Call for Submissions
“. . . in traumatic times like ours when reality itself is so distorted as to have become impossible and abnormal, it is the function of all culture, partaking of this abnormality, to be aware of its own sickness . . . To reinterpret this reality is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it. For me then, the play, the novel, the poem, the critical essay, are means to this end – not ends in themselves.”
-Sylvia Wynter, 𝘞𝘦 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘚𝘪𝘵 𝘋𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘛𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘢 𝘓𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘊𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦
As we continue to navigate the ongoing polycrisis, we — guided by Sylvia Wynter’s resonant and ever-prescient words — are launching a new call for submissions, Liberation Poetics: Caribbean Feminisms Against Imperialism, from Cuba to Palestine.
Imperialism is far-reaching, stretching across borders, and harming people across difference: from martyred people of the soil to stolen oil. This is a crucial period in which Caribbean feminists, emboldened by and spirited with a decolonizing, Queeribbean sensibility, must rise to meet this moment.
With this in mind, we invite you to submit critical essays, fiction, plays, poetry, posters, screenplays, art, and photography that address the urgency of leveraging Caribbean feminisms as a primary antagonism against imperialism and fascism by 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏, 𝟐𝟎𝟐6.
We invite participants to submit pieces that address imperialism, from the perspective of gender, race, color, class, nation, and/or sexuality, in any of the following broad topics:
Queering resistance
Resisting the masculinization of revolution
Rootedness in Caribbean identity, poetics of relation, opacité, antillanité, creolité: Moving across the Afro-, Indo-, and Indigenous Caribbean
Caribbean feminist perspectives and stories on grief, trauma, healing, and joy
Ancestral insurgencies: lessons from past movement shakers and revolutionaries
We also invite participants to consider the following writing prompts:
How do the attention economy, new media, and generative AI technologies depoliticize, distort, and fracture relation?
How can Caribbean feminist thought be in dialogue and praxis with Sudanese and Congolese feminist thought and movements as they agitate against violent imperial extraction?
What does a turn to the ‘Queeribbean’ offer as an antagonism against imperialism’s political, religious, and cultural conceits?
Whose stories, from plant, animal, and human life, are not being told in this moment?
Access the full call for submissions for the complete list of topics and prompts
“. . . in traumatic times like ours when reality itself is so distorted as to have become impossible and abnormal, it is the function of all culture, partaking of this abnormality, to be aware of its own sickness . . . To reinterpret this reality is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it. For me then, the play, the novel, the poem, the critical essay, are means to this end – not ends in themselves.”
