Michael A. Bucknor (University of the West Indies-Mona) and Ian Bethell-Bennett (College of the Bahamas) extend an invitation to submit articles for a special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature for publication in April 2012. The issue will focus on “Masculinities in Caribbean Literature and Culture.” The date for submitting articles is October 31, 2011, but the co-editors encourage potential contributors to send work ahead of the deadline.
Description: In spite of the growing significance of issues of masculinities in gender and other interdisciplinary studies, publications on the role of masculinities in Caribbean culture have been modest in literary and cultural studies. Curdella Forbes points out that it was not until the appearance of works “such as Belinda Edmondson’s Making Men (1999)… that major discussions of the subject appeared” in Caribbean literary criticism (From Nation to Diaspora 2). In Anglophone Caribbean cultural studies, it is primarily music that has attracted gendered analyses that focus on masculinities. While there have been some discussions linking masculinities and sexualities, masculinities and education, and masculinities and socialization, and there have been inter-disciplinary collections of essays that engage masculinities, the range of artistic modes that contribute to masculinities discourse is still to be explored.
This Special Issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature invites multiple readings of gender that underscore the role of masculinities in a range of literary and cultural expressions in the Caribbean. Against the background of studies of the social construction, performance, interrogation and political posturing of hegemonic masculinities, we ask for explorations of some leading questions: Have the depictions of male characters changed over the last five decades or so from Naipaul, Lamming, and Lovelace to such contemporary writers as Junot Díaz, Kei Miller, Anton Nimblett, and what ideological agendas have been served by these depictions? Is there a relationship between migration/diaspora and revised Caribbean masculinities? Of what significance is the geo-political world of the family, the community, work and leisure to the construction of Caribbean masculinities? To what extent has the role of the Caribbean male been altered by modernity and postmodernity, late-capitalism, late-postcolonialism, globalisation or neo-liberalism? These and similar questions are issues this JWIL publication endeavours to highlight.
Although JWIL is a literary journal, the editors encourage submissions from all areas of cultural production: literature, film, music, visual arts, theatre (including forms of popular culture) and any field of study that examines masculinities in Caribbean cultural and artistic expression. They also strongly encourage the submission of comparative work between the Anglophone and other linguistic groups of the Caribbean or between different modes of cultural production.
The editors invite papers of 20 to 25 double-spaced typed pages in English and formatted to the MLA style guide. A copy of each paper should be sent by October 31, 2011, by e-mail, to one of the co-editors:
Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett (School of English Studies, College of the Bahamas, Oakes Field, P. O. Box N 4912, Nassau, The Bahamas) at bethellbennett@gmail.com
Dr. Michael A. Bucknor (Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston 7, Jamaica) at michael.bucknor@uwimona.edu.jm
Painting from Ebony G. Patterson’s series “Faces from the Dancehall”
Via http://repeatingislands.com/2011/09/20/call-for-papers-special-issue-of-the-journal-of-west-indian-literature/
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