CALL FOR PAPERS: CARIBBEANSCAPES: THE VISTAS OF CARIBBEAN LITERATURE

CALL FOR PAPERS

CARIBBEANSCAPES: THE VISTAS OF CARIBBEAN LITERATURE

The 29th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

Department of Literatures in English

Faculty of Humanities and Education

University of the West Indies, Mona

Kingston, Jamaica

April 29 – May 1, 2010

Special Guests :

Kamau Brathwaite        

Lorna Goodison

Shara McCallum            

David Chariandy

The theme for the 29th Annual West Indian Literature Conference is Caribbeanscapes: The Vistas of Caribbean Literature.

The Caribbean has been perceived in myriad and often contradictory ways:  as paradisal isles; outposts of innocence offering Edenic beginnings; hedonistic beachscapes of tourist fantasies; the backwaters of civilization, condemned to mimicry and futile posturing; and vital centres of creative cultural hybridity, literally new worlds that prophesy our globalized futures.  

Anglophone Caribbean literature is a rich archive of such perceptions, often articulating them as visual tropes of space and place that conflate geography and history, language and cartography in the attempt to chart the imaginative and literal frontiers of psyche and society.  

To explore this archive of Caribbean literary vistas, the 29th Annual Conference on West Indian Literature invites papers and panel proposals on the following topics:


•    Tropicalized Spaces : The Power of Vistas
•    Home and Garden: Domestic Ecologies
•    Unhomely Spaces
•    Manscape and Womantongue Trees: The Gender of Vistas in Caribbean Literature
•    Rural Pastoral, Urban Dystopia? City and Country in Caribbean Writing
•    Plantation, Yard, Tonelle:  Metaphors of Place and Identity
•    Spectacular Islands: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Caribbean Popular Culture
•    Translocal and Transnational Vistas
•    Travel Writing
•    Bordered Vistas: Border Regimes, Border Clashes, and Border-Crossings
•    Imagining Caribbean Space

Proposals are welcomed on other topics that are relevant to the theme of the Conference.

Abstracts should not exceed 250 words in length, and should include (1) a title, (2) name, status and institutional affiliation of the presenter(s), (3) a contact email address, and (4) a mailing address. Please also let us know if you require any special equipment. Papers will be a maximum of twenty (20) minutes in length.

Abstracts or proposals for panels comprising three papers should be emailed to the following addresses:

liteng@uwimona.edu.jm

litsengmona@gmail.com

The first Call for Papers will close on November 30, 2009

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Peace,

Geoffrey