"American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography," Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, July 4-7, 2009.

By 'American Tropics' we understand an extended Caribbean, or what Edouard Glissant calls “the estuary of the Americas,” or what earlier scholars sometimes called 'Plantation America': an area including the southern USA, the Caribbean littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. The American Tropics project at Essex seeks to understand the writing associated with this area through a study of particular places within it: cities, borders, regions, natural features. Each place is a zone of encounter, bringing together sets of writing in different languages and styles, from different literary and cultural backgrounds, all of which have in common that attention to the same place. The project therefore approaches literary history via literary geography.

We call for papers which engage with this project in a number of different ways:-

• through attention to particular places and the writing associated within them;
• through consideration of the cultural features of particular places or regions within the American Tropics;
• through engagement with ideas of tropicality more generally, in America or beyond;
• through theoretical engagement with the ideas of literary geography or area studies as they pertain to the American continent;
• through consideration of significant circuits (personal, commercial, cultural) within and beyond the area.

Confirmed speakers include: Barbara Ladd, Richard Price, Sally Price, Susan Castillo, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Sharon Monteith, Gordon Brotherston, Neil Whitehead, Selwyn Cudjoe, Bill Schwarz, Luciana Martins, William Rowe, Margarita Zamora, María Cristina Rodríguez, Lowell Fiet, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Shalini Puri, Leah Rosenberg, Wendy Gaudin, Sue Thomas, Susan Gillman.

The final call for papers runs until 31 December 2008.

Colleagues are encouraged to look at the developing project at http://www.essex.ac.uk/literature/American_Tropics/index.htm; Informal enquiries to Peter Hulme at phulme@essex.ac.uk; Formal offers of papers (title plus 300 word synopsis) to Lesley Wylie at lwylie@essex.ac.uk.