Global Equiano – Early Caribbean Society’s Virtual Event
Submissions invited by 1 May 2024
Global Equiano CFP
Global Equiano invites new discussions of and engagements with Olaudah Equiano, author of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789). It situates Equiano within a mobile, Black, global, diasporic context, emanating from the Black Atlantic, in order to open fresh conversations about him, and other enslaved and free Black people, as they navigated and moved through spaces dominated by the violent colonial forces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Caribbean Restorations – 18th Century and Restoration Literature MLA Forum
Submissions invited by 4 April 2024
Historians from Hilary Beckles to Carla Pestana have traced the central importance of the Caribbean during Britain’s Restoration period. The Caribbean was, in Beckles’s words, the ‘hub of empire.’ This is, of course, a reference to the central importance of the Caribbean as a lucrative trade center for English merchants. If 1660 saw the Restoration of the Stuart monarch in Britain, it also saw the emergence of the Royal African Company in 1660 by the House of Stuart and the City of London merchants, signaling the core importance of the Caribbean and the West coast of Africa to British imperial plans in the early 18th century. The Caribbean also was a crucial staging ground for the political intrigue of those banished and/or fleeing persecution during the turbulent years of the Restoration. From a literary perspective, how does our understanding of the Restoration and early 18th century change when viewed from the perspective of the Caribbean. This panel, sponsored by the MLA Forum on Restoration and 18th Century English Literature, seeks papers that place the Caribbean at the center of literary studies of the Restoration and the early 18th century. How is this period shaped by the Caribbean and vice versa? What happens to concepts like restoration and empire when viewed from the perspective of the Caribbean?
Please send queries and/or 250 word abstracts to Cassander L. Smith at clsmith17@ua.edu.
Early Caribbean Society 