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 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).

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 Beyond’s 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.

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.

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.