The outbreak of the 1791 Haitian revolution shook the imperial powers of Europe and the US. Never before had the enslaved rebelled so powerfully and in the decades to come, the name of the once lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, provoked anxiety and suspicion. In 2010, Western eyes again turned to Haiti as a devastating earthquake hit the island. Natural forces together with poverty and inadequate infrastructure caused a major humanitarian crisis.
Taking its point of departure in the intersection of politics and aesthetics, this special issue of Karib, an on-line open access research journal published with Stockholm University Press, probes the global responses to and repercussions of these events within the frame of emergent and contemporary modernity.
The special issue proposes to investigate the Haitian revolution as an important event in shaping the structures of a new, global world order and the 2010 earthquake as an telling touchstone for the contemporary state hereof. We ask three interrelated research questions:
Within all three fields we encourage discussions that go across disciplines and traditions. We thus welcome contributions that discuss the historical, political and aesthetic representations of the two tremors addressing questions such as:
With its focus on complex global reactions to Haitian disruptions at two ends of modernity, this publication intervenes in the fields of international relations, aesthetics of humanitarianism, diaspora studies, revolutionary studies, and catastrophe studies.
Abstracts of 300 words, including a 5-line biography and contact details, should be sent to the editors Mads Anders Baggesgaard (madsbaggesgaard@cc.au.dk), Jonas Ross Kjærgård (litjrk@cc.au.dk), and/or Christina Kullberg (Christina.Kullberg@moderna.uu.se) no later than November 15, 2017.
Selected contributors will be asked to submit their article in the spring of 2018. The articles may be written in English, Spanish or French and will be peer-reviewed by external readers. Articles should follow the author guidelines that can be found on www.karib.no and should not exceed 8000 words. There are possibilities to publish images, videos and audio within your article.
Kind regards,
Mads Anders Baggesgaard
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Christina Kullberg
Posted on 13 Oct 2017
For our first online issue, “Curating the Caribbean: Museum Practice and Identity Formation”, we seek to explore the museum, museum spaces, and curatorial practices in the Caribbean Region. We are therefore soliciting scholars, cultural heritage activists, curatorial practitioners and artists interested in contributing to the volume.
The point of departure of the Museum issue is that, in the past twenty years or so, identity discourses, interrogations of colonial contexts and consequences as well as articulations of Caribbean consciousness and poetics have been the focus of much scholarly attention in literary and philosophical fields, History and the Social Sciences. This has entailed sustained interrogations of the notions of history, nation and cultural heritage, interrogations that have left in their wake the (re)appropriation and valorization of heritage sites, the (re)creation of museum spaces and/or the raising of (new) monuments. What remains often unquestioned is the early history of Caribbean museums, founded in the colonial period, and the museological ideologies undergirding their constitution.
A central preoccupation of this special issue is to ask how and why museums in particular, have acted and continue to act as manifestations of identity, whether national, cultural or otherwise. Further, are the technologies of representation in curatorial practice so inextricably entangled in colonial museological ideologies as to only affirm and constitute “old” identities at best and stereotypes at worst? And what is the role of the museum space in the contemporary period where the very foundations of identity are being challenged? And given increasing pressure on Caribbean economies, what connections are there to be made between heritage, conservation and preservation in support of tourism and sustainable development models?
Another important pre-occupation of this special issue is to acknowledge that museums have become crucial sites for the contestation of nation, identity and culture. In other words, what kind of “work” have museum spaces performed in excavating and thus legitimating submerged narratives and receovered memories? How are art practices presented in the museum/gallery space? What are the relationships between popular art forms and the museum/gallery spaces? Is there a conflict between cultural heritage and modern art, and how would that be articulated in relation to the museum space?
Papers may be written in English, Spanish or French and will be peer-reviewed by external readers. Articles should follow the author guidelines that can be found on our website and should not exceed 8000 words. There are possibilities to publish images, videos and audio within your article.
Since the on-line format permits continuous publishing we do not have a specific deadline for articles. Please send an abstract to the editors if you want to submit an article.
The editors of Karib
Christina Kullberg (christina.kullberg@moderna.uu.se) and Hans Jacob Ohldieck (hans.ohldieck@uib.no)
Posted on 11 May 2017
Posted on 17 Jan 2017