Book – Release
Writing in the Key of Life is the first critical collection devoted to the British-Caribbean author Caryl Phillips, a major voice in contemporary anglophone literatures.

Caryl Phillips Writing in the Key of Life

Edited by Bénédicte Ledent & Daria Tunca

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2012. XXI, 441 pp. (Cross/Cultures 146)

ISBN: 978-90-420-3455-6                                 Bound €92,-/US$124,-

ISBN: 978-94-012-0740-9                                 E-Book €83,-/US$112,-

With 30% discount until April 15th, 2012, €64,-/US$87,-

Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CC+146

Writing in the Key of Life is the first critical collection devoted to the British-Caribbean author Caryl Phillips, a major voice in contemporary anglophone literatures. Phillips’s impressive body of fiction, drama, and non-fiction has garnered wide praise for its formal inventiveness and its incisive social criticism as well as its unusually sensitive understanding of the human condition.

The twenty-six contributions offered here, including two by Phillips himself, address the fundamental issues that have preoccupied the writer in his now three-decades-long career – the enduring legacy of history, the intricate workings of identity, and the pervasive role of race, class, and gender in societies worldwide.

Most of Phillips’s writing is covered here, in essays that approach it from various thematic and interpretative angles. These include the interplay of fact and fiction, Phillips’s sometimes ambiguous literary affiliations, his long-standing interest in the black and Jewish diasporas, his exploration of Britain and its ‘Others’, and his recurrent use of motifs such as masking and concealment.

Writing in the Key of Life testifies to the vitality of Phillipsian scholarship and confirms the significance of an artist whose concerns, at once universal and topical, find particular resonance with the state of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Heidelberg: The interdisciplinary conference
12 – 14 April 2012
“’Wid mi riddim, wid mi rime’: Cultural Flows in Caribbean and South Asian Diasporic Poetry and Performance”

Further information, in the menbership-area.

Membership area:

The interdisciplinary conference “’Wid mi riddim, wid mi rime’: Cultural Flows in Caribbean and South Asian Diasporic Poetry and Performance” seeks to explore the significance pertaining to cultural flows in contemporary British and North American poetry written by authors of Caribbean or South-Asian origins. It is the first to approach these issues from a comparatist perspective, which promises important new insights. For this purpose, the narrow definition of ‘poetry’ will be broadened to include related aesthetic forms like dub poetry, performance or popular music. The 18 conference papers in the panels Musical and Poetic Forms, Performance and Diaspora, Negotiating Gender, Heritage and Cultural Memory, Form, Poetics and the Canon will focus on three guiding questions: How do postcolonial lyrical forms of the Caribbean and South-Asian diaspora(s) relate to national canons? To what extent do these forms share overarching features of cultural exchange? In what ways do they embrace hybridity in terms of language, images and genre, and which functions does this hybridity fulfil? In this context, the conscious selection of junior and senior researchers from different disciplines, cultures and countries is designed to overcome the limitations of national academic discourses and Eurocentric, neo-colonialist views on Caribbean and South Asian cultural expressions. A public round table discussion and a poetry reading by South Asian British poet Daljit Nagra will make the topic accessible to a wider audience from both inside and outside academia.

Organized by Dr. Anne Brüske (Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg), Dr. Caroline Lusin (English Department, Heidelberg)

Main Location: Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg, Hauptstraße 242, 69117 Heidelberg

GB: Annual Conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies 2012

Wednesday 4th to Friday 6th July 2012 +++ University of Oxford
For further information, see in the Internal Blog. (Link)

UK: Annual Conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies 2012
Wednesday 4th to Friday 6th July 2012
Rewley House and Kellogg College
University of Oxford

Further information and registration access: http://www.caribbeanstudies.org.uk/conference/nextConference.htm

For further queries please contact the Conference Coordinator, Lorna Burns, at societyforcaribbeanstudies@gmail.com.

The 44th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians will be held in Willemstad, Curaçao from Sunday, May 13 to Friday, May 18, 2012. Registration will open on Sunday afternoon and sessions begin Monday morning.
Link to the Homepage

VIENNA, AUSTRIA, JULY 15 – 20, 2012

Call for Papers: http://ica2012.univie.ac.at/call-for-papers

More Information, see in the Info-Blog.

ICA 2012 Vienna !!!

Info-Blog:

«BUILDING DIALOGUES IN THE AMERICAS»
VIENNA, AUSTRIA, JULY 15 – 20, 2012

http://ica2012.univie.ac.at/home/

Symposion 14: Social and Cultural Anthropology / Antropología Social y Cultural / Antropologia social e cultural
Chair/ Responsable / Responsável: Elke Mader
WS 1648 – Between Grotesque and Gorgeous: Postcolonial Representations of the Black Body in the Americas
Convener: Davis- Sulikowski Ulrike Universität Wien
Co-Convener: Khittel, Stefan (Institut für Internationale Entwicklung)

The Black body in the Americas has been repressed, instrumentalized, and represented in innumerable ways since Africans have forcibly been brought to the shores of the Americas . Black bodies have been abhorred, marvelled, demonized, exoticized, and admired. The 19th century was marked by the independence of Haiti and the abolition of slavery, the 20th century lead to civil rights for African Americans, decolonization of most English colonies in the Caribbean, Black resistance movements and an ever increasing visibility of Black people in public spaces throughout the Americas . The 21st century has seen the first Black President of the United States . Despite obvious political progress during the postcolonial period, the representations of the Black body draw on ancient prejudices, colonial images, and contemporary fears. The gangster, the junkie, the prostitute are but a small sample. Nevertheless, ever more often positive associations are also represented: the athlete, the beauty queen, or – the president. Postcolonial approaches have engaged with yet other interpretations of the body – based on Bakhtin and Fanon the body has become a prominent focus of debates on resistance and representation. The pivotal function of ‘the gaze’, intrinsically linked to the infamous double of repulsion and desire, has received particular attention in contemporary research on the body as in the works of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, Achille Mbembe and many others in their discourse on hegemonic strategies and counter-hegemonic struggles. In this panel we want to engage in a lively, interdisciplinary debate on historic and contemporary forms of representations of the Black body, be they based on empirical ethnographic and archival research, or cinematographic, musicological or in general visual analysis. We also welcome theoretical contributions to this topic.