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?
*What is the relationship between "naturally" constructed spaces such as
parks, and other places?
*In what ways are Caribbean literary landscapes gendered, racialized,
creolized, and/or constructed as "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 literatures of land and/or seascape "nativize" cultural
history?
In addition to scholarly engagements with the environment, this volume will
also include selected essays and interviews with prominent Caribbean
writers.
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.
Inquiries, abstracts, and essays should be sent to:
(Anglophone and Dutch):
Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Cornell University
250 Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, NY 14850 [emd23@cornell.edu]
(Francophone):
Renee K. Gosson
Assistant Professor of French
Dept. of Foreign Language Programs
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA 17837 [rgosson@bucknell.edu]
(Spanish and Portuguese):
George Handley
Associate Professor of Humanities
Coordinator, Latin American Studies
Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature
3010 JKHB Box 26118
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602-6118 [George_Handley@byu.edu]