Gender Based Violence in the Caribbean: Historical Roots, Contemporary Continuities

CALL FOR ESSAYS/ARTICLES EDITED VOLUME:

Gender Based Violence in the Caribbean: Historical Roots, Contemporary Continuities
Edited by Dalea Bean & Verene Shepherd

Since the 1990s, Gender-Based Violence (GBV) has been contextualized as one of the primary endemic developmental issues affecting the lives of Caribbean people. Physical, verbal, sexual, emotional and financial violence against persons as a result of prevailing harmful gender norms has been recognized by Caribbean feminist scholars as crippling, particularly to women and girls who face the brunt of GBV’s frontal assault. The contemporary situation is even more grim with rising cases of deadly violence against persons which are rooted in unequal power relations steeped in gender. However there exists no comprehensive academic text which delves deeply into the historical roots of these occurrences and frames them as a critical and deliberate part of the violent history of the region. European contact with the region was deliberately curated in violence. Mass slaughter of the Indigenous Peoples, vile atrocities under the system of chattel slavery that are yet to be fully acknowledged, indignities suffered by indentured immigrants and continued brutalities in the 21st century are well explored by numerous scholars. However, few are framed within the context of gendered analysis with the specific aim of tracing contemporary violence with their historic antecedents.

Gender Based Violence in the Caribbean: Historical Roots, Contemporary Continuities attempts to fill this discursive gap by offering new perspectives on historical and gendered realities of violence meted out to Caribbean peoples by the colonial state. Importantly, it will also explore the interpersonal “private” violence among Caribbean people, to include Domestic Violence, Intimate Partner Violence and Rape widely committed but rarely analysed in historic treatises. The book will span the 17th century to the 21st century because of the escalation of GBV in the present and the need to keep the contemporary in our consciousness as we search for collective solutions. A well needed intervention into the historiography of the region, the text will be organized thematically and chronologically and explore topics related to violence against women, men and children framed within discourses of gender, decoloniality, race, class, culture, disability studies and sexuality.

THEMES:

Conquest and Colonisation: Inequities of Power and Gender
Essays which explore gender-based violence in the era of conquest and colonization

Enslavement as Gender Based Violence
Essays exploring GBV towards women and men during chattel slavery

Unfree societies, Unfree bodies
Essays exploring interpersonal and State GBV between Emancipation and the early twentieth century

Righting Reproductive Wrongs:
Essays addressing lack of reproductive/health rights as a form of state GBV and solutions to them

Private Violence/Public Secrets
Essays dealing with GBV, intimate partner violence and domestic violence in early to mid 20th century- prevalence, treatment in media, lack of attention by leaders, lack of legislation, LGBTQI lived experiences.

Contemporary Continuities: Breaking the chains of GBV in 21st century Caribbean
Essays dealing with continuing harm, cost of GBV, the need for education on gender and violence, solutions to GBV

FOR CONSIDERATION FOR THE VOLUME:

Submit an abstract of 250-400 words (indicating preferred theme) and a bio of no more than 500 words by January 31, 2022.

Deadline for final paper: June 30, 2022 (instructions for preparation of final paper will be sent to authors whose abstracts are selected for the volume).

CONSENT TO PUBLISH

Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission to reprint any material not covered by fair use (text, illustrations, images, etc).
Submission of work to this collection will be taken to imply that it presents work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Permission to quote extensively from or reproduce copyright material must be obtained by the authors before submission and any acknowledgements should be included in the typescript, preferably in the form of an Acknowledgements section at the beginning of the paper.

All correspondence or questions regarding submissions for this collection should be addressed to: Dr. Dalea Bean at dalea_bean@yahoo.com