Colleagues,





Please consider proposing an essay or related piece for an interdisciplinary volume that Lara Putnam and I are planning entitled Caribbean Military Encounters.  I attach and paste below the call for papers.  We are especially keen to include essays drawn from the disciplines of Art History, Cultural Studies, Literature, Media, Musicology, and Performance Studies​; some artistic work; oral narratives and interviews; and brief vignettes.





Best,



Shalini Puri



University of Pittsburgh









Call for Papers:



Caribbean Military Encounters



A multidisciplinary anthology from the humanities



Editors:  Shalini Puri and Lara Putnam



We invite papers for a multidisciplinary anthology that explores the Caribbean as a militarized region.  Our volume will focus on the lived experience of militarization from across the numerous language areas of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.







A key node in contests amongst imperial powers as well as a region of entrenched intra-societal antagonisms; a place rich with natural resources and strategic value; the Caribbean is an intensely militarized region.  The imprint of U.S.-driven military encounter so visibly unites the Greater Caribbean that it is sometimes hard to see within or beyond it.  Yet the enduring militarization of Caribbean life has not been limited to the actions of U.S. troops or the aims of U.S. policymakers. Nor have its results been uniformly negative.  For some, in some moments, military participation has offered a route out of a disempowered present.







Different emplacements of military power in narratives of the national past have divided the Greater Caribbean into subsets rarely considered together: British Caribbean islands, French Caribbean islands, Spanish American Greater Antilles, Latin American rimlands.  The silencing of the memory of certain kinds of military encounters in certain places has allowed the construction of divergent national myths.  But in fact, imperial interventions, civil wars, military or paramilitary abuses, and the militarization of police can be found in Spanish-speaking, English-speaking, French-speaking, and Dutch-speaking Greater Caribbean territories alike, albeit not necessarily in the same proportions across time.







Our focus on lived experience, everyday life, and artistic and political cultures distinguishes our approach from that which is dominant in Policy Studies and Security Studies.  Our approach also differs from those strands of leftist or nationalist scholarship in which resistance to militarization has taken the form of a reluctance to explore the topic except via "agonistic narratives" (Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees 11) that highlight opposition and sidestep complicity, co-implication, and reluctant or strategic participation.  We are as interested in the creative ways disenfranchised populations claim the precarious possibilities militarization offers as we are in opposition to militarization expressed in the arts, everyday life, and organized politics; practices of complicity as well as of critique.  Our exploration of the interlocking systemic and subjective experiences of militarization takes up such questions as: How does militarization shape mobility, citizenship, family, racialization, the construction of sexuality, and Caribbean peoples' sense of available cultural possibilities?  Such questions might be raised in relation to topics like the following:







•Militaries, nation-building, and republican participation in the 19th century



•The British West Indies Regiment in WWI



•The American presence in Guantánamo



•The possibilities of gaining U.S. citizenship through US military service



•Armed struggles, civil wars, and proxy wars of the Left and Right



•The changing economic and cultural landscapes surrounding military bases and "cooperative security locations" – such as those in Chaguaramas, Vieques, Panama, Bahamas, Colombia, Aruba and Curaçao



•The Drug Wars, the War on Terror, the militarization of police forces and the attendant construction of citizen-enemies; the privatization of military and security forces



•Regional/supra-national "peace-keeping forces"



•Aesthetics of militarism and cultural deployment of military symbols







We hope to include scholarly essays from disciplines such as Art History, Cultural Studies, Literature, Media, Musicology, and Performance Studies.  Some essays might explore cartoons, art, music and literature that touch upon the militarization of everyday life.  In addition to scholarly essays, the collection will include testimonies and personal narratives gathered from Caribbean citizens and foreign and Caribbean military personnel.  We especially welcome contributions that draw on illuminating anecdote, narrative nuance, texture, and voice.







Please send indication of interest, 500-word proposals (or longer work), contact information, and bios of 75 words as soon as possible, but no later than December 10, 2014.  Consideration by editors for inclusion in the volume will be based on the complete paper, which will be due May 31, 2015.  Final acceptance will depend on peer review.







Proposals and papers should be sent by email to [log in to unmask]