CfP: Represent, Rename, Recall:
Collective Memory
in Caribbean Literature
Session 15969 at the 47th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA)
Hartford, CT
March 17 to 20, 2016
Derek Walcott has designated the sea as history. Caribbean writers have been turning to the past for no less than a hundred years, but contemporary Caribbean artists are doing so anew and in ways that deeply interrogate the relationship between history, culture, and collective memory. Building on the work of poet Grace Nichols, collective memory is personal history. By providing a new perspective on collective memory as the blurry intersection of culture and knowledge, this NeMLa panel will examine how contemporary Anglo-, Franco-, and Hispanophone writers and artists respond to history and/or dominant narratives of the Caribbean. What is privileged as knowledge and what is relegated to collective memory? How is history remembered and reimagined by contemporary generations of Caribbean writers and artists? What silences or invisibilities does art reveal that a straight or ‘official’ history cannot? Collecting memories as narratives and creating fictional histories for those previously unspoken for or about, the panel seeks papers that consider the different ways literature, music, and/or visual art is utilized to unsilence the past, rewrite posterity, and re-imagine the Caribbean as a site of shared history as well as unique, cultural experiences.
The Caribbean is as much the site of shared history as it is the site of unique, cultural experiences. But what is privileged as knowledge, and what is relegated to collective memory? How is history remembered and reimagined by contemporary generations of Caribbean writers and artists? With these questions in mind, the panel will examine how Caribbean writers and artists attempt to unsilence the past, rewrite posterity, and re-imagine history as a way of exploring memory as the blurry intersection of culture and knowledge.
Session organizers:
Ines Rivera (University of Maryland), irivera@umd.edu
Isis Semaj-Hall (American University), semajin@gmail.com
Source / To submit an abstract: http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15969
Deadline: September 30, 2015
Our thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.
The quotation is from Lemony Snicket, whose lamentable adventures my very dear young friend Graham Reynolds (age 8) is devouring at the moment.