Call for Papers
University of Oxford, 27-29 September 2010
Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Maryse Condé
Co-organizers: Eva Sansavior and Richard Scholar
Oriel College, Oxford, and the Maison Française d’Oxford will host a major international conference on Caribbean Globalizations, from September 27th-29thth 2010. The conference forms part of a Leverhulme-funded project and intersects with two study days organized in 2010 and 2011. Timed to coincide with the start of Black History Month, the conference will be accompanied by a Caribbean-themed cultural programme that will include keynote speeches by major writers and academics working on the Francophone Caribbean region writers, art exhibitions, film screenings and musical performances at various venues around Oxford as part of a ‘Caribbean Week in Oxford’.
This conference aims to map and analyse the multiple engagements of various Caribbean countries with the complex and vexed process that is globalization since 1493 (when Columbus landed in Guadeloupe). The region has undoubtedly been the source of a number of the literary-critical paradigms by which we understand this process. Examples of these include: Créolité, creolisation, la relation, the Commonwealth, world literature, the Black Atlantic and littérature-monde. However, as the recent disturbances in Guadeloupe and Martinique have suggested, Caribbean countries are also actively rethinking their own identity and place in a world where the Western economic model of globalization is more in question than ever. Similarly, in the cultural sphere, the effects of this process on the region haves been the subject of a growing and divergent debate.
Caribbean globalizations seeks to make an intervention in this debate by focussing critical attention on the differing engagements with globalization produced in the Caribbean cultural field. The cultural field has long been a particularly fertile arena for Caribbean globalizations. The diversity that characterizes the cultural and social realities of the region arguably forged in the context of earlier forms of globalizations has been an enduring source of inspiration for Caribbean artists, writers, and intellectuals. At the same time, their work has expressed a preoccupation with generating theoretical and aesthetic frameworks globalization being, perhaps the first among equals to account for the specificities of their societies as well as the shifting range of relations that these societies maintain both within and beyond the Caribbean region. The conference aims therefore to foster a wide-ranging discussion of the possibilities presented by Caribbean cultural production for reflecting upon and re-imagining the idea of globalization. It will seek to explore the multiple engagements with and representations of this phenomenon by Caribbean writers, artists, and intellectuals and, as such, interdisciplinary and comparative approaches (bringing together the different languages spoken in the region) are encouraged.
The following themes will serve as starting points to guide the process of reflection and the expectation is that they would be interpreted as broadly as possible:
Histories: How do Caribbean artists, writers, and intellectuals represent and situate globalization within the history of the region? What alternative histories of globalization are presented in their works? How is the idea of a Caribbean history itself represented?
Geographies: How can the Caribbean region be defined? What types of geographies do Caribbean artists create and enact in their work? How do these engage with and/or re-shape current geographical configurations of the West and the Caribbean, the Mother country or the metropolitan space and the colonies, home and adopted country, in a globalized world?
Languages: What role does language play in the processes of Caribbean globalization? To what extent does it challenge or uphold traditional dichotomies between mother tongue and foreign tongue?
Cultures: How are the relations between globalization and the culture of the Caribbean to be understood? To what extent are notions of highbrow and lowbrow, indigenous and foreign, local and global challenged or re-configured?
Genres: To what extent are traditional generic categories respected, challenged or re-invented by Caribbean artists and intellectuals? Can such engagements be situated historically and culturally within the processes of globalization?
Identities: How is a globalized Caribbean identity represented and re-imagined? And how is globalization itself to be defined in a Caribbean context?
Theories: What is the role of theory in defining the Caribbean and/or its relationship to the globalized world? To what extent are distinctions between indigenous theories and foreign borrowings relevant?
Proposals are invited for both paper and panel sessions.
For individual papers:
Please submit an abstract (max. 250 words) including title, institutional affiliation and contact information.
For panel proposals:
Please submit a description of the topic to be addressed by the panel and short abstracts for each of the proposed papers along with contact details for all panel participants and the proposed chair.
Please send abstracts to: caribbeanglobalizations@googlemail.com
The deadline for submitting proposals and panels is: January 31st 2010
Notification: by 1 March 2010