The Caribbean Digital

The Caribbean Digital

a small axe event

The transformation of the academy by the digital revolution presents challenges to customary ways of learning, teaching, conducting research, and presenting findings. It also offers great opportunities in each of these areas. New media enable oration, graphics, objects, and even embodied performance to supplement existing forms of scholarly production as well as to constitute entirely original platforms. Textual artifacts have been rendered literally and figuratively three-dimensional; opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration have expanded exponentially; information has been made more accessible and research made more efficient on multiple levels. Scholars are called upon, with some urgency, to adapt their research and pedagogical methods to an academic climate deluged by a superabundance of information and analysis. This has created opportunities for open-ended and multiform engagements, interactive and continually updating archives and other databases, cartographic applications that enrich places with historical information, and online dialogues with peers and the public.

The need for such engagements is especially immediate among the people of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Information technology has become an increasingly significant part of the way that people frame pressing social problems and political aspirations. Aesthetic media like photography and painting—because they are relatively inexpensive and do not rely on literacy or formal training—have become popular among economically dispossessed and politically marginalized constituencies. Moreover, the Internet is analogous in important ways to the Caribbean itself as dynamic and fluid cultural space: it is generated from disparate places and by disparate peoples; it challenges fundamentally the geographical and physical barriers that disrupt or disallow connection; and it places others and elsewheres in relentless relation. Yet while we celebrate these opportunities for connectedness, we also must make certain that the digital realm undermine and confront rather than re-inscribe forms of silencing and exclusion in the Caribbean.

In this unique one-day public forum we intend to engage critically with the digital as practice and as historicized societal phenomenon, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that evermore intensely reconfigure the social and geographic contours of the Caribbean. We invite presentations that explicitly evoke:  

• the transatlantic, collaborative, and/or interdisciplinary possibilities and limitations of digital technologies in the Caribbean metaphorical linkages between the digital and such Caribbean philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic concepts as "submarine unity," the rhizome, Relation, the spiral, repeating islands, creolization, etc.
• gendered dimensions of the digital in the Caribbean 
• the connection between digital technologies and practices of the so-called Caribbean folk
• specific engagements with digital spaces and/or theories by individual Caribbean artists and intellectuals
• the ways in which digital technologies have impacted or shaped understandings of specific Caribbean political phenomena (e.g. sovereignty, reparations, transnationalism, migration, etc.)
• structural means of facilitating broad engagement, communication, and accessibility in the Caribbean digital context (cultivation of multilingual spaces, attentiveness to the material/hardware limitations of various populations)

Both traditional papers and integrally multimedia papers/presentations are welcome. We also welcome virtual synchronous presentations by invited participants who cannot travel to New York City to attend the event. Selected proceedings from this forum will be published in the inaugural issue (September 2015) of sx:archipelagos – an interactive, born-digital, print-possible, peer-reviewed Small Axe Project publication.

Abstracts of 300 words and a short bio should be sent to Kaiama L. Glover and Kelly Baker Josephs (archipelagos@smallaxe.net) by 1 June 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by 1 August 2014.

Call for Papers: Islands in the Mainstream: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Caribbean Rhetoric

Proposals are sought from scholars, teachers, practitioners, and researchers in rhetoric, communication, literature, Caribbean studies, indigenous studies, diaspora studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and the visual and performing arts for contributions that explore aspects of Caribbean rhetorical expression from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, original essays are sought that will contribute to and fortify emerging work in the study of Caribbean rhetoric by envisioning the scope and dimension of what such work might entail. Such essays will engage, challenge, and move beyond the traditional perimeter of rhetorical analysis, encompassing the epistemic, pedagogical, and public work that occurs in a broad range of Caribbean texts: oral/aural, visual, scribal, tactile, digital, environmental, supernatural, etc.. Essays about the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean are strongly encouraged, though authors are asked to submit their proposals (and their essays, if accepted) in English, except in the case of specialized terms, phrases, and concepts (annotated accordingly).

The first of its kind to specifically consider the rhetoric of Caribbean cultural production from interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection will provide scholars, teachers, and students with innovative approaches for discussing the range of motives, histories, and social realities that necessitate inquiry and inclusion in rhetorical studies. Similarly, it will contribute to Caribbean studies and other disciplines represented in the volume by providing a dynamic set of robust rhetorical theories for reading Caribbean culture. In addition to defining theoretical parameters for reading Caribbean rhetoric and exploring areas of practice for further research, contributors will be encouraged to consider the pedagogical implications of their ideas. This can include developing curricula (introductory, intermediate, or advanced courses in rhetorical education among undergraduate writing majors, or courses that respond to particular writing-intensive programs, writing centers, or Writing Across the Curriculum), community literacy/publishing initiatives (ongoing or envisioned), or research studies (archival, ethnographic, qualitative, quantitative, etc.) on projects that engage students on matters of Caribbean import. Essays that are collaboratively authored by faculty and students and/or faculty and professionals are particularly welcome.

While the following list is not exhaustive, possible chapters may fall within these broad categories:

• Carnival Theatre
• Dance/Performance Art
• Digital Humanities/New Media/Technology/Broadcast Media
• Fine Art/Photography
• Food
• Geopolitics
• Historiography/Interrogations of Historical Narratives
• Labor Union/National/Political Parties
• Literature
• Music
• National/Sub-Supranational/Transnational
• Oratory/Public Address
• Pedagogy
• Postcolonial/Neocolonial
• Public Archives/Public Memory/Concepts of Vernacular Memory
• Race(d) Relations
• Surveillance
• Vernacular Bodies/Love, Sex, Sexualities

Please submit a proposal, approximately 500 words, that discusses the proposed chapter to the editor, Kevin A. Browne (browne@syr.edu). Questions and queries are welcome. The deadline for proposal submissions is November 1, 2013.

Call for Papers:ACLALS Conference

Connecting Cultures and the Commonwealth, ACLALS Conference

The 16th Triennial ACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies) Conference

St. Lucia, West Indies,

August 5 –9, 2013

CFP deadline: 15 December 2012

Information direct from CFP below:

“‘The current unbroken/ the circuits kept open’: Connecting Cultures and the Commonwealth”

In “Sometimes in the Middle of the Story,” a poem that revisits the perilous event of the Middle Passage, the eminent Walcott scholar, Edward Baugh, gives primacy to the connecting currents of the “ocean” as a central motif. While the sea is viewed as an archive of history as Nobel Laureate and St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott has argued, Baugh mobilizes this metaphor to both recognize the traumatic beginning of the colonial encounter in the Caribbean and the rich “refashioning of futures” of cultural connections that the Middle Passage engendered. No doubt the colonial encounter of slavery and indentureship in the Caribbean could have led to cultural enclosures, but in Baugh’s view, “the paths of ocean” represent connecting currents between and beyond the cultures of Africa, Asia, Europe and the Indigenous Caribbean. The sea, in particular, the Atlantic Ocean, was a site of treacherous travel and trade, yet that very sea is a source “connecting us still”.

Not all colonial encounters carry with them the violence of such ruptures; but whether we had traumatic or benign beginnings, we wonder what future consequently has been imagined for these and other Commonwealth lands? What global zones of power and influence haunt the seemingly ecumenical and liberal discourses of cultural exchange? What cultural connections and disconnections have emerged over time? Whose cultural currents are unbroken: whose cultural circuits have been kept open? What is the currency of indigenous language and linguistic legacies? In the commingling of cultures in the postcolonial circuits of exchange, what is the relationship between indigenous and outside cultures? Is the implicit comparative critical lens fostered in early postcolonial theory still viable? What do these connecting comparisons obscure or reveal? What is the relationship between economic currencies and cultural circuits? What are the historical and critical currents that mark postcolonial and commonwealth studies at this time? What connections are there between different genders, sexualities and ecologies? How valuable is the more recent deployment of concepts of desire, intimacy and affect to postcolonial and Commonwealth studies? What useful connections can be made between such disciplinary paradigms as globalization, diaspora and cultural studies to Commonwealth and postcolonial literature and language studies? In general, how might literary and language studies help us to understand the value of cultural connections and disconnections throughout the Commonwealth?

The 16th Triennial ACLALS Conference invites scholars working in a variety of media (literature, linguistics, film, the visual and musical arts and popular culture) to present papers on the theme, “‘The current unbroken/ the circuits kept open’: Connecting Cultures and the Commonwealth,” on the questions raised above, and on a range of topics including those listed below:

Historical and cultural currents in the Commonwealth
The common wealth of nations
Identity, currency and the practices of cultural consumption
Currents in language studies
The currency of cultures and/or Cultural Studies
Linguistic circuits and circuits of identity or cultural exchange
Cultural circuits and economic currency
The Currency of trade and travel
Circuits of violence/brokenness/trauma and cultural discourse
Discursive cultural circuits on gender and sexuality
Middle Passages and stories in the middle
The Black Atlantic and the Commonwealth
Connections/disconnections throughout the Commonwealth
Circling definitions: Commonwealth? Postcolonial? Postnational?
Waves of critical, cultural or linguistic practice
Short-circuiting genre: literary experimentation?
Island currents, global changes: conversations across the Commonwealth
Imagining Commonwealth futures

DEADLINE: Abstracts of maximum 300 words for papers of 20 minutes duration, and maximum 400 words for three-paper panels (with the names of the panelists) which engage with these and other relevant questions along with a short bio not exceeding 100 words should be submitted to ACLALSCONFERENCE2013@gmail.com by 15 December 2012

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The documents posted on this Web site may contain hypertext links or pointers to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links and pointers are provided for visitors' convenience. I do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any linked information. Further, the inclusion of links or pointers to other Web sites or agencies is not intended to assign importance to those sites and the information contained therein, nor is it intended to endorse, recommend, or favor any views expressed, or commercial products or services offered on these outside sites, or the organizations sponsoring the sites, by trade name, trademark, manufacture, or otherwise.

Reference in this Web site to any specific commercial products, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm or corporation name is for the information and convenience of the site's visitors, and does not constitute endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by this blog.

Imagined Nations, 50 Years Later: Reflections on Independence and Federation in the Caribbean

The 31st Annual Meeting of the West Indian Literature Conference

Imagined Nations, 50 Years Later: Reflections on Independence and Federation in the Caribbean

Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Miami

October 11-13th, 2012

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, Miami, FL

Conference Description

In 2012 Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica celebrate the 50th Anniversary of their independence from Britain. However, while 2012 marks these very auspicious occasions, it is also the 50th anniversary of the collapse of the West Indies Federation. Anniversaries encourage and even demand reflection and re-visitations of the expectations, opportunities lost and those well used, the failures and achievements as well as the considerations that attended these occasions. For more than fifty years, novelists, poets, visual artists and other cultural workers have been actively involved in imagining, revising and challenging the project of independence and the future it promised for so many. 

The 50th Anniversary is an excellent opportunity to revisit the movement towards and attainment of independence; the arts movements that emerged out of these nationalist projects; the cultural institutions that gave expression to the changes taking place; the rise and collapse of the West Indian Federation and the implications of all of these developments for the Caribbean region in the new era of globalization. Moreover, this occasion provides an important critical crossroad for us to consider the extent to which dialogues about independence and Federation have preoccupied not only writers, but also artists working in a number of different mediums in the Caribbean region. To this end, the 31st West Indian Literature Conference invites writers, cultural practitioners and scholars to submit papers that engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the various representations of both independence and the rise and fall of the West Indian Federation.

Panel presentations will consider these and other themes and topics:

Literary Nationalism in Trinidad and Jamaica
The Architecture of Independence
Narrative Intentions: Mapping the Landscapes of Independence
Bodies of (In)difference: Gender, Sexuality and Nationhood
Flexible Citizens, Rigid Borders: Migration and Diaspora
Pan-Caribbeanism and discourses of regional integration
States of Independence – Puerto Rico and the US
Political Leadership: Past, Present and Future
Caribbean Women's Literature: Configuring of a political voice/space.
New artistic articulations and revisions of the (post)independence project
Rhythm-Nations: Music, Poetry and Performance
Pedagogies of Independence
Colonization in Reverse: Caribbean and Britain
Comparative Contemplations: Decolonization in the French, Hispanic and Dutch Caribbean

Cultural Performance and the Politics of Nation

For more information: http://www.as.miami.edu/windianlitconf/

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Blog Disclosure Policy

Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot receives a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy through links to Amazon, Shambala Books, Hay House, or any of the Google ads or Google Custom Search.




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Disclaimer of Endorsement

The documents posted on this Web site may contain hypertext links or pointers to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links and pointers are provided for visitors' convenience. I do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any linked information. Further, the inclusion of links or pointers to other Web sites or agencies is not intended to assign importance to those sites and the information contained therein, nor is it intended to endorse, recommend, or favor any views expressed, or commercial products or services offered on these outside sites, or the organizations sponsoring the sites, by trade name, trademark, manufacture, or otherwise.

Reference in this Web site to any specific commercial products, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm or corporation name is for the information and convenience of the site's visitors, and does not constitute endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by this blog.

Call for Papers: ‘Children’s Literature from the Commonwealth of Nations’

We invite submissions for a Special Issue of Bookbird in conjunction with the Commonwealth Education Trust (CET). The CET has promoted education, literacy and literature throughout the member states of the Commonwealth of Nations for 125 years. Their work has much in common with IBBY. Papers are invited on the literatures of Commonwealth countries, as well as on literacy education, the development of the imagination and critical thinking through reading, and other practical uses of literature. Papers of 4000 words are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics: 

• National identity in literature for children and teens
• Literacy programmes which incorporate children’s literature
• Thematic developments in national literatures
• Indigenous and diasporic literatures for children
• Multilingual children’s literature
• The impact of colonization and/or Empire on national literatures for children
• The oral tradition and/or literary retellings
• Trends in illustration techniques
• Prizes for children’s literature
• Non-fiction publishing for children and teens

Titles and abstracts of 250 words should be sent to both editors by 15th May 2012. Roxanne Harde rharde@augustana.ca and Lydia Kokkola lydia.kokkola@utu.fi

The full papers will be expected by 30th June 2012. Please see Bookbird’s website at www.ibby.org/bookbird for full submission details.

In addition, short reviews of recently published children’s literature (c.a. 300 words) or of research on children’s literature (c.a. 750 words) are warmly welcomed.

Papers which are not accepted for this issue will be considered for later issues of Bookbird.


Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature (ISSN 0006 7377) is a refereed journal published quarterly by IBBY




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Call for Papers: The Caribbean Poetry Project

The Caribbean Poetry Project, is a pioneering collaboration between Cambridge University Faculty of Education, the Centre for Commonwealth Education, and the University of West Indies at Mona (Jamaica), St Augustine (Trinidad) and at Cave Hill (Barbados). Through a joint research and teaching programme, this three-year project will encourage engagement with Caribbean poetry, and improve the teaching and learning of Caribbean poetry in both British and Caribbean schools.


Peepal Tree Press is delighted to be a partner and associate member of the CPP team, collaborating on a poetry anthology. This will focus very much on contemporary caribbean poetry, the aim of the collection is to introduce young people to Caribbean poets and new work. Students and teachers taking the Teaching Caribbean Poetry Course in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and the UK will participate in the selection of work. The anthology will be edited by Jeremy Poynting, Peepal Tree Press, and Dorothea Smartt, poet and Peepal Tree's CPP advisory panel representative.

CARIBBEAN POETRY PROJECT

http://caribbeanpoetry.educ.cam.ac.uk

The Power of Caribbean Poetry - Word and Sound

A conference on Caribbean poetry,

Homerton College, Cambridge University, Faculty of Education

Thursday 20 – Saturday 22 Sept 2012

Speakers / performers include: John Agard, Beverley Bryan, Kei Miller, Mervyn Morris, Grace Nichols, Velma Pollard, Olive Senior, Dorothea Smartt

The first two days of this international gathering will take the form of an academic conference, the final day having a more educational focus and therefore likely to appeal to teachers as well as scholars. Members of the Caribbean Poetry Project from Cambridge University Faculty of Education and the University of West Indies will be hosting the conference and disseminating its outcomes. Marilyn Brocklehurst’s bookshop will be available throughout the conference and some project partners, such as the online Poetry Archive and Peepal Tree Press, will be represented.

CALL FOR PAPERS

·      Caribbean poetry and the word
·      Origins and histories of Caribbean poetry
·      Particular poets e.g. appreciation of the work of Derek Walcott / Kamau Brathwaite
·      Re-reading Caribbean poetry
·      Caribbean poetry and music
·      Ecocriticism and Caribbean poetry
·      Caribbean landscapes
·      Poetry as emancipation
·      Caribbean British poetry
·      Approaches to learning and teaching Caribbean poetry
·      Migration and location in Caribbean poetry
·      Gender in Caribbean poetry
·      Caribbean poetry and postcolonial theory
·      Caribbean poetry and the curriculum

Abstracts (300 words approx.) should be sent to Bryony Horsley-Heather (bsjh2@cam.ac.uk) by the end of MARCH 2012.

Conference fees including lunch, dinner, tea & coffee will be £200. Day rate £75 for 20th, £100 for 21st and £70 for 22nd for bookings before May 1st 2012. Accommodation available at Homerton College at £60 per night. Online registration will be available via the website from November 2011 - See http://caribbeanpoetry.educ.cam.ac.uk/ for updates.

For further information, contact Morag Styles (ms104@cam.ac.uk) or Bryony Horsley- Heather (bsjh2@cam.ac.uk) or visit http://caribbeanpoetry.educ.cam.ac.uk

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Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature

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/

Guyana Folk Festival 2011 Symposium: Aal bady, waan bady

Aal bady, waan bady

Guyana Folk Festival 2011 Symposium

“Arrivals, Encounters, and Exchanges”

Saturday, September 3, 2011

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

On the 10^th anniversary of GCA and the Guyana Folk Festival, the annual symposium will focus and the on-going process of (aal bady) becoming (waan bady)—Guyanese.

MISSION

There is a tendency among the dominant discourses on Guyanese life and society to emphasize differences among Guyanese root heritages.  This nurtures mistrust and diverts attention from the cultural similarities, common experiences and traditions of solidarity and friendship that are evident in contemporary Guyanese culture. 

The organizers of the 2011 symposium believe that the appreciation and the celebration of cultural similarities and common experiences among Guyana’s ethnic communities—at home and in the diaspora—are  necessities in contemporary Guyanese life and society. 

To this end, the symposium’s goal is to explore contemporary ideas about the state of Guyanese culture.  To encourage this, the symposium has the following objectives:

·         To share and encourage new knowledge related to the people of Guyana—Arrivals;

·         To share and encourage new knowledge related to the conditions and contexts of the encounters and contacts in the peopling of Guyana [and its diaspora]—Encounters;

·         To share and encourage new knowledge about the resulting cultural exchanges that emerged from the arrivals and encounters of our ancestors in Guyana and the current roles and future viability of those cultural developments—Exchanges.

Arrivals

To share new knowledge related to the peopling of Guyana.

Archeological and other scientific evidence indicate the populating of this region of the Americas can be traced back to between 9,000 and 12.000 years.  The first peoples of this era were parts of a wider civilization that had developed hybrids such as corn (maize) and potato—two globally important foods. Dr. Denis Williams’ Prehistoric Guyana and Dr. George Mentore’s Of Passionate Curves and Desirable Cadences:  Themes on Waiwai Social Being and Dr. Desrey Caesar-Fox’s dissertation Variants of Akawaio Spoken at Waramadong have been valuable contributions to the understanding of our Amerindian ancestors’ engagement with life in Amazonia.

Through expanding access to international archives, new databases, and the application of more robust research designs interdisciplinary researchers, including Guyanese historiographers, are now offering sharper descriptions of the other people who have populated Guyana since Columbus’s encounter with the Americas in 1492.  These new works are beginning to humanize our ancestors who came from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East by giving them voice and context.

Publications such as Alvin Thompson’s Unprofitable Servants:  Crown Slaves in Berbice, Guyana 1803 - 1831; McGowan, Rose and Grainer’s Themes in African Guyanese History; Maureen Walker-Lewis’s Central Africa in the Caribbean; Clem Seecharran’s Sweetening Bitter Sugar; Trevor Sue-A-Quan’s Cane Reapers and Cane Ripples; and Sister Mary Noel’s The Portuguese of Guyana:  A Study in Culture and Conflict, among others are valuable sources of evidence about the arrivals of our ancestors.

To share and encourage new knowledge related to the conditions and contexts of the encounters and contacts in the peopling of Guyana [and its diaspora]—

Encounters

Recent scholarship by Guyanese academics has been providing increasing specificity and texture about the sites of and the nature of the encounters associated with the peopling of Guyana.  Dr. Brenda Josiah has been doing pioneering work on the post-emancipation African Village movement and the pork-knocking heritage.  Dr. Juanita DeBarros’ Order and Place in a Colonial City:  Patterns of Struggle and Resistance on Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889 - 1924 is a ground-breaking exploration of the intersection of public health, and the exercise of colonial power in Georgetown.

The encounters of our ancestors have continued to inform the Guyanese literary imagination.  These encounters are explored in multiple genres—including autobiography, biography, poetry, song, and science fiction.  Contemporary exemplars of this tradition include Grace Agard’s I’se a Long Memoried Woman; Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice; Dr. Brenda Do Harris’s Calabash Parkway; Marina Budhos’s Ask Me No Questions; and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber.

Exchanges

To share and encourage new knowledge about the resulting cultural exchanges that emerged from the arrivals and encounters of our ancestors in Guyana and the current roles and future viability of those cultural developments.

Interest in Guyanese heritage accelerated in the post-independence years.  Out of the research on this aspect of Guyanese life piloted by John Rickford, Walter Edwards, Peter Kempadoo, Marc Mathews, Diazal Samad, Sister Rose Magdalene, Lakshmi Kalicharran, Kean Gibson, Desrey Fox, Brian Moore, Roy Brummel, Alan Fenty, and others, it is now possible to identity and celebrate several areas of cultural similarity—in language, cuisine, fashion, music, dance, spirituality, and aspirations, to name a few. 

The Objectives

The objectives of the 2011 Symposium are  to:

·        Provide a platform for sharing recent academic knowledge on Guyanese life and society
·        Offer an opportunity to explore the nature of the arrivals, encounters, and exchanges associated with the making of the modern Guyanese nation;
·         Explore the expressive culture that have emerged as a result of the exchanges associated with the making of the modern Guyanese nation;
·         Contribute to the eradication of persistent negative racial and ethnic stereotypes in Guyanese society;
·         Contribute to the building of trust among Guyanese
·         Contribute to the reinforcement of the bonds of solidarity and friendships,
·         Encourage and sustain creativity and achievement;
·         Support the visualization of contemporary Guyaneseness; and
·         Facilitate the collecting of materials for dissemination in Guyana Folk magazine and the academic press; to support scholarly research, for depositing in the Guyana Collection, Ohio University Library, Caribbean Collection of the University of Guyana, and Guyana’s National Library; and for immediate use in radio, television and on-line programming in the United States and Guyana.

Rationale

The symposium organizers invites paper proposals and panels to examine the cultural exchanges that have emerged in Guyana as a result to the arrivals and encounters among our multiple ancestors.  Starting with our Amerindian ancestors who arrived almost 12,000 years ago and since the early 15^th century, our ancestors from Europe, African, Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean. 

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

Arrivals

Shipmates and Jhaji Bhais

Sociological/psychological effects of arrival

Neo-arrivants and the creation of the Guyanese diaspora

Encounters

            Encountering nature

            Religious encounters

            Business encounters

Solidarity and friendships

            Rituals and identity

            Education resolutions

Exchanges

            Name Changing

Literature

Food

            Fashion/Clothes

            Festivals

            Music

            Dance

Marriage—Kwe Kwe and Dig Dutty

            Spirituality

Ethnic enclaves and global Guyana

THE PROCESS

Persons interested in submitting papers are invited to register by proposing a provisional topic by May 30, 2011.  Paper abstracts are due by June 30, 2011.  Abstracts should not exceed 300 words in length and should be sent in electronic form or hard copy to Dr. Vibert C. Cambridge  cambridg@ohio.edu or School of Media Arts and Studies, RTVC 213, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701.

This symposium is scheduled for Saturday, September 3, 2011 at EdZone, Teacher’s College/Columbia University, New York, NY.

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Related articles

• The Guyana Cultural Association of New York Awards: Call for Nominations (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Book review: A portrait of Guyana and its polyglot idiom (repeatingislands.com)
• El Dorado maybe in sight at last (bbc.co.uk)
• Guyana's Mashramani Festival (repeatingislands.com)

Call for Papers: Formal Measures

FORMAL MEASURES

Sixth Annual Graduate Student Comparative Poetics Colloquium

Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University

Saturday, May 7, 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS UPDATE: Deadline for Proposals: March 20, 2011

On Saturday, May 7, 2011, the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University will host a colloquium in comparative poetics titled "Formal Measures." Graduate students at any stage in their work are welcome to submit proposals for a twenty-minute paper presentation.

In addition to two panels, the colloquium will feature a keynote lecture given by Derek Attridge (University of York), a poetry reading by A.E. Stallings (poet and translator; recipient of the Richard Wilbur Award), and a roundtable discussion in which Princeton scholars and poets will discuss the changing role of traditional metrical and prosodic considerations in the study and writing of poetry today.

"Formal Measures" proposes a multidisciplinary discussion of the cultural, political, historical and aesthetic significance and relevance of form and metrics in the writing and study of poetry today. In the wake of free verse, how does the transmission of traditional forms across historical and linguistic boundaries continue to shape our critical understanding and poetic practice? Are particular forms or meters indissociable from the languages in which they first appear? If yes, how do poetic forms nonetheless circulate between traditions and languages? Is there a formal or linguistic definition of poetry? In recent years, these questions have taken on increasing urgency, both inside and outside of the academy, as academics and poets have renewed their engagement with form. We are particularly interested in the circulation, appropriation and reinterpretation of formal schemes and metrical systems within and across poetic traditions and languages, in the tension between experimental and traditional forms, as well as in the metrical dimension of translating poetry.

We welcome papers that offer questions, challenges, elaborations, and interpretations of this year's theme. Papers may focus on any poetic tradition, language or period. We are especially interested in proposals that take a comparative or interdisciplinary approach. Topics may include but are not confined to the following:

-   Form as constraint/Form as freedom
-   Avant-garde/ Experimental use of traditional forms
-   Compositional constraints as poetic practice (Oulipo, etc.)
-   Theories of the relationship between form and literary meaning
-   Theories of prosody
-   Definitions of "poetry," the "poetic" or "poetic language"
-   The relation of poetry to music
-   The metrical dimension of translating poetry
-   Pre-modern form
-   Form and literary history
-   Form and the formation of literary canons
-   Form and individual style
-   Form and genre
-   Form and aesthetics
-   Form and the senses
-   Political uses of poetic form
-   Form and technology
-   Hybrid forms

Paper proposals should include a title, 250-word abstract, brief biography (including department affiliation and areas of interest) and contact information.  Please include at least one close reading in your paper and
send us attachments of the poems before the colloquium. Papers will be pre-circulated to moderators in late April in order for them to prepare responses in advance.  Audio-visual equipment is available upon request.

If you are interested in moderating a panel, please submit a curriculum vitae and a brief description of your interest in the colloquium by the proposal deadline.

Please send proposals via email attachment, as well as any questions, to formalmeasures@gmail.com.

Thank you for your interest.

Ella Brians (Comparative Literature), Andy Lemons (Comparative Literature),
Kathryn Stergiopoulos (Comparative Literature), Amelia Worsley (English)

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Guyana Folk Festival: Ninth Annual Symposium and Fourth Annual Literary Hang

The Guyana Cultural Association, NY, Inc. /Guyana Folk Festival issues a call for presentations at its Ninth Annual Symposium and Fourth Annual Literary Hang. The theme of the GCA/Guyana Folk Festival for 2010 is Diversity in Our Villages: Harmony in Our Culture.


This year these two events come together in a glorious celebration of the village and the book.


This event will be held at Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church, 13 Jefferson Ave., Brooklyn, NY on Saturday, September 4, 2010, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Fourth Literary Hang

Authors are invited to participate in this section of the event by exhibiting and reading from their works. Readings are limited to ten (10) minutes. The sale of books is permitted. Authors may sign any books that they have sold.

The Ninth Annual Symposium

Papers and presentations are invited on any aspect of village or extended village life. These aspects include may include, but are not limited to any of the following:

The village as keeper of the flame

School and society in the village

The role of the church in the village community

Icons in the history of the village

Reflections in music; the rhythm of the village

The meaning of dance and movement in the village

Reflections of the ancestry: historiography embedded in the spoken word

Myth and legend: linkages

Humor

Ceremonial expressions and the role of village etiquette

Cantankerous takings in the life of the village

Village architecture and landscape design

The art of storytelling in the village

Village foods: beacons of history and memory

Bush tea and tinin cup: recalling and reflecting on village basics

Crossing the waters: retaining village tradition in a new homeland

Diasporic circling: the village as link

Papers should be no longer than 10 - 15 minutes. Poster exhibitions and video presentations are encouraged. Video presentations should be no longer than 10 - 15 minutes.


Submit your abstract/summary for a paper, video or poster presentation on or before July 31, 2010.


Send all submissions to:

J. Emanuel

c/o Guyana Cultural Association, NY, Inc. 

1368 E 89 St.

Brooklyn, NY 11236

or

jaemanuel@cs.com

Please see also guyfolkfest.org for this announcement.

***

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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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Dear Reader,

Please help to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook or any other social media .

Peace,

Geoffrey