The Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute at Tulane University is now accepting proposals for the conference “Tropical Exposures: Photography, Film, and Visual Culture in a Caribbean Frame,” which will take place March 10-12, 2016. Proposals are due by September 15, 2015. [Many thanks to Amanda Fleites for bringing this item to our attention.]

Description: Tropical Exposures welcomes proposals for papers that address any facet of Caribbean visual representation in photography, film, art, popular culture, and other media, as well as the interaction of word and image more generally. Scholars are also encouraged to present proposals that consider social and cultural shifts toward the increasing intermediality of representation in the Caribbean frame.

Papers may focus on one terrain, image-maker, or form of media, or employ comparative strategies. Papers may be in English, Spanish, French or Portuguese, though English is preferred. We anticipate creating an edited volume of expanded essays around the notion of Tropical Exposures, co-edited by Ana López and Marilyn Miller. We encourage participants to prepare abstracts and presentations with an eye to inclusion in a print publication. Papers might address some of the following tropics or questions in their myriad Caribbean contexts:

-Conditions of image production in the torrid zones
-Documentary film and the aims of full exposure
-Still life and the notion of static representation
-Visual literacy and lens-based scholarship
-Image and intellectual property
-Snapshots, clips, collages and other image fragments
-Icons of visual culture from Korda’s Che to Cabrera Infante’s Códac
-Ruins as sites of deterioration and inspiration
-Visual representation, race and post-race
-Caribbean images as ephemera
-Realisms, surrealisms, hyperrealisms
-Museums, biennales, and other sites of collective visual consumption
-Code-switching between media
-Virtual and interactive visual systems
-Word and Image studies in and on the Caribbean
-Facades
-Censorship and the Image
-Moving pictures and sentiment
-Patronage, connoisseurship, and institutional support
-Captions
-Image saturation and contamination
-Interiority and exteriority
-Fair use of the Caribbean image
-Tourism and other circuitous systems
-New languages and theories of visual technique and critique

Please send a proposal and 250-word abstract by September 15, 2015 to <ccsi@tulane.edu>, including the abstract as an attachment to the email. Please include the title of your paper, your name (and the names of any co-presenters), institutional affiliation, mailing address, phone number, and email address. We welcome pre-constituted panels. If submitting a panel for consideration, please include a top sheet with panel title, participant names and a brief abstract of the panel topic in addition to the individual paper proposals.

Notification of acceptance to the conference will be made by October 1, 2015.

Please see the Call for Papers page for more information.

For updated information on the conference, location and arrangements, visit the Tropical Exposures page on the Cuban & Caribbean Studies website.

[Photo above: “El Combate” by Ivette Romero.]