Cfp: CARIBBEAN POSTSCRIPTS: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Caribbean Postscripts is a series of books examining the works of the British ‘canon’ from a Caribbean perspective. The first of the series, Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereadings of Medieval English Discourse by Barbara Lalla, has already been published by UWI Press and there are plans to continue this initiative with future publications interrogating British texts from other periods. There is no paucity of Caribbean rewritings of British Literature; there have been numerous publications that revision The Tempest such as George Lamming’s Water with Berries and Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter. There are also numerous critical essays and monographs addressing these appropriations of Shakespeare and using the colonial text to interpret the Caribbean situation. Rob Nixon’s “African and Caribbean Appropriations of The Tempest” and Margaret Paul Joseph’s Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction are well-known examples. The aim of this collection, however, is to focus on analysing British texts from a Caribbean perspective. The premise is that the Caribbean has specific historical, social and cultural issues that can be readily applicable to a reading of British texts, and can therefore unlock these ‘canonical’ texts in new and interesting ways. You are invited to submit papers on seventeenth-century British Literature that might include the works of John Donne, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh to name a few. John Donne, for example, describes the colonized lands as “islands fortunate” in “Love’s Progress”, and further praises his lover with his often quoted, “O my America, my newfound land!” Shakespeare’s Othello bemoans his skin colour and its associations in his “Haply, for I am black”; and Prospero acknowledges ownership of Caliban, again possibly in relation to his skin colour: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Milton’s Satan, rebelling against God’s established power, declares that it is preferable to “reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” Some of these writers may deal with issues of colonization and specifically with the ‘New World’ but this is not a pre-requisite for critical enquiry. The Series Editors of Caribbean Postscripts include Giselle Rampaul, Barbara Lalla, Jean Antoine, Jennifer Rahim, Paula Morgan Topics might include: • Domination, Resistance and the Interrogation of Established Power • Defining/Inventing the Nation • The Other • Race • Masquerade • The Trickster • Exile and Shipwreck • Journeys/Exploration • Language Deadline for abstracts: 29th March, 2010 Deadline for completed papers: 7th June, 2010 Please send to Giselle.Rampaul@sta.uwi.edu.