Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature

Dear Colleagues,

The Caribbean’s literary practice inhabits multiple intersectional postcolonialities, having material touchpoints with Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, the rest of the Americas, the African diaspora elsewhere, and of course, Western Europe and the indigenous peoples of the hemisphere whether still living or long eradicated. This is an intersectionality that results from the Caribbean’s founding as a cataclysmic meeting point between several major world cultures, and the region’s subsequent unrolling as home to multiple diasporas that are at once heterogeneously integrated, and still engaged in an ongoing process of decolonial self–determination and self- making.  To borrow words from Wilson Harris, we might call  this ongoing process an ‘unfinished genesis’ of the ‘arts of the imagination’.

 The Caribbean’s imaginative response to its environment and the historical ‘legacy’  of colonialism is characteristically activist in intention. At one level we see an attempt to articulate the politics, poetics and aesthetics of revolution and self-determination in the face of ongoing structures of repression, whether overtly or covertly colonial, or otherwise.  Yet at another, we may trace a continuing thread of self-referentiality (a self-speaking rather than an answering back), and, beyond this, a movement towards epistemologies of the self and the human that predate or transcend the boundaries of history constructed as a movement of past, present and future time. Among the imaginative practices that drive such decolonial and self-speaking projects we may count the range of spiritualist and cross-genre arts practiced and promulgated by writer-theorists throughout the region and its extra-regional diasporas. We count as well, collaborations by writers and other activists across language zones that divide the region, and across global and regional diasporas. Above all is the extraordinary fluidity of the literature in its ongoing quest for languages sufficient to the weight of recovery and consequential response.

This concept of the unfinished genesis of the arts of the imagination drives the call for papers under the main phrase ‘Rise of a New World’ with ‘Caribbean Literature and Postcolonialism’ as a secondary moniker. Our use of the secondary moniker signals Caribbean writers’ ‘quarrel with history’ (Edward Baugh) –in this context the insufficiency of ‘postcolonialism’ as a singular concept to describe the diverse and shifting, mainly indigenous lenses, through which Caribbean cultural-literary discourse addresses space, time and ontological experience. ‘Rise of a New World’ acknowledges the ways the region’s writers, writer-theorists, scholars, and other activists have conceived the Caribbean across and beyond borders, whether created by imperial, colonial or postcolonial regimes.  ‘Rise of a new world’ indicates Caribbean literary poetics as an active political response to local, regional and global currents that are materially impacting Caribbean lives.

This special issue addresses the ways contemporary Caribbean writers and other cultural workers have responded to the conjunctural crises of the globalizing present, such as: ecological catastrophe; the rise of new surveillance machineries; terrorism and its relation to histories of trauma and loss; border imperialism and inter/intra im/migration cataclysms.  Of particular interest is the increasing emphasis on cross-genre arts, spiritualisms, futures past, and the unsettling of concepts of diaspora in the literature. A focus on theorizations and critical interventions through which this literature has been interpreted is also of interest. 

 We invite papers on contemporary Caribbean literature that address but are not limited to the following:

• Eco-critical interventions: natural disasters, forest struggles, seas, rivers, canals, toxic waste, the commodification of the natural world
• Tourism: fragile economies, vulnerable ecologies, sex trade and human trafficking
• Surveillance: New and historical surveillance machineries; gang warfare; new media; social media; the internet
• Im/migration: nationalisms and border imperialism; emerging diasporas; demographic exchange and the economics of globalization
• Breakup of nation states
• Terrorism, trauma and loss: mourning in the aftermath of catastrophe; de/sacralized   universes; spiritual wastelands
• Neo-slave narratives and the poetics of horror
• Haiti in the Caribbean imaginary
• Dutch Caribbean literature
• Spiritual crossings: Caribbean futures past; ‘other’ territories of the human; mythopoetics
• New Caribbean collaborations: book clubs, reading groups, journals, cross- disciplinary and cross-diasporan conversations
• Genre crossings: literature, theory, music, popular culture, the visual and performing arts
• Theories of crossing: tidalectics; black and burning beaches and open boats; continents of black consciousness; relationalities; creolizations; indigenizations; repeating islands; silences that break; maps that move
• Spaces of resistance and revolution: mangroves, kitchen tables, streets, street theaters, new languages; the archive and the counter archive
• Sexualities, genders and interrogations of traditional family
• Indigenous and unrepresented presence

Dr. Curdella Forbes
Dr. Kezia Page
Guest Editors

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• Caribbean literature
• postcolonialism
• crises of the globalizing present
• multiple diasporas
• decolonial self-determination
• rise of a new world