Call for Contributions, Extended:
“Masculinities in Caribbean Literature and Culture”
Due to the overwhelming early response to their earlier call for papers for the Journal of West Indian Literature, Michael A. Bucknor (University of the West Indies-Mona) and Ian Bethell-Bennett (College of the Bahamas) have decided to dedicate a double issue of the journal to their special issue on “Masculinities in Caribbean Literature and Culture.” The issue has been re-scheduled for November 2012 with a new deadline for submission of full articles on May 31, 2012. They ask potential contributors to confirm their interest in this publication by sending an abstract by January 15, 2012.
Description: In spite of the growing significance of issues of masculinities in gender and other interdisciplinary studies, publications on the role of masculinities in Caribbean culture have been modest in literary and cultural studies. Curdella Forbes points out that it was not until the appearance of works “such as Belinda Edmondson’s Making Men (1999)… that major discussions of the subject appeared” in Caribbean literary criticism (From Nation to Diaspora 2). In Anglophone Caribbean cultural studies, it is primarily music that has attracted gendered analyses that focus on masculinities. While there have been some discussions linking masculinities and sexualities, masculinities and education, and masculinities and socialization, and there have been inter-disciplinary collections of essays that engage masculinities, the range of artistic modes that contribute to masculinities discourse is still to be explored.
This Special Issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature invites multiple readings of gender that underscore the role of masculinities in a range of literary and cultural expressions in the Caribbean. Against the background of studies of the social construction, performance, interrogation and political posturing of hegemonic masculinities, we ask for explorations of some leading questions: Have the depictions of male characters changed over the last five decades or so from Naipaul, Lamming, and Lovelace to such contemporary writers as Junot Díaz, Kei Miller, Anton Nimblett, and what ideological agendas have been served by these depictions? Is there a relationship between migration/diaspora and revised Caribbean masculinities? Of what significance is the geo-political world of the family, the community, work and leisure to the construction of Caribbean masculinities? To what extent has the role of the Caribbean male been altered by modernity and postmodernity, late-capitalism, late-postcolonialism, globalisation or neo-liberalism? These and similar questions are issues this JWIL publication endeavours to highlight.
For additional information, see previous post Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature and contact the co-editors at the following:
Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett (School of English Studies, College of the Bahamas, Oakes Field, P. O. Box N 4912, Nassau, The Bahamas) at bethellbennett@gmail.com
Dr. Michael A. Bucknor (Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston 7, Jamaica) at michael.bucknor@uwimona.edu.jm
[The image included here is by Colombian artist Johanna Calle from her series Submergentes: A Drawing Approach to Masculinities (at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California). See http://www.molaa.org/Interview-Johanna-Calle.aspx ]