CfP: “The Caribbean, melting pot of the Americas”

St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

October 13-15, 2016

The Department of Modern Language and Linguistics (DMLL) of The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus (Trinidad and Tobago), and the Centre d’Études linguistiques et littéraires Francophones et Africaines (CELFA) of the Université Bordeaux Montaigne (France) present the International Conference on “The Caribbean, melting pot of the Americas: From upheaval and ‘origins’ to the historical future and its representations”. This Conference takes place on Thursday 13 – Saturday 15 October 2016.

The Caribbean area is a not a static, singular and homogenous enclave, but a heterogeneous, dynamic and permeable entity, which constitutes a “melting pot” caught up in a Brownian motion, a macro-cultural context blended in a mosaic of divergence and convergence. The authors of Éloge de la Créolité stress this clearly: “Our History is a braid of histories. We had a taste of all kinds of languages, all kinds of idioms.” Moreover, their intention is to express “A kaleidoscopic totality, that is to say, the non-totalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversity”. Also, it could be possible that given the modalities of its make-up and the historical processes involved, the Caribbean might be an open specificity whereby constructions of identity and being are conceived singularly and collectively. This conference will allow participants to re-examine the relationship between the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe: in history, the imaginary, the cultures, in the fantasy world of the subjects and in the collective ‘unconscious’. Moreover, it will lead them to delve into the ‘region’s’ multi-cultural social structures, envisaged as a laboratory of American ‘modernity’, and not as a margin or a disinherited annex to it.

We invite proposals in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese (and also Creole) for single papers to full panels (composed of at least 3 papers) on the themes of the conference and on the following non-exhaustive list of topics:

– Fragmentations imposed by history and colonial heritage

– Creoleness/creolisation

– Theoreticians of Caribbean culture and identity (Chamoiseau, Glissant, Brathwaite, Benitez-Rojo)

– The Caribbean and questions of domination/emancipation of populations, the struggle of social classes and the ‘battle of the sexes’

– Caribbean cinema

– The effects of globalization

– Economic advantages in the Caribbean area

– Strategies for evolving towards a consolidated regional ‘integration’

– Intra-Caribbean politics and the opening up of the Caribbean to the world

The deadline for proposals is January 15, 2015. Please submit proposals to caribconf2016@gmail.com.

Contributors will be notified by March 15, 2015.

For further information, please contact: Savrina Chinien at savrina.chinien@sta.uwi.edu or Jean-Michel Devésa at jmdevesa@free.fr.

Sources: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=217908 and http://sta.uwi.edu/news/notices/notice.asp?id=2363