Call for Proposal: The Caribbean Digital
a small axe event
5 December 2014
Barnard College / Columbia University
New York, NY
Deadline for proposals: 1 June 2014
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 ([email protected]) by 1 June 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by 1 August 2014.
View the Call for Proposal here.
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Call for Papers: Edited Collection on Black Women's Internationalism
Editors: Tiffany M. Gill and Keisha N. Blain
The scholarship on the Black International has been predominately male-centric, emphasizing individuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Paul Robeson and C.L.R. James. With few exceptions, black women have been marginalized in historical narratives of black internationalism, which center on the global visions of black people in the United States and their sustained efforts to forge transnational collaborations and solidarities with people of color from across the globe. This volume is a collection of essays that analyze the gendered contours of black internationalism and explore the creative and critical ways women articulated black internationalism during the twentieth century. Highlighting the writings, speeches, performances, activism, and overseas travel of a diverse range of female actors, this collection moves black women from the margins to the center of the historical narrative. However, this anthology does more than just expand the paucity of scholarship on black women and internationalism. Indeed, this volume is both an assessment of the field as well as an attempt to expand the contours of black internationalism theoretically, spatially, and temporally. In contrast to studies that confine black internationalism to foreign policy agendas and political insurgencies, this collection captures the shifting meanings, complexities, and varied articulations of the term.
The editors seek historical essays that employ a gender analysis, foreground black women's voices, and reveal the underappreciated importance of women in shaping black internationalist movements and discourse(s) during the twentieth century. We are especially interested in manuscripts that reconceptualize internationalism beyond narrowly defined notions of political struggle to include consumption practices, leisure, and artistic expressions. We also seek manuscripts that expand the scholarly discourse on black internationalism to include the ideas and activities of the black working class. We encourage potential contributors to submit articles that explore topics that include but are not limited to the following:
- Black women's travels
- Black women's international activism
- Expressions of cosmopolitanism
- International consumer practices
- Global Feminism(s)
- International cultural exchanges/ practices
- Working-class internationalism
- Gender and Pan-Africanism
- Global religious expressions
- Global black beauty culture and adornment practices
- Global performative and artistic expressions
- Black women's engagement with the Black Atlantic/ Black Pacific
- Black women's internationalist writings
- Black women and the military
- Black women's engagement with foreign policy
- Anti-colonial/ Anti-imperial discourses
Completed manuscripts, due December 30, 2014, should be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word to [email protected]. Essays should be no more than 35 typed, double spaced pages (12 pt. font), including endnotes. Citations should follow the latest version of the Chicago Manual of Style. All entries should be accompanied by a title page and an abridged version of the author's C.V. Please direct all inquiries to the editors via email at [email protected]. For additional information, please visit our website: www.BWIAnthology.com
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