Call for Papers

Creole Formations: Constellations of Créolité in Haitian Contexts

Call for Papers
Creole Formations: Constellations of Créolité in Haitian Contexts
Journal of Caribbean Literatures

We invite scholars and Haitian writers to contribute original articles and literary work to Creole Formations: Constellations of Créolité in Haitian Contexts, a special issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Caribbean Literatures that aims to inspire and convene a pluridisciplinary conversation on the processes, practices, representation, theory, and aesthetics of Creole, Créolité, and Creolization in the formations of Haitian literary, cultural, political, and linguistic landscapes. Our vision of Haiti and Haitian Studies is a broad one that branches beyond geopolitical borders to encompass the Diaspora and comparative transnational perspectives.

We ask contributors to consider the following key questions: how does Creole figure in complex constellations of identity, identification, and affiliation for Haitians and people of Haitian decent? How do works of literature, art, music, and other cultural forms represent Haitian Creole, Creoleness, and Creolization? To what aims and ends? In what ways do understandings and embodiments of Creoleness perform formative work to assemble and solidify groups and structures in Haitian society and Diasporic contexts? For, with, and/or against whom do these formations work?

Additional guiding questions for this issue include:

  • In what ways are individual and community relationships to Creole and Creoleness tied to (or unhinged from) other identity formations and hierarchies of power, privilege, and value, such as class, color, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and citizenship and statehood?
  • How do theories and practices of Créolité clash and/or converge in Haitian contexts?
  • How do theories of Creoleness form the basis and impetus for political movements and mobilization in Haiti? How are these ideas represented or enacted in politically engaged literary and artistic works? How do they emerge in performance practices such as dance? How do they figure in Haitian political discourse at home and abroad?
  • How do authors, artists, and taste makers such as bloggers and fashion figures articulate and deploy concepts of Creole aesthetics? To what effects?
  • How have the parameters of the Creole category and language shifted through time and space?
  • Who are the gatekeepers of this category? Who stakes claim to Creoleness, on what grounds, and why? How do works of art and literature grapple with the shifting and often contested territory of Creole identity?
  • What are the roles of Haitian Creole in the content and form of diglossic literary texts?
  • What has motivated the global circulation of Creole mythologies rooted in outside imaginaries of Haiti, Haitians, and Afro-syncretic cultural, spiritual, or linguistic domains of creolization such as Vodou and the Creole language? What have been the characteristics, patterns, modes, spheres, and effects of the dissemination of these mythologies?

We also welcome:

  • any and all articles on Creole-language literature
  • original literary works (poems, short fiction, and personal essays) that explore these themes in Kreyòl, French, and/or English
  • essays on the politics and practice of translation of literature to and from Kreyòl
  • original interviews with authors who write some or all their work in Kreyòl

We invite contributions of academic articles as well as original poetry or short works of fiction or personal nonfiction relevant to the topics at hand. While historically the Journal of Caribbean Literatures is primarily a literary journal, we recognize the richness of multiple literacies in Haiti beyond textual literary production and readership and thus invite submissions addressing this range of topics from various disciplinary approaches to Haitian Studies, including but not limited to cultural studies, art history, dance and performance studies, film studies, religious studies, musicology, anthropology and ethnography, linguistics, and translation. We also welcome submissions that consider Haiti from circum-Caribbean, Atlantic, Diasporic, and other transnational perspectives.

Submission Guidelines: Article submissions should be no longer than 6,000 words and adhere to the current Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). We will accept article submissions in English or Kreyòl, and literary works and interviews of up to 3,000 words in English, Kreyòl, or French. French and Kreyòl submissions will be translated into English for bilingual publication. Questions and abstracts for preview are welcome up to two weeks before the final submission deadline.

For full consideration, please send complete articles as Microsoft Word documents to creoleformations@gmail.com by June 30, 2017. Please provide your contact information and institutional affiliation in the body of your email. Those selected for inclusion in the issue
will be informed by July 31, 2017. Publication of the issue is planned for Spring 2018.

Guest Editor: K. Adele Okoli, Assistant Professor of French, African and African American Studies, and Gender Studies, University of Central Arkansas Kreyòl Language Editor: Jacques Pierre, Co-Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Haiti Lab and Lecturer in Haitian Creole and Creole Studies, Duke University Under the direction of Chief Editor Maurice A. Lee, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Central Arkansas.

For questions in English, French, or Kreyòl, please contact the guest editor of this issue, Dr. K. Adele Okoli, at creoleformations@gmail.com or kokoli@uca.edu. Pou moun ki gen kèsyon sou atik oubyen zèv literati an kreyòl ayisyen, pa ezite kontakte editè edisyon espesyal la, Dr. K. Adele Okoli oubyen editè soumisyon an kreyòl, Jak Pyè: creoleformations@gmail.com.