File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2002/postcolonial.0204, message 234


From: "Elizabeth DeLoughrey" <emd23-AT-cornell.edu>
Subject: CFP: Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 00:12:27 -0400


CFP: Edited Volume:
"Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture"

Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically
altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation and
settlement than the Caribbean. This unique and troubled history has caused
theorists such as Édouard Glissant to conclude that the dialectic between
Caribbean "nature" and "culture" has not been brought into productive
relation. Glissant determines that the Caribbean "landscape is its own
monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all
history."

Contributions are solicited for a forthcoming collection, provisionally
titled _Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and
Culture._ This edited volume will be the first to examine literary and
cultural narratives that engage with Caribbean, ecocritical and cultural
studies in all language areas of the region. We are interested in creating
a dialogue between the growing field of environmental literary studies,
which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and
Caribbean cultural production, especially the region's negotiation of
complex racial and ethnic legacies. This dynamic and at times violent
interaction of cultures in the Caribbean initially led to an embrace of the
idea of racial hybridity implied in the terms métissage and mestizaje, but
has more recently shifted away from synthesizing narratives to those that
examine both creolization and transculturation. Our objective is to bring
these fields together by exploring the ways in which the history of
transplantation and settlement has contributed to a sense of place and/or
an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.

We seek scholarly articles that explore the cultural relationship between
human and natural history in the Caribbean Americas or, in Glissant's
terms, texts that produce a "language of landscape." Because the Caribbean
has been so profoundly impacted by maritime colonization, particularly the
forced migration of African and Asian labour, we are equally concerned with
the ways in which the region's writers have responded to Derek Walcott's
suggestion that "the sea is history." By focusing on Caribbean literature,
understood in its broadest sense to include the major linguistic/ethnic
traditions, islands, and surrounding mainlands, this volume seeks to
address the following questions:

*In what ways do Caribbean texts engage with the cultural and (un)natural
consequences of plantation economies?
*In what ways are the literary cultures of the Caribbean shaped by the
region's ocean/geography?
*How has the region's literature responded to, mitigated, and/or contested
the growing impact of tourism and globalization?
*How do cultural texts define and address the chief environmental concerns
of today?
*How is the Caribbean environment re/membered in cultural production?
*How is "a sense of place" established in the wake of out-migration and
diaspora?
*How do Caribbean texts complicate and negotiate segregated spaces, such as
rural and urban environments?
*What is the relationship between "naturally" constructed spaces such as
parks, and other "natural" spaces?
*In what ways are Caribbean literary landscapes gendered, racialized,
creolized, and/or constructed as a "folk" spaces?
* How do the discourses of Négritude, Antillanité, and Créolité employ the
landscape as a means to preserve and recapture the past?
* What genealogies might be traced between national and post-national
narratives of land/seascape?
*In what ways do Caribbean literatures produce a regionalist imaginary,
and/or invoke Kamau Brathwaite's assertion that "the unity is submarine?"
*In what ways do literatures of land and/or seascape "indigenize" cultural
history?

In addition to scholarly engagements with the environment, this volume will
also include selected essays and interviews with prominent Caribbean
writers.

Abstracts of no more than one page and a bionote must be submitted by July
15, 2002. The deadline for submissions of completed essays is December 15,
2002, but decisions regarding inclusion in the volume will be based on a
review of the completed essays. Essays should be submitted in MLA format,
although minor editorial adjustment may be necessary.

Editors: Renée Gosson (Bucknell), George Handley (Brigham Young), Liz
DeLoughrey (Cornell)

Inquiries, abstracts, and essays should be sent to:

Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Cornell University
250 Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, NY 14850
emd23-AT-cornell.edu



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