Call for Papers
Journal of Postcolonial Writing

"Scapes" of Globality: New Critical Approaches to Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris's highly experimental writing incorporates spatio-temporal ruptures, intersections, fusions, fluidities, and overlapping discourses. This special issue situates the author's poetics in the context of recent and emerging debates about the globalizing world, immanence, and the work of postcolonial literatures. The Caribbean is often seen to be a forerunner in the long history of globalization through (forced) migration, cross-cultural contact, transnational flows of trade and investment, and creolization. Harris's work explores the proleptic New World in a global context, highlighting the interfaces between old, new, and emerging imperialisms as well as alternative conceptions, experiences, and perceptions of place and worldly relations. In this global context, contributors might consider the ways in which the non-hierarchical, diverse planes of immanence theorised by Harris as "the unfinished genesis of the imagination" offer a New World poetics, which extends beyond the ongoing work of decolonization to include alternative articulations of space/time. Harris's "–scapes" invite us to consider new critical perspectives concerning a sense of location and trans-locality in a changing world order.



Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:


• The figuration of the proleptic Caribbean in a global context.

• The state of exception, trauma studies and approaches to working through related histories of violence, oppression, and terror.

• Post-continental philosophies of time, space, immanence, and the "event" of the new.

• The politics of aesthetics/poetics.

• Harris's time-scapes and/or land-scapes.

• Eco-critical perspectives, planetary thought and metaphors of (re)mapping and de/reterritorialisation.

• Surrealist aesthetics, experimental writing, and the creolization of discourses/genres.



If you have queries or wish to discuss a proposal in more detail, please email Lorna Burns at lorna.burns@glasgow.ac.uk and/or Wendy Knepper at wendy.knepper@brunel.ac.uk.



Deadline for submissions: November 17, 2011