The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) invites applications for its inaugural week-long residential digital humanities institute, to be held at the University of Miami in June 2023. The CDSC supports the growth and development of digital humanities scholarship, training, and infrastructure for the Caribbean and its diasporas. The Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute (CDSsi) will train scholars, at all levels, working at the intersections of Caribbean Studies and digital humanities. Thanks to a generous Mellon Foundation grant, the CDSC will be able to cover travel and accommodations for fellows selected for participation in the summer institute..

For more information, including the requirements for submission and application form, please see the Call for Applications here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10_7VJIvRPWps3W3Z3F3JwdOtLmXJUHDii8g0G9M_5Lc/edit?usp=sharing

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, 31 January 2023 and there will be a virtual information session on Tuesday, 17 January 2023.

Join us from December 12-19, 2022 for Cornel Bogle’s  JWIL Twitter residency which focuses on the work of the Barbadian-Canadian writer Austin Clarke, one of the first Black writers to be published in Canada. Though primarily read and studied as a writer of fiction and memoirs, Clarke was also a journalist, academic, and poet. This week, Bogle will be sharing some of his ongoing research for his manuscript-in-progress, Austin Clarke and the Black Radical Tradition, wherein he argues that, through his print and radio journalism as well as his literary work, Clarke interrogates the notion of the Black radical tradition. Additionally, Bogle will be discussing how Clarke’s work invites us, as readers, into the broader archive of Caribbean Canadian cultural production. Highlighting a recent special Issue of Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, that he edited with Professor Michael A. Bucknor, Bogle will share excerpts from recent scholarship on, as well as new fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by, Caribbean Canadian cultural workers.

BIO

Cornel Bogle is a Sessional Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Humanities at York University. He is a scholar of Black, Caribbean, and Canadian literature, and a poet. His scholarly criticism has been published, or is forthcoming, in journals such as Canadian Literature, the Journal of West Indian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, sx salon, and Topia. His poetry has appeared in Pree: Caribbean Literature, Bookmarked, Moko Magazine, and Arc Poetry Magazine. He is co-editor, with Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, of a special issue of Canada and Beyond on Recognition and Recovery of Caribbean Canadian Cultural Production.

Bogle’s review of ‘Membering Austin Clarke is available in the most recent issue of JWIL. https://www.jwilonline.org/current-issue/

Join us from November 14-21, 2022 when Kim Evelyn will share reflections on teaching Caribbean Literature at @jwilonline. In an increasingly distracting world pulling our students’ attention in different directions, it can feel like a struggle to keep students engaged in the close reading work of literary studies and foster their appreciation for literary texts. Fortunately, the world of Caribbean literature and cultural studies is rich with compelling texts, controversial ideas, radical figures, and fascinating stories. Educators can tap into this wealth of resources with engaging pedagogical strategies that work in both general literature courses and Caribbean literature courses. Providing recordings of poetry readings/performance poems, documentaries, lectures, and interviews allow students to hear and see writers or other important figures off the page. Assignments such as creating playlists, conducting interviews, writing articles or non-fiction/personal essays, and researching archived works draw students into the joys of close reading and help them see the relevance of literary texts and other cultural products to their own lives and cultures. As a bonus, online tools offer students opportunities to develop career-relevant audience awareness and tech savviness as they collaborate on shared documents, dig into digital archives, or create timelines and maps. In this series, we’ll explore opportunities for engagement in meaningful pedagogy in Caribbean literature and cultural studies. I hope you’ll share your best practices too.

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/

From July 25 to Emancipation Day, August 1, 2022, JWIL will be hosting a Twitter residency which will focus on the life and the enduring work of George Lamming (1927–2022). In June of 2021, JWIL (@jwilonline) hosted a Twitter residency curated by Faizal Deen (@faizalbynight) to mark Lamming’s 94^th birthday. This year, Faizal curates another residency in the wake of Lamming’s passing. He will share tweets from last year’s residency as well as bring together and reflect on the numerous tributes and obituaries about Lamming that have been published since his passing in June 2022. Faizal will also curate a space for collective memory and reflection. We invite you all to send us your written celebrations, observances, commentaries and remembrances of Lamming or his work or both. These will be shared @jwilonline over the course of the week. You can send your reflections on Lamming at any time during the residency – via email to faizaldeen@gmail.com or DM us @jwilonline. Together, let us collectively remember the legacies and futures of Lamming’s iconic presence as both artist and activist.

JWIL pays tribute to Caribbean literary luminary George Lamming, who passed away on June 4, 2022 at the age of 94. A towering figure in Caribbeana, Lamming was one of the pillars of a foundational period of our literature, part of the Windrush generation. Creative writer, thinker, scholar, teacher, journalist, he brought all his gifts to bear on the weighty ruminations on Caribbean societies and the search for solutions for our development. Nadi Edwards notes that Lamming  “was a brilliant writer whose complex experimental novels signaled the emergence of a distinct Anglophone Caribbean modernist fiction. He was also an insightful critic whose reading of folk culture, colonial exile and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest anticipated contemporary postcolonial theories of indigeneity, diaspora, and linguistic and cultural hybridity. To quote José David Saldivar, he is ‘the supreme commentator, the one author from our America, who pulls Old World colonialist and New World colonized writing into a coherent and continuous line’”. Lamming’s passing brings us closer to the end of an epoch, though his staggering legacy will never allow the “sun to set” on the Caribbean’s response to empire and its afterlives.