The Australian Association for Caribbean Studies (AACS) shared a Call for Papers for an interdisciplinary conference organized around the theme “Archipelagic Sovereignties,” to be held from June10 to 12, 2027. The deadline for submission of abstracts and bios is January 31, 2027.
The conference is co-organized by the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies, the United States Studies Centre, and the University of Sydney’s Discipline of English and Writing. Confirmed keynote speakers are Curdella Forbes (Professor of English, Howard University), Melanie Newtown (Professor of History and Caribbean Studies, University of Toronto), and Michelle Stephens (Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University). See detailed description and guidelines below and at AACS.
Description: In June 2027, we invite you to join us on Gadigal Country at the University of Sydney for the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies (AACS) conference, organised by the Discipline of English and Writing and the United States Studies Centre (USSC), and held from the 10th to the 12th of June, 2027. AACS conferences are interdisciplinary, and papers on all topics relating to the Caribbean are considered, including natural sciences.
For 2027, we invite presenters to explore archipelagic sovereignties. A conventional definition of archipelagic sovereignty is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which permits archipelagic states to draw baselines around their outermost islands, enclosing the waters between them as sovereign territory.
Caribbean theorists such as Édouard Glissant or Sylvia Wynter invite different understandings of archipelagic sovereignty in tracing a relational view of the Caribbean region and its connections to other islands and regions in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.
The Caribbean archipelago is a central location in what has been described as an ‘archipelagic turn’ (Roberts and Stephens, Archipelagic Americas), a reimagining of geography, history, and culture through a framework of interconnected island networks, coastlines, and oceans.
And yet, archipelagic sovereignty might also be defined as the unceded, continuous relation of Indigenous peoples to land and sea (Newton, “Returns to a Native Land”). Archipelagic theorists have not always addressed this continuous Indigenous presence within the circum-Caribbean region, a function of the historical myth that the Caribbean’s Indigenous Carib, Taino, and Arawak peoples were ‘wiped out’ by European colonisers.
The conference takes as its starting premise that Indigenous sovereignties have never ceased across the Caribbean’s archipelagic formations, even as they remain physically and symbolically contested. These contestations are sharpened by the friction between Indigeneity and Indigenisation, a concept Wynter introduces to “rework the concept of indigeneity outside of Western epistemes, in ways that track osmotic and crucible relations among origins, rift and diaspora” (Forbes and Page).
We are particularly interested in the comparative possibilities opened by thinking through Caribbean sovereignties from Gadigal Country, a place of unceded sovereignty and Indigenous diaspora in the words of Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker. How does the conference’s location on unceded land reorient the questions we bring to the Caribbean and the Americas? How might placing Indigenous frameworks at the centre of our thinking open new affiliations and ways of knowing that do not reproduce familiar oppositions between roots and routes, land and sea, presence and loss?
Abstracts on all subjects and from all disciplines within the field of Caribbean studies are welcome. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the abstract, not its relevance to the conference theme. Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words along with a short title and a short biographical note through the following portal by the 31st of January 2027: https://sydney.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eRsLiWMIfbjZzyS
You are also welcome to send through your abstracts by email to the conference team (Dashiell Moore, Ben Etherington, Aaron Nyerges, and Rodney Taveira) at australiancaribbeanstudies2027@gmail.com.
[Shown above: Unrelated photo of Trunk Bay, USVI, from https://lacgeo.com/caribbean-archipelago.]