Here’s a name for submissions for a forthcoming quantity edited by Christopher L. Ballengee and Darrell Gerohn Baksh: Past Arrival: Performing Indianness within the Caribbean. The deadline for submission of proposals is April 1, 2023.
We invite proposals for chapters for the edited quantity Past Arrival: Performing Indianness within the Caribbean. Proposals ought to embrace: 1) an summary of round 400 phrases that clearly signifies how the proposed essay pertains to a number of themes of the amount, and a pair of) a present C.V. Learn beneath for extra particulars in regards to the undertaking and for particulars relating to submission.
Between 1838 and 1917, the British transported thousands and thousands of indentured laborers from Asian colonies to work in agriculture and business world wide. Most of those had been recruited from India. Although assured free passage again to India after ten years of commercial residence within the colonies, the bulk as an alternative settled completely within the locations they had been despatched to work. At this time, descendants of those Indian migrants make up important populations in former websites of indenture world wide, particularly within the Caribbean.
Whereas analysis on the historic motivations and socio-political legacy of Indian indenture has steadily elevated in current a long time, surprisingly little of this work has centered on deep analyses of the humanities as a essential website for the expression of particular person, cultural, nationwide, and transnational identities. As such, Past Arrival: Performing Indianness within the Caribbean gives much-needed perception on this regard. The amount will function a set of essays on Indian Caribbean music, movie, dance, theatre, and visible artwork that work to explain and critique the place of Indian post-indenture artistic expression throughout the still-creolizing contexts of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Past Arrival facilities very particularly on the efficiency of Indianness in foregrounding social, cultural, political, and inventive points surrounding Indian Caribbean identification.
The title of the undertaking is drawn from the opening line of Patricia Mohammed’s essay on this quantity. She writes, “Indians have progressed far past the nostalgic sentiments of arrival, of newness to a panorama, of that tentative political declare to belonging to a nation.” Right here Mohammed laments what she sees as a preoccupation with “Indian arrival” within the Caribbean. For instance, Indian Arrival Day is rightly celebrated as a public vacation in Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and different Caribbean locales. But, as Mohammed suggests, this reification of arrival paradoxically reinforces Indianness as international, as solely having arrived, and due to this fact excluded from the Caribbean previous, current, and future.
With this quantity, we wish to reevaluate Caribbean artistic expression as we additionally re-vision the Indian post-indenture diaspora as a transnational, archipelagic community of former websites of indenture sure extra to at least one one other than to a distant, largely imagined Indian homeland. With this in thoughts, the amount goals towards critiques of creolization, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism—ideas typically utilized to analyses of Caribbean tradition—whereas within the course of affirming that notions of “Indianness” needn’t be tied to an ambiguous craving for India however as an alternative are sometimes squarely fastened to diasporic cultural practices.
To be thought of for inclusion within the quantity, authors ought to submit chapter proposals no later than 1 April 2023. As soon as notified of acceptance, authors ought to submit full chapter drafts by 1 September 2023.
Chapter proposals must be emailed to christopherballengee@gmail.com and embrace 1) an summary of round 400 phrases that clearly signifies how the proposed essay pertains to a number of themes of the amount, and a pair of) a present C.V.
For extra info, see https://networks.h-net.org/node/2720/discussions/12287830/call-chapters-beyond-arrival-performing-indianness-caribbean
[Shown above: Renluka Maharaj’s “Neo Dorado,” 2021. See the artist’s work at https://www.renluka.com/. Also watch her video at https://www.caribbeancollectivemag.com/history/indianarrivalday ]