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Call for Papers – 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference

The University of Miami, Coral Gables, Department of English & Creative Writing and Hemispheric Caribbean Studies invites submissions of abstracts for the 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference to be held October 8-11, 2025.

Today, Caribbean societies and, by extension, Caribbean writers, reckon with crises that feel both new and cyclical. Increased volcanic activities, record-breaking hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves are only some of the environmental pressures we face. States of Emergency in response to political and social violence have become commonplace in Haiti, Trinidad and Jamaica. As a group of Caribbean critics, we have also had to reckon with the passing of a generation that helped to establish and define our field. In its broadest sense, this year’s Conference of West Indian Literature, convened around the theme, ‘The Time of the Bruggadung: States of EmUrgency,’ asks the simple question: what are Caribbean writers reckoning with today?

That almost comic word of Bajan creole, ‘bruggadung’, becomes something even larger than the onomatopoeic sound of a bang or commotion in the mytho-poetic world of Brathwaite. Instead, it becomes the sound of environmental disaster (“all uh know/ is that one day suddenly so/ this mountain leggo one brugg-a-lung-go” – “The Dust”), or else the sound of social and cultural disaster (“but leh murder start an’ bruggalungdung/ yu cahn fine a man to hole up de side.” – “Rites”), or even the sound of the collapse of Apartheid (‘bongo man a come/ bongo man a come/ bruggadung’ – “Soweto”)Always, the bruggadung signals a time of reckoning.

For this convening of the conference, we are particularly interested in papers that might approach the theme in a broad context. Critical considerations might include:

How have Caribbean writers and other cultural producers been engaged in ringing the warning bell to alert us of the impending social and environmental urgencies of the time?

To what extent has Caribbean literature historically grappled with the intersection of natural disasters and colonial legacies, and how have these narratives foreshadowed the Anthropocene’s emergence as a dominant paradigm?

How has a new generation of Caribbean writers understood and reimagined the emUrgencies of their own times? Moreover, how might we understand these generational differences and the new dialogues that may be required from its critics?

In a world increasingly characterized by physical and ideological barriers, how might the expansive imaginative landscape of mytho-poetics foster cross-cultural understanding and solidarity in the face of various social, economic, and environmental challenges?

Given the prominence of “resilience” discourse in disaster contexts, how have cultural producers challenged the prevailing narratives of trauma and immobility, offering alternative modes of representation that empower affected communities?

For full details, please see: CFP-The 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference

Deadline for abstracts: April 2, 2025

Notifications of acceptance: May 15, 2025

Call for Papers: JWIL November 2024 Special Issue on George Lamming

Call for Papers: JWIL November 2024 Special Issue on George Lamming

This special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature seeks essays and reflections on the work of George Lamming. When Lamming passed away in 2022, the Caribbean lost one of its great authors and public intellectuals. Beginning with his poetry published in BIM and his first novel In the Castle of My Skin (1953), to the influential essays in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), to his later interviews and speeches, Lamming helped shape Caribbean writing and thought for more than fifty years.

We invite scholarly articles that address different aspects of Lamming’s work, including his interrogation of sovereignty; his engagements with gender and class; his theorizing of Caribbean modernity; the use of allegory in his fiction; his work at the BBC or with BIM; his place within the Windrush generation; his connections to other parts of the region (to Cuba, Grenada, Haiti, or elsewhere) or to the larger African diaspora (his time in Ghana or the US, for example); his reflections on Caribbean humanity and/or the possibilities for decolonization; and how his work imagines the role of the writer in Caribbean society. Articles might also focus on work that has been influenced by Lamming, such as Curdella Forbes’ A Tall History of Sugar or Esther Phillips’ Leaving Atlantis. We also welcome non-traditional academic submissions, such as creative reflections on Lamming’s work and influences.

We welcome a variety of contributions, including scholarly essays (6,000 to 8,000 words), fiction and nonfiction (2,000 to 5,000 words), poetry (2 to 3 poems), visual art, and book reviews (1,000 to 1,500 words). Prospective contributors should submit 300- to 500-word abstracts by November 15, 2023. Responses to abstract submissions will be sent by December 15, 2023 and final versions of accepted papers will be due March 1, 2024. Inquiries can be sent to Raphael Dalleo (prdalleo@gmail.com).

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

About the special issue editor: Raphael Dalleo is Professor of English at Bucknell University. His book, American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism, won the Caribbean Studies Association’s 2017 Gordon K. and Sibyl Lewis Award for best book. American Imperialism’s Undead was completed with the support of an NEH-sponsored residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His other books are Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies (editor), Haiti and the Americas (coeditor), Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1920-1970 and The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (coauthor).

 

 

 

 

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, rosenber@ufl.edu

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

Call for Papers: Special JWIL April 2023 Issue on Pamela Mordecai

Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature on the work of Pamela Mordecai

This special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature seeks papers and reflections on the work of Pamela Mordecai. For over four decades now, Mordecai has been producing diverse literary works. She has published poetry, short stories, plays, textbooks, and other forms of writing, including a novel and a short-story collection. In addition to being one of the women writers who led the steady growth of Caribbean women’s literature since the 1980s, Mordecai has been at the forefront of the work of bringing visibility to Caribbean women’s literature via ground-breaking collections such as Her True-True Name. Yet, Mordecai’s oeuvre and other contributions to Caribbean literature and culture as editor, anthologist and publisher have not been sufficiently acknowledged by the critical community.

We invite scholarly articles that address different aspects of Mordecai’s work, including her located Caribbean sensibilities and rhetorical strategies, as well as her diasporic reach. We also welcome non-traditional academic submissions (such as creative reflections on her work and influences) and book reviews of her latest collection, A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems (2022). Scholarly essays should be between 6000 and 8000 words. Creative pieces can be between 2000 and 5000 words, and book reviews 1000-1500 words.

Prospective contributors should submit 300-500 word abstracts by 31 August 2022. Responses to abstract submissions will be sent by 10 September 2022 and final versions of accepted papers will be due 15 October 2022. Please send abstracts and all inquiries to Carol Bailey (c2010bailey@gmail.com) and Stephanie McKenzie (smckenzi@grenfell.mun.ca)

About the special issue editors: Carol Bailey is co-editor of A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems, author of A Poetics of Performance: The Oral-Scribal Aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean Fiction (UWI Press, 2014), and the forthcoming book, Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization (Rutgers University Press, 2023). Stephanie McKenzie is Professor, Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, and co-editor of A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems. She is the author of three books of poetry (published by Salmon Press) and Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology (University of Toronto Press, 2007; rpt. 2019).

Call for Papers — Recognition and Recovery of Caribbean Canadian Cultural Production

Michael A. Bucknor and Cornel Bogle invite submissions for a special issue of Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies on Caribbean Canadian cultural production which will feature scholarship that is engaged in the critical tasks of recovery and recognition of figures, texts, debates, collectives, and institutions that have influenced the field.

The editors welcome essays and interviews that focus on both historical and contemporary Caribbean Canadian cultural production including literature, music, film, and visual arts, particularly related to the following topics:

–The recuperation of writers and artists not traditionally recognized as Caribbean Canadian

–Caribbean Canadian and Black Lives Matter

–Caribbean Canadian archival materials

–Institutional networks and supports for Caribbean Canadian art

–Caribbean Canadian art and crises

–LGBTQ+ Caribbean Canadian art

–Women artists and women’s work

–Caribbean Canadian Children’s and Young Adult literature

–Appropriation and Erasure

–Caribbean Canadian Life Writing

–Francophone Caribbean Canadian writing

–Spanish Language Caribbean Canadian writing

–Caribbean Canadian and Indigenous relations

–The reception of Caribbean Canadian art

–Caribbean Canadian art in Western Canada

–Caribbean Canadian film

–Emerging Caribbean Canadian writers and artists

–Self-publishing and traditional publishing of Caribbean Canadian writing

All submissions must be original, unpublished work. Articles, between 6,000 and 7500 words in length, including endnotes and works cited, should follow current MLA bibliographic format. Submissions should be uploaded to Canada and Beyonds online submissions system and simultaneously sent to caribbean.canlit@gmail.com by July 31, 2021 to be peer-reviewed for Issue 10, 2021. For more information please contact the guest editors at the e-mail address above and see CFP Canada and Beyond.

 

 

Call for Papers: Special JWIL April 2022 Issue on Kamau Brathwaite

Engaging Kamau Brathwaite:

This special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature seeks papers and reflections on the work of Kamau Brathwaite, situating the writer/poet/scholar and his work within the canons of Caribbean, American, African-American, and/or postcolonial literature. In particular, we are interested in contributions that consider how, and why, we can/should/do engage Brathwaite’s work in our writing, research, and teaching today, a half-century after his first major publication.

With significant ties to Barbados, Jamaica, England, and Ghana, Kamau Brathwaite represents a truly transnational intellectual, though it may be argued that the Caribbean region was always the center – the groundation – of his thought processes. He has made major contributions across several fields and disciplines with his creative and critical writings, as well as his organizational, pedagogical, and editorial work. Thus, Brathwaite and his work may be engaged on/from multiple dimensions as relevant to contemporary conversations about race, region, rhythm, and representation. This special issue seeks to present that range of relevance to scholarship, service, and teaching today. We are open to scholarly papers and reflections that position Brathwaite’s work(s) as frame and/or focus for a central argument. We are especially interested in submissions that consider:

– Brathwaite’s less studied texts,

– his work as an editor and teacher,

– his influence on later generations of Caribbean writers, and/or

– approaches to teaching his writings.

While the Journal of West Indian Literature focuses primarily on literary topics, given Brathwaite’s own mixed methodologies, this special issue will necessarily include interdisciplinary engagements with his work.

Prospective contributors should email 300-500 word abstracts, along with a short bio, by 1 April 2021. Responses to abstract submissions will be sent by 1 May 2021 and final versions of accepted papers will be due 1 September 2021. Please send abstracts and all inquiries to Kelly Baker Josephs (kjosephs@york.cuny.edu).

Deadline for abstracts and bio: 1 April 2021

Full papers due: 1 September 2021

Publication: April 2022

About the special issue editor: Kelly Baker Josephs is Professor of English at York College, City University of New York, and Professor of English and digital humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2013) and co-editor of the forthcoming collection, The Digital Black Atlantic, part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series.

JWIL invites submissions for November 2021 Special Issue entitled “Movements and Moments: On Dub Poetry”

*DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MARCH 31, 2021* The Journal of West Indian Literature invites submissions for a November 2021 Special Issue entitled “Movements and Moments: On Dub Poetry”. Since its acknowledgement by the global literary scene in the 1970s, dub poetry has made several radical/political interventions. We can think of its emergence as part of several anti-colonial moments, as amplifying post-independence movements of Caribbean nations and the crumbling of the British Empire; and increasingly, we might attend to the community-mobilizing focus of its practice. Celebrating “nation language” demonized by the colonizer, dub poets have shifted the balance of criticism in favour of seeing Creole language registers as linguistic innovation, as art form, as anything other than unacceptable English, the predominant judgement by the colonial education system. As an artistic tradition, then, dub poetry problematizes the terms on which our politics and the literary are negotiated, troubles demarcations between high and popular culture, and contributes to the musical, literary, visual, and dance movements of a “transnational Jamaica” (Thomas 2011). Critics have foregrounded the embodied, gendered, and national significance of dub poetry (Brydon 1998; Bucknor 1998; Carr 1998; Casas 2004; Cooper 1994; Gingell 2005 & 2009; Puri 2005; Antwi 2016). What we have not considered enough is the transnational dimensions of this art form and its resonance. This special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature is an invitation to re-narrate the cultural history of dub poetry and reevaluate the privileging of certain movements and geographical settings in global mappings of this Black art practice. We are particularly interested in tracing the lives of dub poetry from an anti-colonial nationalist poetics to a Black transnational poetics and performance culture. In this issue, we aim to situate dub poetry as a major influence on transnational Black movements and as an architect of anti-colonial environments in the Black transnational scene. In this way, we seek to expand the sonic territories of Afro-beats in the Black diaspora. We consider the ways in which dub poetry’s dissemination is “appropriated, popularized, and indigenized” in a transnational milieu and think about the reverberating “legacies of black-on-black transnational politics” (Chude-Sokei 2011). Such considerations turn us towards what Paul Gilroy identifies as “playful diasporic intimac[ies]” (1993) with all their conflicts, contestations and joys. Articles accepted at JWIL are expected to be in English and 5000-8000 words in length. Please consult the submissions guidelines of JWIL at www.jwilonline.org. Questions regarding the issue and the submission process should be addressed to editorial@jwilonline.org. The deadline for submission is March 31, 2021, and essays should be sent to the attention of Dr. Phanuel Antwi (University of British Columbia) via email at dubpoetryspissue@gmail.com. Original essays can be on a range of topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:

Dub Poetry and the Black Lives Matter Movement

Caribbean Poetics/Oral Traditions

Dub and Reggae Aesthetics

Rastafari Philosophy/Culture and the Reggae Phenomenon

The Epistemology and Pedagogy of Dub Poetry

Dub Poetry and LGBTQ Politics

Dub Poetry and Afro-futures

Dub Poetry in Jamaican Popular Culture

Dub Poetry and Copyright Law

Mental Health and the role of Dub Poetry

Sound, Blackness, and Technology (analogue and digital)

Miss Lou, Bob Marley, and Dub Poetry

Gender Relations and Sexual Politics in Dub

Dub Plates, Sound Systems, and Turntablism

Dub and Musical Forms: Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, Dancehall, Hip Hop, Jazz

Dub Poetry and Carnivals (e.g. Notting Hill Carnival, Toronto’s Caribana)

Deejaying (Toasting), Versioning, and Sampling in Dub Poetry

CJE cfp – “Poetry Beyond Borders”

The editors of the Caribbean Journal of Education invite submissions for a special issue entitled “Poetry Beyond Borders,” to be guest-edited by Dr. Aisha Spencer (UWI), Dr. Schontal Moore (UWI), and Dr. Georgie Horrell (U of Cambridge). The issue is slated to appear in June 2019.

Abstracts (no longer than 250 words) should be submitted by September 3, 2018 to soepubs@uwimona.edu.jm. For more details, click on the image below.

 

Call for Papers Special Forum in April 2017 Issue of Journal of West Indian Literature

“Troubling Gender: The Making of Women and Men in Indo-Caribbean Literature and Visual Culture”

This special forum within the April 2017 issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature will feature essays that explore constructions of gender in Indo-Caribbean literature and art. What are the ways in which Indo-Caribbean writers and visual artists of the twentieth- and twentieth-first century have represented the contours and limitations of masculinity and femininity in the context of post-indentureship plantation economies? What have been the imaginative wrestlings with normative understandings of the role of gender when it comes to citizenship, family life, education, activism, diaspora, building cross-racial solidarities, expressions of cultural identity and sexual identity, and writing itself? Essays that are attentive to the shifts in the treatment of such themes from the time of indentureship to now, to pre-1990s writing and to writers and artists from Suriname, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Jamaica, Barbados or other sites of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora are especially welcome. Full essays will be due by 15 January 2017 and should be 6000-7500 words in length. Submissions should be sent to editorial@jwilonline.org

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Journal of West Indian Literature 24, 2 (November 2016) Special issue: Caribbean Ecocriticism

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Journal of West Indian Literature 24, 2 (November 2016)
Special issue: Caribbean Ecocriticism
Guest editor: Elaine Savory

Since the publication of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, edited by DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley in 2005, there have been several interventions into the new field of Caribbean ecocriticism. Important work by scholars including DeLoughrey, Handley, Carrigan and Huggan has helped to foreground the importance of this perspective on considerations of Caribbean literary production. Now we seek to gather new and varied contributions to what is becoming an important body of scholarship.

Articles are invited which treat ecological topics in relation to Caribbean literature and culture. These may be readings of scribal or oral texts considered through a combination of disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, chronological and theoretical lenses.

Please consult JWIL’s submission guidelines and style sheet before sending in articles.

Please submit articles by May 31, 2016 to Elaine Savory at savorye@newschool.edu“>savorye@newschool.edu