This special forum explores the recent challenges to the field of American Studies from within the field of Caribbean Studies.
Arguably the Caribbean constitutes the original “Americas”: it is, as Junot Díaz reminds us, the “ground zero” of the hemisphere. Yet institutional academic segregation continues to produce distinct provinces of “Latin America and the Caribbean” and “North America.”
Such a conceptual division of the continent continues to haunt and often vitiate some of the most admirable scholarly achievements identified with the “imperial” and “transnational” turns in Western scholarship. Over two decades after 1989, this proposed forum aims to set aside the insecure Cold War three worlds frame that obscures historic commensurabilities across the hemisphere.
Answering the call to reflect on the powerful effects of “geopolitical strategies and discourses,” the special forum aims to represent a Caribbeanist initiative toward transgressing a kind of conceptual color line that has maintained an exception of mainland U.S. from its hemispheric situation ever since the onset of postwar ideological conflict naturalized as a “Cold War.”
Topics may range widely, from intra-Caribbean relations or social movements to Black Stardom or New World intellectual geographies and genealogies, but each essay should aim, whether implicitly or explicitly, to undermine the conceit of containing the U.S. as part of a First World/ North Atlantic society somehow historically more “modern” than the rest of “Third World” nuestra America.
A brief abstract of 250 words or less should be submitted to the editors by May 18, and a final essay of no more than 7000 words should be submitted by August 20, 2012.
Please send all materials and queries to co-editors Belinda Edmondson and Donette Francis at specialforumcaribbean@gmail.com.
Information supplied by PRSA member Aldo Lauria Santiago, Rutgers University.
