Call for Papers

Caribbean literature and popular culture have benefitted from technological innovations that facilitate the production, distribution, and consumption of literary and cultural texts. Critical and scholarly inquiry has been renewed by the expansion of canonical and archival possibilities. Digital archives have been established, such as the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC www.dloc.com) and the Caribbean Film Database. Digital access to Caribbean literary and cultural journals has been extended via mainstream academic databases such as Proquest, Project Muse, and JSTOR, online literary magazines and blogs, and the sale of Caribbean texts through online booksellers. The explosion of social media constitutes a new site of archival production. As the editors of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature observe, digital technologies enable "the extension of the Caribbean literary archive in both chronological directions at once." Art forms such as film, theatre, music, dance, and fashion also benefit from this archival expansion. Access to a globalized Caribbean literary and cultural archive also generates new critical, theoretical, practical and ethical questions for critics, historians, and archivists regarding the sites of cultural production, consumption, and interpretation.

The 35th Annual West Indian Literature Conference highlights the significance of the archive in Caribbean literary and cultural studies. We invite papers that explore the centrality of the archive in Caribbean literature, and the conceptual, practical, spatial, and technological aspects of archival projects.

Papers might examine the following issues:

Archival Politics, Theories, and Methods
The Body as Archive
Digital Archiving and Caribbean Literature and Culture
Culture, Memory, and the Archive
Literary Archives and Publishing
Cultural Institutions and the Archive
Digital Caribbean 2.0: Social Media and the Caribbean Cultural Archive
Archives, Libraries, Exhibitions, Festivals
Creative Industries and the Archives
Archiving the Caribbean Diaspora
Vernacular Archives
Sound Archives
Visual Archives

Abstracts should not exceed 250 words in length, and should include a title, name, status and institutional affiliation of the presenter(s), a contact email address, and a mailing address. Please also let us know if you require any special equipment. Papers will be a maximum of twenty (20) minutes in length.
Abstracts or proposals for panels comprising three papers should be emailed by June 1, 2016 to westindianlitconference@gmail.com.

______________________________
1 Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell. "Introduction." The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature. London & New York: Routledge, 2011, xxiii.