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The Caribbean and The Southern United States: Interrogating Contemporary Literary, and Cultural Connections

The Caribbean and The Southern United States: Interrogating Contemporary Literary, and Cultural Connections

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Jeanne Jégousso)

Call for Book Chapters

The Caribbean and The Southern United States: Interrogating Contemporary Literary, and Cultural Connections


            In 2020, Martinican author and filmmaker Fabienne Kanor published Louisiana, a novel taking in place in New Orleans ten years after hurricane Katrina, in which Nathan travels from Cameroon to Louisiana to find a long-lost uncle. From Governor Nicholls Street, located in the historic Tremé neighborhood, Kanor peruses the American South, its population, its culture, and its history. After travelling along the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and to the bayous in between, the young man come to the realization that “l’Amérique n’est pas un pays neuf, mais un vieux monde qui n’a jamais été lavé” [America is not a new country, but an old world that has never been cleaned] having lost his illusions and hopes about black America. 
Connected by the shared experience of the “plantation system” (in the words of Martinican author Édouard Glissant), the relationship between the Caribbean and the American South has been studied extensively from a historical perspective[1], and there has been some literary scholarship devoted to our understanding of the influences and connections in 19th and 20th century literature[2]. Furthermore, some studies have expanded their temporal boundaries but have been limited by linguistic barriers including the collective volumes of American Creoles: the Francophone Caribbean and the American South edited by Celia Britton or La Louisiane et les Antilles, une nouvelle région du monde edited by Alexandre Leupin and Dominique Aurélia. In the case of these collections, they include discussions of some of the more modern literary and cultural connections between the Caribbean and the American South, but are limited by a French speaking network. 
            Our goal with this collection is to expand on the existing ideas of the “circumCaribbean” by welcoming presentations analyzing the literary and cultural connections between the American South and the Caribbean from the late 20th/21st centuries, regardless of linguistic boundaries.


Some questions to consider: 
·      Since the late 20th century, how do authors from the Spanish, Dutch, English, French, Kreyol speaking Caribbean write about their relationships with their neighbors in the southern U.S.? 
·      How do authors from the southern United States understand and represent the Caribbean in their literary works? 
·      How do American or Caribbean works and practices continue to illustrate the famous motto that New Orleans is “the northmost city of the Caribbean”? 
·      How are the contemporary relationships between the Caribbean and the American South studied in the classroom? 
·      What cross-cultural connections can we see emerging in works of literature by authors from the southern U.S. and the Caribbean? 
 
Proposals in English from cultural anthropology, musicology, arts, history, and any other relevant field are also welcome.
 
Schedule:

May 15th, 2023: due date to send 300–500-word abstracts to Emily O’Dell (eodell[a]mcnese.edu) and Jeanne Jégousso (jegoussoj[a]hollins.edu)
October 1st, 2023: due date for final chapters of 6000-7000 words (including notes and bibliography)
Expected to be published in Fall 2024

[1] Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society by Cécile Vidal, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences by Nathalie Dessens, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery by Rebecca J. Scott, Atlantic environments and the American South edited by Thomas Earle and D. Andrew Johnson, and Spanish New Orleans and the Caribbean by Alfred E. Lemmon, to name a few
 
[2] Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature by John Wharton Lowe, Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South edited by Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler, and Cécile Accilien, Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White by George B. Handley