Wednesday 10 June 2020

JOURNALS FOCUS ON CARIBBEAN DIASPORA, LIT, MEMORY

Over the past year, several international journals have been focusing on Caribbean diasporic issues, including memory and literature, with scholarly articles and creative work.

Among the most recent is the African and Black Diaspora journal, which has published a special issue titled “African-Caribbean Women Interrogating Diaspora/Post-diaspora” - now available online.

“The articles in this issue originated as papers presented at a conference held at London South Bank University in July 2018, representing the work of a network of scholars from the UK, Canada and the Caribbean,” says Dr Suzanne Scafe, who edited the special issue with Dr Leith Dunn.

The contributors “had been focusing on Caribbean women’s mobility, and, in particular, issues of diaspora, globalization and transnationalism,” adds Scafe, (See her earlier SWAN article.)

African and Black Diaspora describes itself as a “multi-disciplinary peer-reviewed international journal that seeks to broaden and deepen our understanding of the lived experiences of people of African descent across the globe by publishing theoretically and historically informed as well as empirically grounded works in the social sciences and humanities that are intellectually challenging and illuminating”.

It is part of the Taylor & Francis Group, which publishes some 2,700 journals and more than 5,000 new books each year

For information on the contents of the special issue, please see: 


BABEL

For those who speak French as well as English, a special bilingual issue of BABEL looks at “Écritures minoritaires de la mémoire dans les Amériques” (Memorial Minor Writings in the Americas).

The scholarly articles discuss literature of the Americas (within the theoretical framework of "minoritaire" writing), with a focus on memory, history and resistance to domination. 

Edited by Dr Anne Garrait-Bourrier and Dr Christine Dualé, professors at universities in France, the volume has a foreword by Jamaican author Alecia McKenzie (SWAN’s founder).

The Caribbean writers whose works are analysed include Edwidge Danticat and Paule Marshall, among a wide-ranging collection that also examines “voices of rebellion” and memory in works by African American authors Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, James Baldwin, Jean Toomer, and Octavia Butler.

BABEL is published by the Université de Toulon in southern France. The open-access issue is available at:  https://journals.openedition.org/babel/6521

Tuesday 2 June 2020

FINALLY SEEING - WHEN INJUSTICE IS CAUGHT ON TAPE


These tears, I know,
are not just for
you

They fall for
the ancestors
too

All those who’ve
died under knees,
boots

Unrecorded.

So many believe
only what they can
see

It couldn’t be
that bad, they said
carelessly

Now they have no
choice, but to look,
hear

There – it is recorded.

                                - SWAN