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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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