Date: Fri, 04 Sep 98 12:45:13 PDT


CALL FOR PAPERS				Journal of Caribbean Literatures

The French Caribbean: Migrations and Métissages

	In a certain sense, the very historical foundation of the French Antilles
can be located in several specific moments and movements of migration. From
the Amerindians who arrived from the South American continent, slaves
exported from Africa, European colonists, post-emancipation indentured
workers from Asia, to modern-day Middle-Eastern settlers and traders, the
Caribbean created from these diverse peoples a creole identity that
ceaselessly relocates the context of its own continuity. The region's
cross-cultural identity-structure, drawing on Catholic,
Protestant, Hindu, and Africanist religious influences as well as
pan-nationalist sociocultural movements such as Negritude, has transformed
these ethnocultural roots even as it looks toward the pluralism of a past
and a future grounded in a multiplicity of languages, ethnicities, and
cultures.
	Writers and theoreticians like Edouard Glissant, Raphaël Confiant and
Patrick Chamoiseau have effectively interrogated the notion of identity
from the perspective of these Caribbean complexities, underlining the
principal patterns etched by history and place in their articulations of
"Creoleness" and "Caribbeanness." Continued migratory exchanges between the
French Antilles and France open up new sites of interrogation and
circulation even as the DOM/TOM are increasingly integrated into the EU and
a third of the French Caribbean population finds its home in the metropole.
At the same time, as the neighboring anglophone Caribbean islands
strengthen their own regional integrationist ties, celebrating the 25th
anniversary of the Caribbean Economic Community (CARICOM) in 1998 and the
launching of the Associated Caribbean States(ACS) in 1994 -- the latter
moment marked by France's refusal to permit their territories any more than
observer status -- the fluid, fragile ties that bind these regional axes
together appear increasingly evanescent.
	How, then, have French West Indians been able to reinvent their vision of
identity in the light of the intricacies of this second Atlantic passage?
What are the implications of the persistent geopolitical paradox that turns
the Caribbean DOMs into fragmented European territories? To what extent do
the structure and use of creole languages reflect and refine what
"Creoleness" means in and to the region? Given the determinants of distance
and place, and the constant circulation of the community made possible by
modern technology, how does the new metropolitan "third island" settle on
functional terms of self-definition that go beyond such pejorative
neologisms as "négropolitain" while addressing the resultant re-siting of
European identities? How is a sense of "Caribbean" identity shaped,
redefined, or even undone by the divisions maintained between francophone
and anglophone areas of the region and the ongoing domination of the DOMs
by Europe? Is our understanding of "Creoleness" mapped onto a specifically
Caribbean terrain, or must it ultimately incorporate these new patterns of
cultural métissage spawned in and by the diaspora?
	The articles that will appear in this special issue of JCL will
interrogate issues of identity, "ex-île", and representation in French
Antillean literature and critical discourse, including such related
questions as the destabilizing role of the metropolitan media and the
economic effect of French-dominated labor conditions, export-import
inequalities, unemployment and the minimum wage, and the elements of
cultural contestation (use of creole, music, dance, theater, repatriation
of immigrants, (re)definitions of "Creoleness" and "Caribbeanness") engaged
by these geopolitical phenomena. 

Five-hundred word abstracts should be submitted in French or English by
November 1, 1998.

to 
Pascale De Souza			or 		Adlai Murdoch	
Language Studies Center				French Departement
SAIS Johns Hopkins University			Univ. of Illinois-Urbana
1619 Massachussets Ave. N.W.			2090 FLB
Washington DC 20036-2213				707 S. Mathews
tel: 202 663 5758					Urbana Il 61801
fax 202 663 5764					fax: 217 244 2223
email: desouza-AT-comm-plus.net			email: hmurdoch-AT-ux1.cso.uicu.edu


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