This seminar explores Caribbean practices of freedom within contexts of constraint, from historical and present-day forms of grand and petit marronage to community movements of protest, and the yard/lakou as organic artistic crucible and institutionalized collective. Caribbean writers and critics describe, analyze, rehearse, and consecrate the ingenuity of Caribbean people historically, during colonial practices of physical bondage, forced migration, plantation confinement, as well as contemporary conditions of capitalist conversion, intellectual and artistic labor that is devalued and stolen in turn, and individual possibilities of expression and creativity despite environmental collapse, eroded institutions, and neo-colonial political action. How do the prevailing and novel pressures and threats to speech, thought, and creation shape or suggest new forms or strategies of endurance? This seminar investigates the literary and artistic resourcefulness and improvisation that has ensured material and spiritual thriving in the region alongside past and recent obstacles to freedom.

In this fourth iteration of “Going Beyond the Literary" at ACLA, we propose to establish a space within ACLA for Caribbean studies and arts. The literary scholar of the Caribbean must work across multiple languages of empire, so that European, Creole, Amerindian, and ancestral Asian and African languages constantly circulate, regenerate, and reflect intersecting histories, migrations, and creative vocabularies. Meanwhile Caribbean literary production is in dynamic interchange with performance arts, visual arts, music, ritual. We thus investigate how a range of discourses and art forms, interdisciplinary, multi-modal, and multilingual, generate comparative methodologies from the Caribbean context. From theories of intercultural contact like creolization, tracing patterns of economic, social, and cultural repetition, and uncovering palimpsests of indigenous, ancestral, and modern ecologies of creation, survival, and rejuvenation, the shared regional concerns inflected by local histories of the Caribbean offer a crucial contribution to broader practices of comparative literature.  

To investigate how Caribbean philosophers, artists, and writers engage creating practices of freedom in spaces of constraint, we especially welcome contributions from scholars in all disciplines and papers that are focused on :

-practices of embedding social transformation with ecology;

-movements and art work that seek to protect communities from economic displacement;

-creation of forums for the flourishing of local languages;

-political and protest practices that inventively block, use, and transform spaces of enclosure, control, and surveillance. 

-chronicles and testimonial genres of recording and disseminating practices of creation and resistance.

-writing as material practices of illumination–notes and fragments, textile semiotics, weaving, assembling, foraging.