Here is a call for papers for a special issue on “Literature, Art, and Environmental Activism” by guest editor Leah Rosenberg (University of Florida) for the Journal of West Indian Literature. The deadline for abstracts is November 1, 2022.

Writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other arts performers have taken a leading role in protesting governmental failure and corporate responsibility for environmental destruction and disaster across the Caribbean. In the 2000s, Caribbean writers, filmmakers, visual and other artists have spoken truth to power in Puerto Rico and Dominica after the tragedy of Hurricane Maria, in the struggle to preserve Jamaica’s Cockpit country from bauxite mining, and against extractive industries, tourism, and other environmentally destructive forms of development. In fact, writers and artists have been documenting, illuminating, and protesting environmental destruction since Caribbean cultural traditions emerged.

We invite scholarly essays as well as the statements of artists and writers that illuminate the various and profound contribution of literature, film and other arts to Caribbean environmental activism. We hope to address the long history of artists’ and writers’ environmental concerns and activism, the wide geographical and social reach of their efforts across the Caribbean and its diaspora, the ways in which environmental change and crisis have shaped artistic form, and artists’ and writers’ vision for the future.

Prospective contributors should submit 300–500 word abstracts by 1 November 2022. Responses to abstract submissions will be sent by 15 November 2022; final versions of accepted papers will be due 15 April 2023. Scholarly essays should be between 6000 and 8000 words. Writers’ and artists’ statements or essays may be considerably shorter.

Please submit abstracts through the JWIL submission page: https://www.jwilonline.org/submission-guidelines/article-guidelines/

For queries about the issue, please contact Leah Rosenberg, rosenber@ufl.edu

Please click here for more information about the Journal of West Indian Literature.

[Image above: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla’s “Land Mark (Foot Prints)” 2001-2002.]