CALL FOR PAPERS
Edited Volume
Just Below South:
Performing Intercultures in the Caribbean and the
Southern United States
“What will come out of there is like nothing one has
ever seen before,” wrote Derek Walcott of the
Caribbean world. This project will investigate the
unprecedented cultural performances that have emerged
and continue to emerge out of areas linked
historically by colonization and the slave trade, as
well as by migration, travel, and tourism. As recent
work on the culture of the Atlantic world such as
Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead (1996), and on
connections between Caribbean and U.S. literature in
George Handley’s Postslavery Literatures of the
Americas (2000), has vividly demonstrated, the
creative products of these histories tend to yield
their most powerful insights when read not in terms of
nation but in terms of region. We will build on these
kinds of arguments to address the Caribbean and U.S.
South as a distinctly regional interculture. The
collection will take research in this nascent area of
inquiry in a new direction by focusing specifically on
performance and performativity. Antonio Benitez-Rojo
suggests in The Repeating Island that the essence of
the Caribbean is performance; and the U.S. South, no
less a product of “the repeating island,” is likewise
a place that reveals itself in significant ways
through performance. We seek both essays focusing on
embodied performance—dance, music, staged and street
theater, and the performance of everyday life—and on
performance in or as literature. We welcome work on
canonical as well as less- or unknown
performers/writers/texts.
Potential topics and approaches include:
* Current and historical representations of
colonization
* Performance within tourist economies
* Ritual performance
* Textual and/or literary performativity
* New concepts of regionalism and nationalism
* Regionalized intersections of race, class, gender,
sexuality
* Expanding the discourse of postcolonial inquiry
* Rethinking concepts of modernity and postmodernity
* Caribbean and/or Southern Studies and the academy
One-page abstracts and a brief biography must be
submitted by September 30, 2002.
Editors:
Jessica Adams, The University of Michigan
Michael P. Bibler, Tulane University
Cecile Accilien, Portland State University
Please send submissions and/or questions to Jessica
Adams at jdevi@umich.edu.
===============================================
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
===============================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jul 31 2002 - 23:59:05 EDT