*UPDATED* 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

“HINTERLANDS : Journeys of the Imagination”

17-20th October 2019
University of Guyana, Turkeyen Campus
Georgetown, Guyana

CFP Deadline: 20 June 2019 


Image: “Palace of the Peacock – Homage to Wilson Harris”,
George Simon, Phibert Gajadhar, Anil Roberts,
University of Guyana (2009)

Among the most significant origins of West Indian Literature is The Discovery of Guiana (1597) by one of the “ancestral murderers and poets” (Walcott), Sir Walter Ralegh. The quest for gold, the dream of wealth and power inspired centuries of “history, fable and myth” (Harris), which saw Ralegh himself, and generations of West Indian writers in pursuit of the elusive El Dorado, hidden in the mysteries of the Guianese Hinterland. The “Interiors” (McWatt), the “heartland”, the rainforests – the “hinterland”, is that vast unfathomable region that is largely unexplored, untamed, dynamic; whose definition is yet incomplete and the subject of a continuing journey of exploration and of the imagination.

That is West Indian literature at this time. That is what this conference seeks to interrogate. It is the subject of the conference and a concept of Guyana – the country in which the 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference will be held.
 Continue reading *UPDATED* 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

Recent Publication – sx salon 30: Brother, by David Chariandy

sx salon
Issue 30
February 2019

Issue 30 of sx salon is dedicated to David Chariandy’s second novel, Brother (2017). Brother has received many awards and accolades, such as the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Toronto Book Award. To discuss the various dimensions of Chariandy’s novel, sx salon has gathered several voices from Canada and the Caribbean to explore the intricacies of homosocial and diasporic spaces, linearity, and the lines between nostalgia, sentiment, and survival. (Introduction)

sx salon: a small axe literary platform is a digital forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature, broadly defined. Caribbean creative writing has always wrestled with the idea of an aesthetic form that engages regional and diasporic understandings of our changing realities. As a forum, sx salon aims to stimulate these sensibilities and preoccupations across different literary genres. Initiated in 2010, sx salon appears three times per year (February, June, and October). The journal publishes literary discussions, interviews with writers, reviews of new publications (creative and scholarly), and poetry and prose by Caribbean writers.

Table of Contents Continue reading Recent Publication – sx salon 30: Brother, by David Chariandy

Louise Bennett Anthology

CFP Deadline: 1 August 2019

This Call For Papers is for an amazing Louise Bennett anthology that will be published end of 2019 to honor the 100th birthday of Jamaica’s folk icon. The anthology is seeking to gather 100 submissions from as many writers/ poets/ critics/ artists as possible. Questions should be sent to the email address on the flyer ([email protected]) or to Isis Semaj-Hall directly at [email protected]

Above text and image adapted from email.

Caribbean Quarterly: Enough!

CFP Deadline: 1 August 2019

Caribbean Quarterly is now accepting submissions for Enough!, an issue dedicated to addressing child sexual abuse (CSA) in Caribbean culture through an examination of regional literature, film, art, music, and life writing. The journal is currently accepting articles (6000 words), poems (2 pages or less), short prose (1500 words or less), personal narratives (1500 words), and art (photographs, paintings, or drawings in jpeg format) focusing on CSA in the Caribbean.

This issue seeks to bring the art and scholarly communities as well as victims/survivors together to address the critical issue of CSA in the Caribbean region by initiating a conversation. This issue hopes to answer some questions, such as: Why is CSA so prevalent in the Caribbean, and what can be done to address it on a social, familial, and governmental level? Can the Caribbean transform its culture of accepting or concealing CSA? What are the historical origins of CSA culture in the Caribbean and can this narrative be altered? Is there a connection between gender and possible victimization in incidents of CSA in the Caribbean?

Some possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • CSA in Caribbean literature, film, art, poetry, music
  • CSA and the Caribbean media
  • Addressing CSA in the Caribbean on a socio-cultural level
  • Families and CSA in the Caribbean
  • Reaching victims/survivors of CSA in the Caribbean
  • Addressing CSA in the Caribbean through education
  • CSA in the Caribbean and the culture of young girls and older men
  • Educating boys and men in the Caribbean on CSA culture
  • Victims of CSA in the Caribbean and gender

Please submit an article proposal of 250 words or less to guest editor Camille Alexander at [email protected] by August 1, 2019. Accepted proposals will receive responses by August 20, 2019 with final manuscripts due by December 1, 2019.

Submissions of prose, poems, art, and personal narratives may be submitted at any time before October 1, 2019; responses will be sent by December 1, 2019. For book review enquiries, please review the book list at http://www.uwi.edu/cq/reviews/booksreview.aspx and contact Caribbean Quarterly editor Kim Robinson-Walcott at [email protected] with your book selection preference.

For any additional enquiries about this issue of Caribbean Quarterly, please contact Camille Alexander, Assistant Professor, United Arab Emirates, University, [email protected].

Above text adapted from webpage.

Nicole Dennis-Benn presents Patsy

Book Launch and conversation with Tracy K. Smith

7:30pm 
4 June 2019
Greenlight Bookstore in Prospect Lefferts Gardens
632 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11225

Nicole Dennis-Benn, beloved and award-winning author of Here Comes the Sun, returns to Greenlight to present her searing new novel about the injustices—big and small—that immigrants, the working class, and women face every day. Patsy flows effortlessly between the story of the titular Patsy, who emigrates from Jamaica to New York in search of a freedom she’s never known, and the story of Tru, the daughter she leaves behind. While Patsy finds herself ironically working as a nanny after fleeing from parental expectations at home, Tru attempts to build a relationship with her father, though she never stops wondering where her mother has gone. As Dennis-Benn depicts the lives of Patsy and Tru over the course of a decade, the two women remain connected through their desire for a freedom beyond that which is available to them. Current U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith joins Dennis-Benn in conversation at Greenlight, followed by a festive reception with rum punch to celebrate the book’s launch.

Above images and text adapted from webpage.

 

Killens Review of Arts & Letters

Fall/Winter 2019 Issue
Theme: “Life at a Crossroads”

CFP Deadline:  19 July 2019

Overview of the Journal:

For the Fall 2019 issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, we seek submissions of creative nonfiction, fiction, essays, interviews, book reviews, poetry, memoir, photography, and visual artwork by writers and artists of the African diaspora that mediate on facing a challenging decision or a life-changing moment that has made an impact on future generations or contributed to the legacy of the Black experience throughout the African diaspora.

THEME DESCRIPTION: “Life at a Crossroads”

In the 1941 book 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, a combination of text and photographs that present a commentary on the hardships and aspirations of Blacks in America in the early 1900s, writer Richard Wright ends his prose with: “We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shall be with them.”

Since the publication of 12 Million Black Voices more than 74 years ago, there have been cultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical changes in America that have had a dramatic impact on the perspectives, beliefs, and livelihoods of people of the Black community. They have also left an indelible mark on American and world culture. Today, people of the Africa diaspora still stand at a crossroads, a time in which significant change and decision making are crucial to making a contribution to future generations and leaving a legacy to Black culture.

Please submit to only one category at a time:
essay, fiction, interview, poetry, prose, and art.
We aim to respond to your submission within two months time.

Submission Guidelines Continue reading Killens Review of Arts & Letters

2020-2021 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program

Application Deadline: 16 September 2019

The 2020-2021 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is accepting applications from U.S.-citizen academics and professionals through the deadline of September 16th, 2019. Fulbright Scholars are selected for their academic merit and leadership potential to teach, research, and exchange ideas. There are over 450 awards available in more than 130 countries; complete details are located in the Catalog of Awards.

Eligibility criteria, application guidelines, review criteria, as well as other resources are available on the Fulbright website. Fulbright also offers webinars throughout the application season, which provide additional details about the program and allow for audience Q&A participation.

Fulbright offers awards for Teaching, Research, or Teaching and Research in the Caribbean region in the following countries: 

Above text adapted from email.

Label Me Latina/o

CFP Deadline: 15 June 2019

Label Me Latina/o is an online, refereed international e-journal that focuses on Latino Literary Production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal invites scholarly essays focusing on these writers for its biannual publication.

Scholarly submissions should be between 12-30 pages, double-spaced, 12 point font and should follow the MLA Style Manual. Please use End Notes rather than Footnotes and place page numbers in the upper right hand corner. Original, unpublished submissions in Microsoft Word (PC compatible format) should be sent electronically to both of the co-directors: Kathryn Quinn-Sánchez [email protected] and Michele Shaul [email protected]
Continue reading Label Me Latina/o

Black Intellectuals and the Making of the Atlantic World

CFP Deadline: 15 June 2019

The Editors of African and Black Diaspora announce a Call for Papers on Black Intellectuals and the Making of the Atlantic World for a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

During the three decades between the end of World War I and 1950, Black intellectuals (from Africa, Caribbean, the United States), cultural workers, students, artists and political activists forged new conceptions of self beyond the confines of the colonial matrix and forged anti-colonial political and cultural organizations, as well as journals and newspapers, and created wider solidarity networks with progressive organizations and movements in the center of Empire. The new spaces they developed in London, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin etc. … increased the interactions among Black intellectuals in the colonial metropole which functioned as a site of anti-colonial resistance against racism and colonialism. In the process, Black intellectuals and artists, created a dynamic and transnational spaces in which “cultural exchange, production and belonging” (Gilroy 1993) were forged across space and time in the making of the modern Black Atlantic world. Indeed, Black intellectuals during the period and since used a wide variety of cultural productions, and artistic works as a form of language artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance as a rich continuum of cultural exchange that imaginatively reinvented, re-created, and restored the centrality of African diaspora in the making of the modern Black Atlantic world.

The Editors of African and Black Diaspora are seeking papers that examine the development of Black intellectual movements and the various political and cultural networks they developed in the colonial metropolis and how these networks were activated, nurtured to conveyed transnational dialogue among people of the African descent. In what ways have these networks both real and imagined become spaces of knowledge and memory? What cultural resources and political practices were deployed to “improvising new lives…, creating new possibilities … and decolonizing” the metropolis itself (Schwarz, 2003). What political discourse and cultural resources were developed to resist the colonial empire both at home and abroad?

Continue reading Black Intellectuals and the Making of the Atlantic World

IRADAC Presents a Round-Table: Critical Perspectives and Current Trends in Afro-Latinx Studies

6:30pm – 8:00pm
12 April 2019
CUNY Grad Center, Room C197

Round-table panel:

  • William Luis, Vanderbilt University
  • Sophie Maríñez, Borough of Manhattan Community College
  • Jill T. Richardson, The Graduate Center & Borough of Manhattan Community College
  • Silvio Torres-Saillant, Syracuse University

Moderated by Richard Pérez, John Jay College

Above text and image adapted from webpage.

Recent Publication – Journal of West Indian Literature: Special Issue on Marlon James

Journal of West Indian Literature
Volume 26, Issue 2
November 2018

The Journal of West Indian Literature presents a special issue dedicated to the novels of Marlon James. “From his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, that engages queer sexual identity, religious dogmatism and violence, through his outstanding second novel, The Book of Night Women, that focuses on slavery, racial hegemony and female agency, to The Brief History of Seven Killings, which looks at the political upheaval of the 1970s, transnational crime and popular culture, James has created dramatic renditions of Jamaican history.” (CFP)

The Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL) is a UWI-led Caribbeanist project invested in highlighting and critically examining the prolific literary production of the Anglophone Caribbean. The journal publishes articles in English that are the result of scholarly research in literary textuality (fiction, poetry, drama, film, theory and criticism) of the English speaking (cricket playing) Caribbean and in translation from other parts of the archipelago.  JWIL also publishes book reviews, and, in time, hopes to include reviews of theatre and film productions.


 Continue reading Recent Publication – Journal of West Indian Literature: Special Issue on Marlon James

The Jamaican 1950s: ​A Symposium

4-6 April 2019
University of Pennsylvania 

As we think about the long 1950s (1948-1962) in Jamaica, we think in terms of a series of displacements. The period begins with the sailing of the H.M.T. Empire Windrush to London, the establishment of the University of the West Indies, and Evon Blake’s integration of the Myrtle Bank pool. The 1949 elections result in another, though reduced, Jamaica Labour Party victory, and the solidification of the two-party system. Throughout the 1950s we see the beginnings of developmentalism in the aftermath of the Moyne Commission; the deepening of the Cold War and the expulsion of the left from the People’s National Party; the growth of Rastafari, and the emergence of scholarship on the movement; and the stirrings of a “folk” arts movement, as well as the emergence of aesthetic languages of painters like David Pottinger and Albert Huie. On the global stage, the 1950s inaugurates a growing recognition of Jamaican popular music through figures like Byron Lee and Don Drummond; of Jamaican sprinting prowess through Olympic medalists Arthur Wint, Herb McKenley, and George Rhoden; and of literary influence through the publication of Vic Reid’s New Day, Roger Mais’ Brother Man, and John Hearne’s Voices Under the Window, among others. The firm establishment of the social sciences at the UCWI and the appearance of texts like Douglass Hall’s Free Jamaica, and M.G. Smith’s work on pluralism generates an interrogation of both the legacies of the past and the promises of nationhood. Within other organs, too, these legacies and promises were publicly debated. The period also marks the moment during which questions of “women” and “gender” begin to emerge on the scene of scholarly, literary, and artistic production. The period ends with the dismantling of the West Indies Federation and the independence of Jamaica and Trinidad. 

The long 1950s, therefore, encompass the pivotal moments that set into motion the infrastructures of modern political, social, economic, and artistic activity. They also bring into relief struggles over the appropriate spheres of interaction – national, regional, pan-African, diasporic – thus inaugurating an ongoing process of disciplining (and challenging) the scales at which we have sought to organize and imagine our futures. By the end of the decade, we see that the earlier twentieth century story of an emergent civil society in Jamaica is displaced by the story of political society. The result of this has been a particular kind of formal decolonization, one that lacks some of the decolonial social and cultural visions of earlier moments, and one that also resists those forms of decoloniality being enacted in the popular realm. Looking at the long 1950s closely and patiently, therefore, gives us windows into the contestations over the scale and scope of Jamaica’s political futures during the moment just before they sedimented into nationalism.

Program
Thursday, 4 April
Halney Auditorium, The Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology Continue reading The Jamaican 1950s: ​A Symposium

Research Associate for the IRADAC

Review of applications will begin on 1 April 2019.

The Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC) was founded to address the African presence in the Americas through scholarly research and public programs for the betterment of the public as well as the academic community. The Institute’s mission is to foster understanding and critical interpretation of the history, development, conditions, status and cultures of the diverse peoples of the African Diaspora.

As part of the Provost’s Diversity Initiative, the CUNY Graduate Center seeks a Research Associate/Post-Doctoral Fellow to support the development of early career scholars from diverse backgrounds (with particular attention to historically underrepresented groups in the academy) who show promise as innovative scholars in the field of Africana Studies. The incumbent will participate in activities related to IRADAC and to the Ph.D. program of his/her own discipline. The Post-Doctoral Fellow will engage in his/her own original research and scholarship and will publish the results of his/her research. S/he will present the research to scholars and the public through conferences, seminars, workshops and/or symposia thus furthering the mission of IRADAC as it pertains to the African Diaspora. Teaching opportunities are possible with an adjunct appointment. This position reports to the Director of IRADAC.

The appointment will be for the academic year 2019-2020, effective August 26, 2019. Continue reading Research Associate for the IRADAC

Practicing Translation, Translating Politics

4-5 April 2019
Skylight Room
CUNY Grad Center

This symposium will mark the end of an academic year in which the Committee on Globalization and Social Change has engaged the issue of “Translation.” Taking a broad view of the topic, we have treated translation as a practice and process of carrying across, of thinking and acting across various types of boundaries, whether real, reified, or imagined. We are especially interested in the profound challenges, generative possibilities, and unanticipated outcomes that follow attempts to pursue, discover, or fashion connections across singular, incommensurable, and untranslatable domains. At a time when so many planetary predicaments require translocal responses and alternatives, the politics of translation – the peril and promise of carrying across – emerges as an especially timey issue. We hope that this gathering of scholars working in different fields and world areas from various theoretical perspectives will help us to think together about the entwined political, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of translation today.

Of special note for Caribbeanists is Session III of the Practicing Translation, Translating Politics symposium, at 3pm on Friday, featuring presentations by Kaiama L. Glover and Brent Hayes Edwards. Their presentations are entitled, “Blackness’ in French: On Translation, Haiti, and the Matter of Race” and “Diasporic Literature and the Task of the Black Translator,” respectively.

Continue reading Practicing Translation, Translating Politics