Assistant/Associate Professor with specialty in the Americas

Job Opening:

Assistant or Associate Professor – Social Sciences (Tenure track) with speciality in the Americas

The Department of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the City College Center for Worker Education/CUNY invites applications for an Assistant or Associate Professor (tenure track) in the Social Sciences, to start on or about September 1, 2012 (Subject to budgetary approval). Field of specialization open, but candidates for this position should be actively engaged in researching and teaching in one or more of the following areas: immigration, globalization, urban studies, labor, and/or educational policy, with an emphasis on the intersections of gender, race, and class in the Americas. The successful candidate will be able to integrate theory and practice in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Continue reading Assistant/Associate Professor with specialty in the Americas

Caribbean Art and the African Diaspora

Tuesday, May 29, 2012, 6:30 PM
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York, NY

A discussion with panelists:
Erica James, Assistant Professor, History of Art and African American Studies, Yale University
Marc Latamie, Artist
Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator, Museum of Arts and Design
Gabriela Rangel, Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator, Americas Society (Moderator) Continue reading Caribbean Art and the African Diaspora

Reading Wilson Harris’s “History, Fable and Myth”

Reading Wilson Harris’s “History, Fable and Myth” (1970) as a “Foundational Text” in Caribbean Literature and Cultural Studies

by Barbara J. Webb, English, Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center 

At an international conference organized in 2001 by Hena Maes-Jelinek in honor of Wilson Harris’s 80th birthday and over 50 years of creative writing, Gordon Rohlehr referred to Harris as “the most admired unread writer of the Caribbean.”  Rohlehr was undoubtedly alluding to the difficulty of Harris’s densely metaphorical, highly abstract writing.  It is also striking that Harris is barely present in Alison Donell and Sarah Lawson Welsh’s Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature.  In their section on “Caribbean Criticism: Some Seminal Moments” (in the introduction to the period 1966-1979) they describe Harris’s Tradition, The Writer and Society (1967) as “an important and interesting intervention” but they maintain that his “writing, both fictional and critical… has not been easily accommodated within Caribbean literary traditions or critical paradigms and is often categorized as being more akin to the ‘magic realism’ of South American writing” (291).  Andrew Bundy, editor of the Selected Essays (1999) goes so far as to write Harris “out of the Caribbean.” He maintains that “Harris’s study of the fabric of the imagination sets his writing apart from the concerns of West Indian Caribbean writers” (7). Elsewhere Bundy rejects the idea of aligning Harris with certain issues of race, geographic and historical boundaries and situates him among the Central and South American writers that came to prominence in the 1960s. Wilson Harris does draw on a multitude of literary and cultural traditions and like the main character in his novel Black Marsden (1972) it seems that “everything is grist for his mill” (37).  Accordingly his numerous books and essays have been read as modernist/surrealist, postmodern/poststructuralist and of course postcolonialist where he is often given pride of place because of his engagement with questions origins, authenticity, subjectivity, universality and historiography. Continue reading Reading Wilson Harris’s “History, Fable and Myth”

Orlando Patterson in Conversation with David Scott

The Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar presents Orlando Patterson in Conversation with David Scott

May 4th 2012
4pm-6pm
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5114
365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY

Fifty years into Jamaican independence and twenty years after the publication of his seminal work Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson sits down with renowned anthropologist David Scott to discuss his creative and scholarly work and their implications in the contemporary moment. This is the closing event of our semester of revisiting “foundational texts” (see schedule here). The suggested reading for this event is the Introduction to Slavery and Social Death.

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and the author of, among other volumes, Slavery and Social Death, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, and most recently, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries. He has also published three novels: The Children of Sisyphus, An Absence of Ruins, and Die the Long Day. A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for Social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. The author of three novels, he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press.

David Scott is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where he specializes in the study of Caribbean and South Asian culture and Postcolonial thought more broadly.  The editor of Small Axe, he has published several seminal works of Caribbean thought, including Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, and Conscripts of Modernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (which we read at the inaugural discussion session of the Caribbean Espistemologies Seminar).

Co-sponsored by the Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar and the PhD Program in History

New Issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

The new Issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, entitled “New Work in Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies,” has been published and is now accessible online. This special issue features reviews of a wide range of criticism, poetry performances and visual art exhibitions in Caribbean studies. The issue is available here.

From the introduction by Raphael Dalleo:

Reviewing is a vital scholarly activity. Academic fields are conversations in which participants speak to one another and to their predecessors. Scholarly writing builds on its predecessors and engages in dialogue with its peers, but the publication process for academic work can be so slow that new ideas often take years to elicit responses and debate. Reviews of scholarly work are therefore particularly important as one of the first responses to a new contribution. We are especially happy to offer this issue of Anthurium and to dedicate it to reviews of recently published scholarship in Caribbean literary and cultural studies in order to help facilitate the conversations necessary for a vibrant field. Continue reading New Issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

The Question of the Social Sciences

The Question of the Social Sciences
A Small Axe Essay Competition

Small Axe is keen to encourage work in the critical and interpretive social sciences. We are interested in the ways in which such disciplines as anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology seek to grapple with the regional and diasporic Caribbean. This interest stems partly from the fact that the social sciences have been central, historically, to the construction of the “Caribbean” as an object of scholarly inquiry, and central therefore to what we understand the problems are that require investigation and interpretation. But in the past several decades there has been a considerable disciplinary upheaval (engendered by the rise, for example, of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies) such that the character of the social sciences has altered, and perhaps also social science modes of engaging and constructing the
Caribbean. Continue reading The Question of the Social Sciences

Gade nan mizè-am tonbe

The Institute of Caribbean Studies, of the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras (UPR-RP), invites the academic community and the general public to the lecture “Gade nan mizè-am tonbe: Las prácticas del Vodou en Haití ante la crisis ambiental” by Dr. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert,  Professor of Hispanic Studies on the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair; Director of Environmental Studies and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies, and Professor, Program of African Studies, Vassar College.  Jean Ourdy Pierre, Ph.D. Candidate, Hispanic Studies Graduate Program, College of Humanities, UPR-RP, will comment the lecture. The activity will be held on Thursday, April 12, from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. in Amphitheatre Manuel Maldonado Denis (CRA 108) of Carmen Rivera de Alvarado (CRA) Building, Faculty of the Social Sciences, UPR-RP.

This lecture will be broadcast LIVE online through the following website: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cc71

Comments and suggestions on this presentation will be very welcome at: [email protected]

Abstract (No translation to English available):

“Gade nan mizè-a m tonbe” es una canción religiosa dedicada al lwa (o espíritu) Bwa Nan Bwa (Árbol en el Bosque) en la cual los creyentes imploran a sus dioses que observen la miseria en la que se encuentran. Con esta súplica como punto de partida, este estudio explora el impacto de la crisis ambiental haitiana—especialmente la aguda deforestación y la pérdida de los sagrados mapous—sobre las prácticas del Vodou. La discusión incluye un análisis de las formas en las que el terremoto de enero del 2010 ha exacerbado este impacto, sobre todo en las prácticas y creencias vinculadas a la muerte.

Caribbean Philosophical Association Conference, deadline extended

From Nelson Maldonado-Torres, CPA President:

This is to let you know that we have extended the deadline for submitting paper, panel, round table, and workshops proposals for the CPA 2012 conference at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine to this coming Wednesday April 4th.  The original deadline was tomorrow March 31st.  The conference will be on July 19th to 21st.  News of accepted proposals will be sent by April 22nd.

Proposals can be submitted in multiple areas, including, epistemology, phenomenology, race and gender analysis, slavery, liberation, decoloniality, women of color feminism, political thought, and arts, literature, and the aesthetic, among others.

The CPA 2012 conference is sponsored by the Department of Liberal Arts and the Office of the Deputy Principal at the University of West Indies, St. Augustine, in Trinidad.  The main organizer is Dr. Paget Henry, Brown University.

Confirmed participants include:  Mireille Fanon Mendès France, Lewis R. Gordon, Jane Gordon, Paget Henry, Charles Mills, Michael Monahan, Catherine Walsh, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among others.

For more information go here: http://www.caribbeanphilosophicalassociation.org/CPA_2012.html

Elizabeth Nunez reading at York College

On Tuesday, March 27, author Elizabeth Nunez will read from her new novel, Boundaries as part of the Provost Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series at York College. Author of eight novels, Dr. Nunez is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY. Boundaries was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice (see review here).

Event Details:
March 27, 2012
Noon to 2:00 PM
Faculty Dining Room AC-2D01

Professor Fabiola Salek (Department of Foreign Languages, Humanities & ESL) will introduce Dr. Nunez and there will be a book signing following the reading. Refreshments will be served.

 

Comments on Sylvia Wynter

by Christopher Winks, Comparative Literature, Queens College

Text: “Afterword: Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’” by Sylvia Wynter

It was an excellent decision on Kelly’s part to have us read, study, and discuss representative essays by Wilson Harris and Sylvia Wynter, not only because both writers are part of the generation of the 1950s Caribbean Renaissance that contributed so much to Caribbean intellectual selfhood, and thus independence, but because in their complexity and indeed frequent intractability of access, they exemplify what to my mind Caribbean epistemologies aim at carrying out: a thoroughgoing questioning of dominant modes of knowledge in order to move outside these restrictive paradigms, grounded in the unique historical and experiential deep-structures of invasion, enslavement, colonialism, resistance, revolution, the decolonizing moment,  postcolonial disillusions, and new emancipatory possibilities.  Another immense Caribbean mind, the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima, declared that only the difficult stimulates, and it is precisely in their difficulty, in the vast range of cultural and philosophical reference that animates their quest for what Harris calls “a profoundly compassionate society committed to freedom within a creative scale” and Wynter “the lost motives of our ‘native’ human self-interest, and, increasingly degraded in our planetary environment, of our human self-interest,” that we as readers can ultimately find our surest inspiration and illumination. Continue reading Comments on Sylvia Wynter