heritage or experience.” The planned publication schedule is November, March and July.
In the first issue, Moko includes art and writing from the following Caribbean contributors: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Florine Demosthene, Soyini Ayanna Forde, Manuel Mathieu, Dalton Narine, Celeste Rita-Baker, Colin Robinson, and Nilsa Wheatley.
Special tenth-year anniversary issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal on “Intellectual Formations: Locating a Caribbean Critical Tradition.” Many of the contributions began as presentations at the 31st West Indian Literature Conference (October 2012) which celebrated the 50-year anniversaries of independence in Jamaica and Trinidad. The issue includes essays from several recognizable names in Caribbean Literary Studies. The issue is divided into three parts:
Part I: First Reflections, Plenary Voices
Part II: “The Generation of 1968”
Part III: Locating a Tradition of West Indian Criticism
Open access. _____________________________
ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics, & Consciousness
Special issue on Caribbean women, guest-edited by Professor Opal Palmer Adisa. Includes creative works and scholarly essays from: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Helen Klonaris, Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming, Angelique V. Nixon, Toni Pressley-Sanon, Opal Palmer Adisa, and more.
Open access with registration. _____________________________
Contemporary Caribbean Visual Art & Culture. This issue features the work of a wide array of visual artists, including: Christopher Cozier, Simone Leigh, Satch Hoyt, Camille Chedda, Olivia McGilchrist, and Tristan Alleyne. ARC 8 also features writing from: Dominique Brebion, Marta Fernandez Campa, Carl E. Hazlewood, Qiana Mestrich, Marsha Pearce, Legacy Russell, and Jaret Vadera.
Print. Subscription-based. Preview available online. _____________________________
This issue features special sections on “Translating the Caribbean” (Guest-edited by Kaiama Glover and Martin Munro), a tribute to the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and “Visual Life of Catastrophic History.”
The Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center presents a day with Ian Baucom. there will be two events: A seminar at 12:00pm and a public talk at 4pm. Details from the circulated announcement below. The readings will be available for download here until 7 December.
Friday, December 6th Ian Baucom works on twentieth century British Literature and Culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and Black Atlantic literatures. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999, Princeton University Press), Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005, Duke University Press), and co-editor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (2005, Duke University Press). He has edited special issues of the South Atlantic Quarterly on Atlantic Studies and Romanticism, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively entitled The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life. Prof. Baucom received his Ph.D. from Yale University and taught there before joining the English Department at Duke. Prior to assuming the post of the Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute, he was Chair of English at Duke for three years.
12:00-1:30 – Seminar with Ian Baucom Room 5109 Please join us in discussing a portion of Prof. Baucom’s new book project in conversation with several readings which have shaped its development. The readings for this seminar are as follows (click on each to download):
1. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in a 2009 issue of Critical Inquiry.
2. Ian Baucom, “The Human Shore: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Natural Science”
3. The Introductory chapter of Tim Morton’s new book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
4. Ian Baucom, “History 4˚C: The Youngest Day” (which is his working introduction to his new project).
4:00-6:00 – Ian Baucom, “History 4˚C: Search for a Method” Room 9100 (Skylight Room)
“The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming,” Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently argued, has effected a collapse of the long-standing division between human and natural history. Where it has been the enduring conviction of the historical profession that the proper study of history begins at precisely the point at which human life organizes and separates itself from animal, natural existence, the planet’s looming ecological catastrophe, Chakrabarty indicates, has made that distinction void. Human history, human culture, human society have now come to possess a truly geological force, a capacity not only to shape the local environments of forests, river-systems, and desert terrain, but to effect, catastrophically, the core future of the planet as we enter into the long era of what the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and other climate researchers have called the “anthropocene.” As scholars across the disciplines have increasingly begun to argue, addressing the deep time of the anthropocene (both its deep history and its deep future) implies a fundamental interrogation (or re-interrogation) of many of our core concepts (“nature,” “politics,” “sovereignty” and the “human” key among them). As the coherence and plasticity of those concepts—particularly of the human–come under renewed pressure so too are there allied shifts toward a range of posthumanist understanding of the “task” (or tasks”) of the humanities and, consequently, of the relation of the humanities to the life and other natural sciences.
In this talk I take up some of those challenges, particularly as they address the question of framing a critical method adequate to the “situation” of the anthropocene. In so doing, I will argue that despite its enormously rich considerations of the multi-scaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe, thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multi-temporal ontology of the present that would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest, therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search for method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together (minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4˚.
This event is co-sponsored by the following entities at the CUNY Graduate Center: the Advanced Research Collaborative, the Center for the Humanities, IRADAC, the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.
CFP deadlines: Abstracts due 29 December; full papers due 28 February. Contact information below.
Below adapted from the CALL FOR PAPERS:
Following the sporadic series of conferences on the Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean since 1975 held mainly in Trinidad and Tobago, there is a plan to organise one conference every year in various parts of the region. Next year’s conference will be held in Belize from August 5 to 11, 2014 on the theme “The Indian Diaspora in Belize and the wider Caribbean.” This is the first conference of its kind to be held in this English-speaking country, and in Central America.
The conference aims to bring together academics, scholars, teachers and students at all levels with an interest in the Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean to discuss their research findings.
Space will be provided for less formal presentations from activists and practitioners in the field in order to contribute to the limited store of public knowledge on Indians in Belize.
Possible paper themes can include, but are not limited to history, migration, inter-ethnic marriages, culture loss, alcoholism, business, remittances, agriculture, education and gender.
These themes can be approached from a variety of disciplines, and can be inter- as well as multi-disciplinary. At least two-thirds of each paper to be presented must deal with Indians in Belize. Submitted papers will be assigned to particular panels according to similarities in theme, topic and discipline. Continue reading International conference on The Indian Diaspora in Belize and the wider Caribbean
“The Work of Man Has Only Just Begun”
A two-day event and online resource to explore the “Legacies of Aimé Césaire”
The Researchathon – Thursday, 5 December 10AM-5PM (detailed explanation available here)
Studio@Butler
Butler Library 208
Columbia University
New York, NY
The Forum – Friday, 6 December 10AM-5PM (full schedule below)
Maison Française
Buell Hall
Columbia University
New York, NY
From the event organizers:
Poet, statesman, and singular voice of the anti-colonial movements of the 20th century, Aimé Césaire continues to influence contemporary discussions of ethics and aesthetics, politics and history in this precariously postcolonial world. In an effort to contribute to Césaire’s living legacy, we have organized an online forum http://cesairelegacies.cdrs.columbia.edu in which four pairs of scholars, from a variety of disciplines, offer reflections along four different critical paths. Our aim is to think Césaire outside and beyond the usual frames, to generate provocative new ways of imagining possible Césairean futures at the close of his centenary year. We hope that you will not only join in our discussion, but also participate in our two-day event—a researchathon followed by a public forum—to be held in NYC on December 5 and 6. We hope, above all, that you will agree with Césaire that the work of man has only just begun.
CFP deadlines: Abstracts due 15 February 2014; papers due 30 July 2014.
The editors of the forum for inter-american research (fiar) invite scholars to send articles (in English and Spanish) for a special issue of fiar: The Journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS)—‘Caribbean Entanglements. Culture(s) and Nature Revisited.’ The deadline for abstracts is February 15, 2014.
Scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds are interested in understanding contemporary and historical effects and interrelations due to multiple culture-nature connections. However, studies on the theme remain often within the disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, in this special issue of fiar we will focus on the diverse approaches and debates dealing with entanglements of culture(s) and nature in a dialogical and critical fashion. Continue reading Caribbean Entanglements: Culture(s) and Nature Revisited
African Diasporas: Old and New Conference
University of Texas at Austin
April 3-6, 2014
Panel CFP. Deadline: abstracts due 22 November 2013.
W.E.B. DuBois famously said that he didn’t give a damn for any art that was not propaganda. Just as famously James Baldwin denigrated what he considered the stock characters of the protest novel. Perceptions of propaganda and protest are in and of themselves ideological lenses that may sharpen, distort, or render invisible the range of rhetorical and imaginative strategies manipulated to inform diasporic identities. Identifying “new” formulations of diaspora at specific historical junctures means redefining the terms of social and political engagement. Through an examination of rhetorical and literary strategies in a variety of media and through a variety of discourses this panel seeks to understand how subjects imagine and enact diasporic communities in the midst of U.S. territorial occupations. We take as a point of departure the “new” diaspora created through primarily military invasions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries beyond the contiguous U.S., with a particular focus on the Caribbean and Latin America.
Proposals should include a 250-word abstract and title, as well as the author’s name, address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation.
Send all proposals to Kimberly J. Banks at [email protected] by 22 November 2013.
CFP adapted from email from panel organizer. Contact Kimberly J. Banks for further information.
13-14 March 2014
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave
New York, NY
Opening Keynote: David Scott, Columbia University
Closing Keynote: Sibylle Fischer, New York University
CFP deadline: Abstracts of 300 words or less electronically to [email protected] by 31 December 2013.
Two decades since its publication, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) united conversations about race, place, diaspora, and slavery within the Atlantic world. This interdisciplinary conference takes as its point of departure Gilroy’s ethos of looking outside of and challenging established categories (such as those determined by nationalist modes of thought). In the spirit of thinking both with and beyond the Black Atlantic paradigm this conference seeks to create a space for scholars to negotiate its theoretical limits while gesturing towards alternative frames and futures for the Black Atlantic. This interdisciplinary conference revisits the roots and routes, the genealogies and the futures, of The Black Atlantic.
This conference invites critical and methodological conversations among students and faculty who have been theorizing ways that rethink diaspora, transatlantic cultures, race, historiographies, and notions of “modernity.” This conference aims to bring together scholars across disciplines and bridge conversations that will shift the grounds, directions, and temporalities of the Black Atlantic.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:
Memory, Subjectivity, and the Black Diaspora
Remapping the Spatiotemporalities of the Black Atlantic
Early Modern Atlantic Crossings and Early Transatlantic Exchanges
Engenderings and Queerings of the Black Atlantic
Sounds and Music of the Middle Passage
Transatlantic Affective Economies
Black Atlantic Matter(s): Things and Objects of the Middle Passage
Ethics, Archives, and Historiographies of the Black Atlantic
The Black Pacific; Intersections of Race and Labor
Latin American and/or Caribbean Studies and the Black Atlantic
This is the annual conference of the English Student Association at the CUNY Graduate Center. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a 3-5 line bio, contact information, and a/v requests to [email protected]. Additionally, feel free to submit abstracts as a fully formed panels and/or roundtables. We also welcome suggestions for non-traditional conference presentations. The deadline for abstracts and other proposals is December 31st, 2013. Participants will be notified by the end of January.
The above was adapted from the circulated CFP. For more information, visit the conference website.
The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop present a celebration of Gaiutra Bahadur‘s book Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (U of Chicago Press 2013).
Event details:
Saturday, 16 November
5-7pm
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
New York, NY 10001
Guyanese are the second largest immigrant group in Queens and among the five largest in New York City, and their story of coming to America is tightly braided with their ancestral story of leaving India. In Coolie Woman, Bahadur pursues her great-grandmother’s story of indentured servitude in Guyana and recovers the lost voices and buried histories of other indentured women, whose passages were both transgressive acts of reinvention and unsuspecting exile.
Bahadur tells their story in a book that author Junot Diaz calls “an astonishing document… both a historical rescue mission and a profound meditation on family and womanhood.” Join as as we celebrate the publication of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture in a multimedia evening of text, image, and song.
Read an excerpt from Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture here.
On 22 November there will be two events at the CUNY Graduate Center commemorating Aimé Césaire’s Centennial.
1:00pm in Room C203
Heare Now Aimé Césaire!
Gary Wilder
Join Gary Wilder as he explores Aimé Césaire’s distinctive critical orientation to politics, culture, and knowledge during the period of decolonization as he pursued projects that were at once situated and world-historical, realist and utopian, pragmatic and aesthetic, timely and untimely.
3:00pm in Room 5409
Roundtable talk on Aimé Césaire’s Centennial
Barbara Webb
Christopher Winks
The Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series hosts a roundtable discussion of Césaire’s Centennial, led by remarks from Christopher Winks (Queens College) and Barbara Webb (The Graduate Center and Hunter College).
CFP deadline: Abstracts due 30 November 2013, electronically to [email protected]; Notification of acceptance: December 21, 2013; full essays due 1 January 2014.
Editors:
Katherine Bankole-Medina, Ph.D., History
Abena Lewis-Mhoon, Ph.D., History
Stephanie Yarbough, ABD, Africana Studies
From the CFP:
Women of African descent (Africana, African, Black, and Afro-…) have a long history of seeking, theorizing, and ensuring justice in the world.
While Black women have experienced various forms racial, gender, social and political struggles, they have responded to a wealth of issues involving social justice, civil rights, human rights abuses, and equal rights. This project encompasses a range of issues associated with Africana women’s attempts to come to terms with justice within variety of venues. Continue reading Women of African Descent and Justice in World Societies
An AfroCuban Journey From the Literary Camp to Social Activism: A Conversation with Roberto Zurbano
Wednesday, October 30th, 2013, 6:00 p.m
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC) Auditorium
53 Washington Square South
New York University, New York NY 10012
Join the afrolatin@ forum and co-sponsors for a public conversation with Roberto Zurbano about his journey towards social activism.
Roberto Zurbano is the Fall 2013 Scholar/Writer in residence of the Connecticut College Center for Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. Zurbano’s career began in the field of literary criticism and from there he went on to support the Cuban Hip Hop movement and proceeded to his current focus, antiracists social activism in Cuba. Zurbano informs us that “…new paths are now opened for Cuban society, but that these do not open on their own and a new active force is the phenomena with which Blacks in Cuba defend their right to a place in society, one free of marginalization and racism.” Continue reading An AfroCuban Journey
8 November 2013, 4pm
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
Sociology Lounge – 6112
Inaugural event in the “Question of Africa” Series from the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas & the Caribbean (IRADAC). The series will feature new writing from within the Diaspora. This event celebrates the publication of three new books in African American and African Diaspora Studies by members of the CUNY Community:
A Symposium on the Atlantic World
February 21-22, 2014
Rice University, Houston, Texas
CFP deadline: Abstracts (300 words) due 1 November 2013 via email to [email protected] (snail mail option below)
Of note: Presented papers will be considered for publication in an anthology from a major university press. A limited amount of funding for travel may be available for those unable to obtain funding from their own institution.
The Department of History at Rice University invites proposals for a special conference and anthology exploring the complicated relationship between race, citizenship, and national identity during the era of emancipations. Historians working within the framework of Atlantic History have reoriented our understandings of the past away from the nation-state and towards an Atlantic, hemispheric, continental, or global approach. Without such movement away from a nationally-based framework, much of the innovative and enlightening scholarship on people of color in the Atlantic World would have been impossible. Yet by de-privileging the nation-state, historians have obscured the discussion of how nationality and citizenship figured into blacks’ conceptions of their own identities, as well as whites’ conceptions of people of color within the nation. Nationality, whether legal citizenship or cultural imagination, played an integral role in the formation of individual and group identity. By examining race, identity, and nation in particular contexts, this symposium will contribute to a better understanding of if, how, and why people of color throughout the Atlantic World came to understand themselves as citizens during the long nineteenth century.
The organizers welcome a wide variety of topics both individually and in completed panels.Successful proposals may:
Consider a range of topics relating to race, citizenship, and national identity.
Explore a single national context or those employing a transnational analysis
Span the era of emancipations, roughly from the Haitian Revolution through Brazilian abolition.
Proposals should include an abstract of approximately 300 words and a single page CV. Submissions from graduate students, junior and senior scholars are encouraged, as are those that draw on interdisciplinary methods. Additionally, presented papers will be considered for publication in an anthology from a major university press. A limited amount of funding for travel may be available for those unable to obtain funding from their own institution.
Proposals must be received by 1 November 2013, and should be sent by email to [email protected] or by post to Race and Nation Symposium; c/o Whitney Stewart; History Department – MS 42; Rice University; PO Box 1892; Houston, TX 77251-1892.
Above adapted from full CFP. For more information, go to http://raceandnation.wordpress.com/.
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