A CALLALOO CALL FOR PAPERS

INTREPID VISIONARY: BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD, NOVELIST, POET, AND SCULPTOR

Callaloo is currently putting together material for a special issue on the
poetry, historical fiction, drawings, and abstract sculpture of Barbara
Chase-Riboud. She is a prize-winning poet and author of five widely
acclaimed and translated historical novels: the bestselling Sally Hemmings
(about President Thomas Jefferson and his slave), winner of the Janet Kafka
Prize for best novel written by an American woman; Valide: A Novel of the
Harem; Echo of Lions (about the Amistad mutiny); The President's Daughter (a
pre-quel to Sally Hemmings); and Venus Hottentot (about the 18th-century
South African woman Saartjie Bartman), which won the American Library
Association prize for best novel in 2004 and was nominated for the Zora
Neale Hurston Award. The first living American woman to have a one person
exhibition ("The Monument Drawings") at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, Ms. Chase-Riboud received a knighthood in arts and letters from
the French government in 1996, and in 1998 she was commissioned to construct
the monument for the African Burial Ground discovered in New York at Wall
Street. That monument, "Africa Rising," is now installed in the Federal
Building in New York. A renowned multi-media artist who enjoys a robust
international reputation for the compelling breadth of her abstract
sculpture, novels, and poetry, Chase-Riboud has also produced two books of
poetry, From Memphis to Peking, (chronicles of her travel to China as the
first American woman to visit the Republic after the Revolution), and
Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, winner of the Carl Sandburg Prize in
American poetry. She is one of the few African American artists who have
excelled in and across several creative venues. From April 5-July 2, 2006,
her work will be featured in the Studio Museum of Harlem's exhibition
"Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980," curated
by Dr. Kellie Jones of Yale University; and from June 16, 2006-January 7,
2007, her work will also be featured in the New York Historical Society's
exhibition "Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery." Born and
raised in Philadelphia and of Canadian and American decent, Ms. Chase-Riboud
was educated at Yale University and is a recipient of numerous fellowships
and honorary degrees. She presently divides her time between Rome, the
United States, and Paris, where she has lived for over thirty years.

We seek formalist and interdisciplinary submissions that examine,
1. the intersection and/or breaks in Chase-Riboud's poetry, sculpture, and
fiction, keeping in mind issues of translatability;
2. comparative reflections that engage Chase-Riboud and her artistic peers;
3. the relationship of disciplines such as history, science, and literature
to Chase- Riboud's body of fiction, keeping in mind the ways her work might
"supplement" or upend normative understandings of existentiality and
archival matter, particularly in relation to enslaved women;
4. women of color feminisms and art as critical intervention;
5. race/racism, feminism, gender construction, sexuality, mourning,
monumentality, psychoanalytic implications (desire, pleasure, consent,
subjectivation/subjection) in her novels
6. aesthetic techniques, aesthetic implications in and across Chase-Riboud's
oeuvre, i.e. abstraction/ historical fiction, neo-slave narrative/slave
narrative;
7. the text-image problematic and the aural intonations of sculpture and
drawings, juxtapositions;
8. artistic reflections in dialogue with Chase-Riboud's abstract work

Deadline for Paper Submissions: December 15, 2007

Callaloo/ Barbara Chase Riboud
Department of English
Texas A & M University
4227 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843-4221
Emailed Abstracts Deadline: June 1, 2007 bcrspecialissue @ gmail.com

Please direct queries to bcrspecialissue @ gmail.com

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Received on Thu Jun 15 2006 - 07:46:18 EDT