Call for Book Chapters to Complete Collection:

Louisiana and the Caribbean: Interrogating Contemporary Literary and Cultural Connections

**A press has already expressed interest but we just need a few more chapters to complete the collection**

            In 2020, Martinican author and filmmaker Fabienne Kanor published Louisiana, a novel taking in place in New Orleans ten years after hurricane Katrina, in which Nathan travels from Cameroon to Louisiana to find a long-lost uncle. From Governor Nicholls Street, located in the historic Tremé neighborhood, Kanor peruses the American South, its population, its culture, and its history. After travelling along the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and to the bayous in between, the young man come to the realization that “l’Amérique n’est pas un pays neuf, mais un vieux monde qui n’a jamais été lavé” [America is not a new country, but an old world that has never been cleaned] having lost his illusions and hopes about black America.

Connected by the shared experience of the “plantation system” (in the words of Martinican author Édouard Glissant), the relationship between the Caribbean and Louisiana has been studied extensively from a historical perspective[1], and there has been some literary scholarship devoted to our understanding of the influences and connections in 19th and 20th century literature[2]. Although many of these studies have expanded their temporal boundaries, they have been limited by linguistic barriers. For example, the collective volumes of American Creoles: the Francophone Caribbean and the American South edited by Celia Britton or La Louisiane et les Antilles, une nouvelle région du monde edited by Alexandre Leupin and Dominique Aurélia, which include discussions of some of the more modern literary and cultural connections between the Caribbean and Louisiana, but are limited by a French speaking network.

 Our goal with this collection is to expand on the existing ideas of the “circumCaribbean” by welcoming presentations analyzing the literary and cultural connections between Louisiana and the Caribbean the late 20th/21st centuries, regardless of linguistic boundaries.

Some questions to consider:

• Since the late 20th century, how do authors from the Spanish, Dutch, English, French, Kreyol speaking Caribbean write about their relationships with their neighbors in Louisiana?
• How do authors from Louisiana understand and represent the Caribbean in their literary works?
• How do American or Caribbean works and practices continue to illustrate the famous motto that New Orleans is “the northmost city of the Caribbean”?
• How are the contemporary relationships between the Caribbean and Louisiana studied in the classroom?
• What cross-cultural connections can we see emerging in works of literature by authors from Louisiana and the Caribbean?

Proposals in English from cultural anthropology, musicology, arts, history, and any other relevant field are also welcome.

Schedule:

May 15th, 2024: chapters of 6000-7000 words (including notes and bibliography) due

[1] Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society by Cécile Vidal, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences by Nathalie Dessens, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery by Rebecca J. Scott, Atlantic environments and the American South edited by Thomas Earle and D. Andrew Johnson, and Spanish New Orleans and the Caribbean by Alfred E. Lemmon, to name a few

[2] (Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature by John Wharton Lowe, Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South edited by Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler, and Cécile Accilien, Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White by George B. Handley