Monthly Archives: November 2021

Kedon Willis’ Twitter Residency on Jamaica Kincaid (Nov 15-22, 2021)

Kedon Willis will take over the JWIL Twitter feed from Nov 15-22, 2021 to celebrate Jamaica Kincaid’s colossal impact on Caribbean writing by highlighting her devotion to telling Caribbean stories and her resistance to limits on how those stories could be told. Throughout the week, Kedon will spotlight media on how the author, in building her career, pushed against boundaries surrounding the depiction of women’s lives and their relationships, the conventions of the autobiographical genre, and the notion of Caribbean identity. In so doing, the residency will serve as a modest repository of the Kincaid’s fearlessness, ingenuity, and wit. The residency will also act as a digital analogue for City College of New York’s celebration of the legacy of Jamaica Kincaid on November 18. For info on that event, see https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/lhf/lhf-2021-celebrates-jamaica-kincaid​

Kedon Willis (@KedonWillis) is an assistant professor of English at CUNY City College where he teaches Caribbean and Latin American literature. His areas of interest include comparative Caribbean literature and queer theory, and his research examines the evolution (and limits) of queer liberation in the writings of contemporary queer authors of Caribbean heritage. Kedon’s scholarship, creative writing and journalism has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of West Indian Literature, the Florida Review, Pree Magazine, the Wall Street Journal Magazine and the History Channel.​

 

CFP: ACLALS 2022, Toronto, July 11-15, 2022

Announcing a call for papers for the Association for Commonwealth Literature And Language Studies (ACLALS) 2022 conference.

At a time when we are experiencing profound and unexpected disruptions to our shared spaces, routines, economies, societies, and work-lives, ACLALS 2022 proposes that we convene in Toronto (fingers crossed!) to consider the nature and implications of rupture, the commons, and their conjoining: the ruptured commons. Garnett Hardin wrote in 1968 about “the tragedy of the commons” – the tendency for publicly owned, shared space to degrade through the neglect, abuse, overuse, and simple taking-for-granted of its multiple owners, who, because there are so many, do not identify as owners and take little responsibility. With each new climate-change study we become more aware of the ways our common environment has seen its natural states and processes violated by human activity. The ruptured commons is at the heart of the concept of the Anthropocene and what Amitav Ghosh has called “the great derangement” of our unsustainable ways. The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink our common spaces and how we use them, from city streets to airplanes, domestic spaces to workplaces – including academic ones. Indeed, our work as scholars, teachers, and students has been ruptured in countless ways as our institutional commons of classrooms and conferences fragment into rectangle-bound faces and voices on screens. Finally, the “common” in Commonwealth has come under fire for decades, whether by rewriting it as “common poverty” or by rejecting its presence in the names of our discipline and, for some, in ACLALS itself. At a time when so much of our shared future is uncertain and when we have the opportunity to reimagine the commons, we invite delegates to place notions of rupture and commons in a wide variety of pan-historical contexts and scales from the local to the global.

See here for more details. Abstracts should be no more than 350 words and are to be submitted online by Nov. 30, 2021 at:

http://aclals.net/conferences-and-cfps/aclals-2022/

 

Janelle Rodriques’ Twitter Residency on representations of tourism in Caribbean literature (Nov 8-14, 2021)

Between November 8-14, Janelle Rodriques (@Sister_Killjoy) will tweet selections from various scholarly, creative and historical reflections on Caribbean tourism, from Jamaica Kincaid to Kei Miller, from Kamala Kempadoo to Angelique Nixon. She will be curating – and invites us to curate together – various critiques of the region’s dependence on and our quarrels with tourism, as an extension of plantation politics and poetics.

Janelle Rodriques (@Sister_Killjoy) is a Caribbean literary scholar working in the United States. She is the author of Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature (Routledge, 2019), and has published in Anthurium, Caribbean Quarterly,  Journal of West Indian Literature and Atlantic Studies.