This seminar explores how Caribbean methods of comparison – multi-modal, multi-lingual, and interdisciplinary – make common cause with other comparative fields. “Going Beyond the Literary I & II" highlighted the interdisciplinarity of Caribbean studies by productively complicating literary analyses through ethnographic, linguistic, historical, artistic, performance, or spiritual materials and approaches. These seminars participated robustly in the field's efforts to devise and describe new epistemologies, new language, new methodologies, and new models for Caribbean studies while attending in particular to critical questions raised by the literary. “Going Beyond the Literary III” continues this work and seeks to build on it by forging connections with other comparative fields throughout the humanities, arts, and social sciences. 

From Sylvia Wynter, to Edouard Glissant, to Roque Salas-Rivera, Caribbean philosophy and poetics are formed with reflections on ritual, dance, rhythm, and visual art. In order to attend to its physical, cultural, and geopolitical environment, including indigenous, ancestral, and syncretic cultural and spiritual forms, the literary scholar of the Caribbean must often demonstrate (inter)disciplinary agility in criticism that can engage the ubiquitous extra-literary aspects of Caribbean writing.

Building on a tradition of comparative Caribbean scholarship, what vocabularies can we continue to develop for "going beyond the literary" to the oral, the embodied, the visual, the historical, the spiritual and the cultural? In what ways can this grounding in other fields expand or interrogate the literary through engagement with local modes of historiography, philosophy, theology, linguistics, or theory?  

To address these questions, we invite contributions from scholars in all disciplines that

-deepen interdisciplinary scholarship of Caribbean visual art, literary, music, new media, and performance works; 

-work with Caribbean methodologies as they inflect and travel with other comparative disciplines, particularly Indigenous, Ethnic-American, Queer, Disability Studies;

-explore how Caribbean arts, literature, and other cultural forms might generate strategies of comparison, appreciation, dialogue, and thought that demand more attentive, grounded, embodied, or place-based study than a single discipline’s training alone could have.