Savrina Chinien (The University of the West Indies-St. Augustine) and Mario Laarmann (Sorbonne Université) have shared the Call for Papers for the upcoming international conference “New Voices / Nouvelles voix / Nuevas voces. Post-Postcolonial Caribbean Literature,” to be held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, May 3-5, 2027. The deadline for submission of abstracts and bios is November 30, 2026. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
Description: In 1968, poet Heberto Padilla provoked a crisis in Cuba when suggesting that time might be cyclical, not linear. What at first sight might seem absurd is in fact a paradigmatic case for the turn from revolutionary to postmodern literature in the Caribbean. After his travels to the Soviet Union, Padilla began questioning the socialist promise of a perfectly egalitarian and ever improving society which followed the Hegelian idea of History as a process of ongoing liberation. While he had still believed in this modern dream in his 1962 poetry collection El justo tiempo humano, his 1968 Fuera del juego broke with the promise of teleological progress and pointed instead to the shortcomings of the Fidel Castro government, which led to both the writer and his poems being publicly denounced as anti-revolutionary.
The Caso Padilla, or Padilla affair, as it came to be known, is only one of many examples in which Caribbean writers and public intellectuals have expressed their discontent with the post-colonial reality of their respective islands, be it independence or departmentalization. In 1961, Frantz Fanon denounced the multiple problems he observed in recently independent countries in Les damnés de la terre, in 1962 C.L.R. James came to similarly pessimistic conclusions in his Party Politics in the West Indies, and many writers and artists have since expressed a similar sensibility, which cumulated in the 1980s and 1990s in what is commonly referred to as the postcolonial esthetics. According to David Scott, in postcolonialism, the relation between past, present, and future has ceased being “a Romantic one in which history rides a triumphant and seamlessly progressive rhythm” (Scott 2004, 13), showing instead the plurality of perspectives, the fabrication of discourse, and the shortcomings of universalism. But the deconstruction of universal categories and the pluralization of global History for the sake of local histories as we find it in literature from Édouard Glissant to Maryse Condé, from Wilson Harris to Jamaica Kincaid, and from Severo Sarduy to Junot Díaz springs nearly never from a triumphant position. Destabilizing not only the discourse of the (former) European or North American colonizer, but also the revolutionary ideals of the post-colonial nations and departments themselves, postcolonial literature fundamentally relies on what Scott calls a tragic sensibility: the observation that the various utopian visions – revolution, independence, federation, departmentalization, socialism, social democracy – have mostly failed to attain their goals across the region.
The conference “New Voices / Nouvelles voix / Nuevas voces. Post-Postcolonial Literature in the Caribbean” takes this apparently insurmountable sense of tragedy as its starting point and asks for the sensibilities and ideas emerging from the recent generation of writers. Global warming, unchallenged neoliberalism, the rise of the extreme right, fake news and disinformation have only heightened the gravity of the problems at hand, and social media and artificial intelligence might amplify it even further, eroding the ground on which collective – if not to say universal – solutions and principles would need to be reestablished. We deliberately don’t propose a set starting date for this contemporary generation (birth years or years of publication) as it might differ according to different contexts, leaving the outlines of the present conjuncture open for discussion. Similarly, we do not prescribe a certain theoretical approach to literature, calling instead for presentations that consciously reflect the role of (literary) theory in the analysis of post-postcolonial novels. The questions we intend to discuss include:
– Who are the new voices that have recently emerged in Caribbean prose fiction? (Please focus on one specific novel, writer, or context.)
– How do contemporary writers make sense of their societies and the world today?
– To what extent has literature changed since the postcolonial conjuncture?
– Does contemporary literature propose ways out of the postcolonial sense of tragedy?
– What are the esthetic means the writers in question employ to intervene in the contemporary conjuncture?
– Does a new way of thinking / a new hope / a new collective or universal horizon emerge in contemporary literature? If so, in what way?
– And most fundamentally, what approaches to literature are suitable to study this new literature?
– Is a decolonial approach the only appropriate one after the postcolonial paradigm?
Possible writers to be studied: Literature written in all Caribbean languages is welcome, but to facilitate discussion among all participants we ask for papers in English. Writers from the various Caribbean diasporas are welcome as long as their literature engages with the Caribbean itself. The following writers are suggestions; in case you are not sure if the writer you would like to work on fits in the scope of the conference, please don’t hesitate to send us an email before writing your proposal: Claire Adam, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Jason Allen-Paisant, Carlos Manuel Álvarez, Jean D’Amérique, Cezanne Cardona, Audrey Celestine, Nadia Chonville, Justin Haynes, Rita Indiana, Kevin Jared Hosein, Isis Labeau-Caberia, Jorge Enrique Lage, Breanne Mc Ivor, Ira Mathur, Kei Miller, Celeste Mohammed, Gael Octavia, Makenzy Orcel, Ingrid Persaud, Michael Roch, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias.
Proposals in English language of no more than 300-500 words as well as a short bio-bibliographical note should be sent to the organizers by November 30, 2026. On principle, no hybrid presentations will be accepted, except in cases where the political situation makes in-person attendance impossible (please specify if this is your case).
For full description, see https://www.romanistik.de/aktuelles/9373
https://sta.uwi.edu/fhe/dmll (scroll down)
https://heyzine.com/flip-book/ac2d2c2192.html
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z-kG6tFq-PAs9IRHYcLiBRpYfwiTxlGp/view
Proposal deadline: November 30, 2026
[(Unrelated) Artwork featured above (photo by Jacopo Salvi): Tessa Mars, “a call to the ocean”, 2025. Installation view of “otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua” (other mountains, adrift beneath the waves), Ocean Space, Venice. Commissioned by TBA21–Academy. The exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama was curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and Juan Canela. See more at https://tba21.org/othermountains_panama.]