May 11th is Kamau Brathwaite’s Birthday. Join us as JWIL teams up with sx salon to mark KB’s birthday. Between May 11 – 18th, sx salon‘s general editor Rachel Mordecai will take over our Twitter feed to share reflections on teaching Kamau’s work.

In addition to being one of the Caribbean’s foremost writers, Kamau was also a teacher. His pedagogies of the word were instructive. This Twitter residency will reflect on pedagogical questions. In particular, Rachel Mordecai will explore questions about teaching gender in and through Brathwaite’s poetry.

How might we teach these poems, with attention to gender, in our current moment? And what do these poems teach us?

Bio

Rachel Mordecai is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Editor (since 2019) of @sxsalon. Her primary interests are Caribbean literature and culture; her work has appeared in Sargasso, Wadabagei, Kunapipi, @SmallAxeProject, and @jwilonline.

@RachelMordecai’s book Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture appeared from @UWIPRESS in 2014. Her monograph-in-progress is on Caribbean family sagas, including the work of Maisy Card, Lawrence Scott, Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, and Dionne Brand.

Join us from 25th April – 2nd May for a JWIL Twitter residency with Natalie Wall, exploring artivism and monodrama in the work of d’bi.young anitafrika. Follow along at @jwilonline

Jamaican-Canadian dub artist d’bi.young anitafrika, creator of the anitafrika method and spolrusie publishing, is a black queer feminist dub poet who has authored twelve plays, four collections of poetry and recorded seven albums. anitafrika has reinvented the way that we understand black womxn’s theatre. As part of JWIL‘s recent issue on dub poetry, we published Natalie Wall’s essay “Catching Bullets with Her Ass: Matrilineality and the Canadian Dub Poetry Tradition in the Work of d’bi.young anitafrika.” This residency explores anitafrika’s critical and creative practice in the dub tradition.

anitafrika’s life and work has been shaped by the three main transnational hubs of dub. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, they came into the dub performance scene and tradition in Toronto. anitafrika is currently pursuing a PhD at London South Bank University investigating how Black womxn theatre makers globally embody theatre in a decolonial praxis; they are also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s New College and curator of Incubate, a monthly performance and open mic event at Theatre Peckham. anitafrika is also now completing Dubbin Theatre, an anthology of their plays written from 2000-2022, and Dub Poetry to Dubbin Theatre.

Natalie Wall is currently the Research Impact Manager at Queen Mary University of London. Originally from Canada, Wall focuses on black Caribbean Canadian women’s performance, artivism, and antiracist scholarship and practice, and is currently writing a monograph titled White Generosity, to be published by Emerald Publishing, which examines the historical and contemporary construction of global reparations and black freedom.

Join us from March 28-April 4 for a JWIL Twitter residency by writer Alecia McKenzie. McKenzie’s residency will explore “The Disco of Dub – as in discothèque, library, discography.”

The word “disco” comes from “discothèque”/discoteca – which used to mean “a record library” before the word started being used for “nightclub”, etc. This residency will explore McKenzie’s  “discoteca” or collection of dub recordings. She will be tweeting about various recordings, while referencing her co-authored article “Dub Poetry’s Global Impact, Forty Years On” published in the  recent JWIL special issue on Dub Poetry. The posts will cover works by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean “Binta” Breeze, and others.

Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican writer and editor currently based in France. She is the author of six books and has written on culture and the arts for a global news agency and various publications. Her most recent novel is A Million Aunties. She tweets at @mckenzie_ale.

This year marks 36 years of the Journal of West Indian Literature‘s life as a regional University of the West Indies-led Caribbeanist project invested in highlighting and critically examining the prolific literary production of the Caribbean. This two-part Twitter residency featuring, first, immediate past JWIL editor-in-chief, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and, then, current JWIL editor-in-chief, Lisa Outar, reflected both on the Journal’s past and its current life as a leading site for promoting scholarship on Caribbean literature both in the region and globally. From March 7 to March 21, O’Callaghan and Outar offered archival records and memories of the Journal’s intertwined beginnings with the West Indian Literature conference, stories of the pioneers of Caribbean literary studies who helped create and support the publication at a time when publishing work on the region in the region was a rarity as well as reflections on the current work the Journal is doing to promote Caribbean literary studies and the rich work of region-based Caribbean artists.

Evelyn O’Callaghan, Emeritus Professor of West Indian literature, Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature at the University of the West Indies, Barbados campus, is recently retired. She has published on West Indian literature, particularly on women’s writing, early Caribbean narratives and, more recently, ecocritical readings of Caribbean landscapes in visual and scribal texts.

Lisa Outar is an independent scholar/editor who publishes in the areas of Indo-Caribbean literature, feminist writing and the connections between the Caribbean and other sites of the indentureship diaspora. She is co-editor of Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments.

Announcing a call for papers for the Association for Commonwealth Literature And Language Studies (ACLALS) 2022 conference.

At a time when we are experiencing profound and unexpected disruptions to our shared spaces, routines, economies, societies, and work-lives, ACLALS 2022 proposes that we convene in Toronto (fingers crossed!) to consider the nature and implications of rupture, the commons, and their conjoining: the ruptured commons. Garnett Hardin wrote in 1968 about “the tragedy of the commons” – the tendency for publicly owned, shared space to degrade through the neglect, abuse, overuse, and simple taking-for-granted of its multiple owners, who, because there are so many, do not identify as owners and take little responsibility. With each new climate-change study we become more aware of the ways our common environment has seen its natural states and processes violated by human activity. The ruptured commons is at the heart of the concept of the Anthropocene and what Amitav Ghosh has called “the great derangement” of our unsustainable ways. The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink our common spaces and how we use them, from city streets to airplanes, domestic spaces to workplaces – including academic ones. Indeed, our work as scholars, teachers, and students has been ruptured in countless ways as our institutional commons of classrooms and conferences fragment into rectangle-bound faces and voices on screens. Finally, the “common” in Commonwealth has come under fire for decades, whether by rewriting it as “common poverty” or by rejecting its presence in the names of our discipline and, for some, in ACLALS itself. At a time when so much of our shared future is uncertain and when we have the opportunity to reimagine the commons, we invite delegates to place notions of rupture and commons in a wide variety of pan-historical contexts and scales from the local to the global.

See here for more details. Abstracts should be no more than 350 words and are to be submitted online by Nov. 30, 2021 at:

http://aclals.net/conferences-and-cfps/aclals-2022/

Between November 8-14, Janelle Rodriques (@Sister_Killjoy) will tweet selections from various scholarly, creative and historical reflections on Caribbean tourism, from Jamaica Kincaid to Kei Miller, from Kamala Kempadoo to Angelique Nixon. She will be curating – and invites us to curate together – various critiques of the region’s dependence on and our quarrels with tourism, as an extension of plantation politics and poetics.

Janelle Rodriques (@Sister_Killjoy) is a Caribbean literary scholar working in the United States. She is the author of Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature (Routledge, 2019), and has published in Anthurium, Caribbean Quarterly,  Journal of West Indian Literature and Atlantic Studies.