AACS 2027: Archipelagic Sovereignties

In June 2027, we invite you to join us on Gadigal Country at the University of Sydney for the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies (AACS) conference, organised by the Discipline of English and Writing and the United States Studies Centre (USSC), and held from the 10th to the 12th of June, 2027. AACS conferences are interdisciplinary, and papers on all topics relating to the Caribbean are considered, including from the natural sciences.

For 2027, we invite presenters to explore archipelagic sovereignties.

A conventional definition of archipelagic sovereignty is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which permits archipelagic states to draw baselines around their outermost islands, enclosing the waters between them as sovereign territory.

Caribbean theorists such as Édouard Glissant or Sylvia Wynter invite different understandings of archipelagic sovereignty in tracing a relational view of the Caribbean region and its connections to other islands and regions in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.

The Caribbean archipelago is a central location in what has been described as an ‘archipelagic turn’ (Roberts and Stephens, Archipelagic Americas), a reimagining of geography, history, and culture through a framework of interconnected island networks, coastlines, and oceans.

And yet, archipelagic sovereignty might also be defined as the unceded, continuous relation of Indigenous peoples to land and sea (Newton, “Returns to a Native Land”). Archipelagic theorists have not always addressed this continuous Indigenous presence within the circum-Caribbean region, a function of the historical myth that the Caribbean's Indigenous Carib, Taino, and Arawak peoples were ‘wiped out’ by European colonisers.

The conference takes as its starting premise that Indigenous sovereignties have never ceased across the Caribbean’s archipelagic formations, even as they remain physically and symbolically contested. These contestations are sharpened by the friction between Indigeneity and Indigenisation, a concept Wynter introduces to “rework the concept of indigeneity outside of Western epistemes, in ways that track osmotic and crucible relations among origins, rift and diaspora” (Forbes and Page).

We are particularly interested in the comparative possibilities opened by thinking through Caribbean sovereignties from Gadigal Country, a place of unceded sovereignty and Indigenous diaspora in the words of Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker. How does the conference’s location on unceded land reorient the questions we bring to the Caribbean and the Americas? How might placing Indigenous frameworks at the centre of our thinking open new affiliations and ways of knowing that do not reproduce familiar oppositions between roots and routes, land and sea, presence and loss?

Abstracts on all subjects and from all disciplines within the field of Caribbean studies are welcome. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the abstract, not its relevance to the conference theme. Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words along with a short title and a short biographical note through the following portal by the 31st of January 2027: https://bit.ly/4qARgRS.  

You are also welcome to send through your abstracts by email to the conference team at australiancaribbeanstudies2027@gmail.com, which is comprised of Dashiell Moore, Ben Etherington, Aaron Nyerges, and Rodney Taveira.

Confirmed Keynotes (in alphabetical order, works emboldened above)

Curdella Forbes, Professor of English, Howard University

Dr Forbes is Professor of Caribbean Literature in the Department of English. Her research interests include Caribbean literary and cultural history, Caribbean poetics, and diaspora and modernity studies. She is the author of the award-winning book From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender (University of the West Indies Press, 2005) and co-editor of Caribbean Literature in Transition 1920-1970, volume 2 of the three-volume series published by Cambridge University Press (2021). In her career as a fiction writer, she has authored several books including Songs of Silence (Heinemann 2002, 2010; Hodder Caribbean Contemporary Classics 2021) and A Tall History of Sugar (Akashic Books 2019, Canongate 2020), winner of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction.

Melanie Newtown, Professor of History and Caribbean Studies, University of Toronto

Melanie J. Newton is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she teaches Caribbean and Atlantic World History. She is the author of The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (2008) and has published widely on indigeneity, decolonization, and conquest in the Caribbean. From 1996–98, she served on the Barbados Constitution Review Commission, whose recommendation led to Barbados becoming a republic in 2021. She also co-chaired Toronto’s Community Advisory Committee on renaming Dundas St. and Yonge-Dundas Square.

Michelle Stephens, Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University

Michelle Stephens joined the Departments of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in Spring 2011. Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies and has been teaching courses in African American, American, Caribbean and Black Diaspora Literature and Culture. She is currently the Founding Executive Director and principal investigator of the Mellon funded Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. Among other works, she is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005), Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke 2014), Archipelagic American Studies, co-edited with Brian Russell Roberts (Duke 2017), Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking, co-edited with Yolanda Matinez-San Miguel (Rowman and Littlefield 2020), and the exhibition catalog and essay collection Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, co-edited with Tatiana Flores (Duke 2017). A founding co-editor of Rutgers University Press’s Critical Caribbean Studies book series, she also sits on the editorial advisory board of Rowman and Littlefield’s Rethinking The Island book series.

Bibliography

Forbes, Curdella, and Kezia Page. “Beyond History: Rise of a New World.” Humanities (Basel) [Basel], vol. 14, no. 11, November 2025, pp. 212-221.

Newton, Melanie J. “Returns to a Native Land: Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean.” Small Axe : A Journal of Criticism, vol. 17, no. 2, July 2013, pp. 108–22.

Roberts, Brian Russell, and Michelle Ann Stephens, editors. Archipelagic American Studies. Duke University Press, 2017.