Monthly Archives: September 2022

Bedour Alagraa’s Twitter Residency on the role of the essay in Caribbean intellectual tradition (Oct 3-Oct 10, 2022)

Join us from Oct 3 to Oct 10, 2022 for another JWIL Twitter residency. Bedour Alagraa (@balagonline) will take over our Twitter feed (@jwilonline) with a focus on the essay as a crucial poetic and political expressive medium in many different Caribbean intellectual traditions. As part of her residency, Dr. Alagraa will explore important essays by Caribbean writers including Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, among others.

Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant Professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book manuscript is entitled The Interminable Catastrophe (forthcoming from Duke University Press).

You can read her essay, “Lessons from Brathwaite: Breaking the Pentameter, Deepening Black Study” in the most recent issue of JWIL. https://www.jwilonline.org/current-issue/

Call for Papers: Special JWIL November 2023 Issue on Literature, Art, and Environmental Activism

Call for Papers: Special JWIL November 2023 Issue on Literature, Art, and Environmental Activism

Writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other arts performers have taken a leading role in protesting governmental failure and corporate responsibility for environmental destruction and disaster across the Caribbean. In the 2000s, Caribbean writers, filmmakers, visual and other artists have spoken truth to power in Puerto Rico and Dominica after the tragedy of Hurricane Maria, in the struggle to preserve Jamaica’s Cockpit country from bauxite mining, and against extractive industries, tourism, and other environmentally destructive forms of development. In fact, writers and artists have been documenting, illuminating, and protesting environmental destruction since Caribbean cultural traditions emerged.

We invite scholarly essays as well as the statements of artists and writers that illuminate the various and profound contribution of literature, film and other arts to Caribbean environmental activism. We hope to address the long history of artists’ and writers’ environmental concerns and activism, the wide geographical and social reach of their efforts across the Caribbean and its diaspora, the ways in which environmental change and crisis have shaped artistic form, and artists’ and writers’ vision for the future.

Prospective contributors should submit 300–500 word abstracts by 1 November 2022. Responses to abstract submissions will be sent by 15 November 2022; final versions of accepted papers will be due 15 April 2023. Scholarly essays should be between 6000 and 8000 words. Writers’ and artists’ statements or essays may be considerably shorter.

Please submit abstracts through the JWIL submission page: https://www.jwilonline.org/submission-guidelines/article-guidelines/

For queries about the issue, please contact Leah Rosenberg, ude.lfu@rebnesor

Please click here for more information about the Journal of West Indian Literature.