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Caribbean Globalizations

Caribbean Globalizations

Publié le par Marielle Macé (Source : Richard Scholar)

<!>Call for Papers / Appel à contributions

Caribbean Globalizations: Histories, Cultures and Genres, 1493 to the Present Day

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 an international conference on Caribbean Globalizations, from September 27th-29th 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 Caribbean region, 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 have 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 new deadline for submitting proposals and panels is: January 31st 2010

Notification: by 1 March 2010