Call for papers for a conference being hosted from 29 November – 1 December 2023 at the University of Wollongong, Sydney Campus, Australia. The conference is being convened by Challenging Precarity: A Global Network (CPGN) and the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (SPACLALS). The organisers invite scholars and experts from disciplines in the humanities, especially in literary, visual and cultural studies, as well as those working in the social sciences, to examine multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses in contextualising the theme “Precarious Planet: Disability, Rights and Justice”, and to provide interventions into the pressing concerns of our present times and future lives. Papers considering the relation between the conference theme and the situation(s) of precarity in the Global South are strongly encouraged. Global and local indigenous Pacific, Aotearoa New Zealand, and First Nations Australian perspectives will be particularly considered. For more details, consult https://southpacificaclals.wixsite.com/website/about-1

Submission of abstracts: 1 July 2023

Acceptance email: 18 August 2023

Hosted by the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus (Kingston, Jamaica), the 41st Annual West Indian Literature Conference invites papers and panel proposals that explore the critical connections in Caribbean literary and cultural studies. With this year’s focus on connections, the conference seeks to bring together academics, postgraduate students, creative practitioners, secondary school educators, and the general public to both critically assess the literature and celebrate the scholarly analysis of West Indian (Caribbean) literary artists. This gathering also takes the opportunity to recognize the connections between West Indian music and West Indian writing. It will honor the life and brilliant cultural criticism of the late Professor Emeritus Gordon Rohlehr (UWI, St Augustine). It will also celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Noises in the Blood by Professor Emerita Carolyn Cooper (UWI, Mona) and Woman Version by Professor Emerita Evelyn O’Callaghan (UWI, Cave Hill). These two texts continue to inspire scholars to make new critical connections among gender, music, orality and literature. See full call here – WILC 2023 CFP

From the organizers –

“This year, the seventh annual Caribbean Digital event will be held virtually, with three asynchronous digital community projects and a synchronous gathering.

Currently, we are in the midst of collecting entries for one of the three community projects, our Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship. To suggest projects for inclusion in the Directory, you are invited to add links and annotations to our master spreadsheet between October 26 and November 20. 

We are also gearing up for our Collective Annotation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, which will run November 16 to 20. This event offers our community an opportunity to engage Césaire’s work in ways that will generate an original textual artifact. Please sign up here to receive timely information regarding participation in this venture.

Our third valence, a Keyword Collection for Caribbean Studies, initiates a collaborative exploration of words that serve as rich sites for research and pedagogy in Caribbean Studies. This collection is intended to be the beginning of a project that will grow with future Caribbean Digital events.

We are excited to work on these three projects with you. Please contact us at thecaribbeandigital@gmail.com if you have questions and/or wish to participate. All three ventures will be launched synchronously at the Caribbean Digital event on 4 December 2020, 1p-2p EST, which you can register for here.”

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 20 June 2019

Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2019

Submissions are invited for the 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference, to take place at the Turkeyen Campus of the University of Guyana, 17-20 October 2019.

The conference theme is “HINTERLANDS: Journeys of the Imagination,” which in the words of the organizers “will include the foundations: some special attention to the heritage(s) of Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul”; a focus on film and technology; and examinations of the Guyanese experience.

Papers on the following themes are also especially welcome:

• images
• the visual arts (the fine arts)
• oral literature
• performance traditions
• theatre
• dance hall
• chutney
• soca
• spoken word and performance poetry
• creole languages

More information here: WILC 2019 CFP

Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

CFP: CACLALS at Congress 2019 University of British Columbia (Vancouver, B.C.)

June 1-3, 2019

“Listening and Speaking: Postcolonial Circles of Conversation”

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Dr. David Chariandy (Simon Fraser University)
Prof. Jasbir Puar (Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers University)

From the organizers:

In the spirit of postcolonial circles of conversation, we invite papers, panels, roundtables and workshops to reflect on critical, theoretical and creative acts of listening and speaking. What are the conversations that the “postcolonial” has failed to adequately address? What are the silences, gaps or points of erasure in postcolonial circles of conversation? What are the new conversations generated by or beyond the field, in terms of new theoretical crossroads or points of intersection, new forms of alliance, new acts of cross-cultural listening, new comparative mappings, etc.? How do we approach modes of listening in the context of indigenous knowledge (such as notions of “deep listening”)? How does listening occur across species boundaries? How does the aesthetic or creative, more generally, facilitate original modes of listening and speaking?

CACLALS welcomes conference paper or panel proposals that address any aspect of the CFP’s central questions or issues. We also welcome proposals otherwise related to the Association’s broader mandate to examine postcolonial and global literatures.

Proposals of approximately 350 words should be sent by January 15, 2019, as a Word doc. attachment to info@caclals.ca with the subject heading of “CACLALS Proposal at Congress 2019.”

Conference queries should be sent to CACLALS President, Dr. Mariam Pirbhai: info@caclals.ca.

More details here.

November 23, 2018

UWI Cave Hill, Barbados

CFP deadline: June 29, 2018

From the organizers:

The Department of Languages,  Linguistics and Literatures at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill is inviting papers that explore themes related to Caribbean speculative fiction. The last two decades have seen an increase in the publication of SF works by Caribbean writers who bring a Caribbean sensibility to a genre that has been steadily gaining global academic recognition. These works encourage a re-examination of what constitutes Caribbean literature. They also challenge us to examine the nature of Caribbean SF, to ask how it differs from other geo-political/cultural writings in the genre, and whether or not writing in this genre helps us to understand the Caribbean’s presence on the global stage.

Abstracts of 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by Friday, 29 June 2018 to:

• Andrew Armstrong: andrew.armstrong@cavehill.uwi.edu

• Richard Clarke: richard.clarke@cavehill.uwi.edu

• Nicola Hunte: nicola.hunte@cavehill.uwi.edu

• Debra Providence: debra.providence@cavehill.uwi.edu

For more details, see Caribbean Commons post here.

AUSTRALIAN ASSOCATION FOR CARIBBEAN STUDIES

Caribbean Meridians

Female Orphan School, Parramatta South Campus
Western Sydney University, February 7-9, 2019

Confirmed Speakers:
Alexis Wright (University of Melbourne)
Michael Bucknor (University of the West Indies at Mona)

from the organizers:

AACS conferences are interdisciplinary and papers on all topics are considered, including from the natural sciences. Recent conferences have taken the themes of ‘Land and Water’ (Wollongong, 2015) and ‘Interiors’ (Canberra, 2017). For 2019 we are encouraging presenters to think about the ‘meridians’ that connect the peoples, cultures, ecologies, and histories of the Caribbean with those of other places around the globe.

Studies of Caribbean history and culture arguably have always been ‘transnational’, or at least oriented to thinking about the forces beyond the Caribbean that have shaped it. Most often this has been a matter of thinking about the relations between the Caribbean and the countries from whence its inhabitants largely have been drawn – especially Africa and Europe – as well as to the regional hegemon, the USA. The concept of the ‘meridian’ is chosen to encourage presenters to think about the lines of connection that spread from the Caribbean out to the world as whole. These encompass the Atlantic world but they also extend across the Western hemisphere and the Pacific to Asia, Oceania, and beyond. ‘Caribbean meridians’ encourage us to look for unusual, perhaps unexpected lines of connection or relation such as those that have spread south to Australia (‘meridian’ once meant ‘south’), as well as ‘South-South’ relations where ‘South’ refers to the ‘global South’. The idea of the meridian also reflects back on the Caribbean, which is criss-crossed with intra-regional connections that can escape scholarly notice.

Presenters might also like to think about the way in which the term ‘Caribbean’ affects the term ‘meridian’. The latter tends to evoke the straight lines of longitude that have come to govern relations of time and space. How do Caribbean perspectives inflect and alter conceptions of time, space, and/or world? How have the peoples of the Caribbean imagined the world and the kinds of connections and affiliations that bind it? Are there specifically Caribbean meridians?

Abstracts on all subjects and from all disciplines within the field of Caribbean studies are welcome. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the abstract, not its relevance to the conference theme. Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words along with a short title and two-line biographical note to aacsconf2019@gmail.com by September 14, 2018.