Call for Papers

"Rethinking Europe from the Caribbean: Entanglements and Legacies"

12-15 April, 2018

Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Germany

The multiple ties that bind the Caribbean and Europe are the main focus of the conference
marking 30 years since the Society for Caribbean Research (Socare) was founded. The
Caribbean was the first region to be colonized by European powers in the 16th century and the
last one to be (incompletely) decolonized in the 20th century. It received more than one-third
of all Africans trafficked in the European trade in enslaved people between the 16th and 19th
centuries as well as significant numbers of indentured and contracted European laborers
during much of the same period, followed by indentureship and contract labor from Asia. It
experienced the genocide of thousands of indigenous groups at the hands of European
colonists as well as some of the most intense economic exploitation among Europe’s colonies.
After World War II, European states compensated for their domestic labor shortages by
recruiting large numbers of workers from their Caribbean colonies. This also prompted
changes in the citizenship policies that European colonial powers directed at these migrants.
Today, more than one-third of Europe’s remaining colonial possessions are located in
the Caribbean, and the CARICOM Reparations Commission, established in 2013, states that
it “finds European colonial rule as a persistent part of Caribbean life.”1 Nevertheless,
historiography, geography, as well as social, literary, and cultural theories tend to conceive of
Europe and the Caribbean as separate, even antithetical regions. For social sciences focused
on modern industrial societies, the Caribbean’s legacy of enslavement made it appear as
paradigmatically backward, inefficient, and underdeveloped. As such, it constituted the
opposite of the notion of the free, modern, and efficient wage-work which Europe claimed to
have pioneered. Having been shaped by an influx of African, European and Asian populations,
the Caribbean has come to represent racial and ethnic diversity par excellence, as also
evidenced in Caribbean thinkers’ theorizations of transculturation, hybridity, and creolization.
In contrast, Europe – following centuries of mass emigration, nation-building processes,
expulsions, and waves of ethnic cleansing – stood for high levels of ethnic homogenization.
The reversal of the migration pattern since the mid-20th century in the direction of Europe,
among other regions, triggered large-scale debates on race on the continent and increasingly
framed immigration as a threat to European societies. In the context of literary studies, the
canonical status of European ‘national’ literatures still tends to be juxtaposed to ‘postcolonial’
Caribbean literary production. Notions of postcoloniality similarly focus mainly on the former
colonies, while only recently debates across Europe have begun to address the question of
Europe’s postcoloniality.
In the wake of the humanitarian crises following the most recent hurricanes and
earthquakes in the Greater Caribbean, limited and discrepant disaster relief efforts have again
raised questions about political and economic relations between Western powers and the
Caribbean. Facing public health disasters and waves of out-migration, island economies are
further challenged through current citizenship regimes, fragmented political accountability and
exploitative economic arrangements, which highlight the ambivalent geopolitical status of
many Caribbean territories vis-à-vis European and U.S.-American interests.
Against the backdrop of these and related aspects, the conference focuses on the
legacies and continuities of European colonialism in the region and on transregional

1
http://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/
entanglements between the Caribbean and Europe. Examining languages, (post)colonial
histories, socioeconomic trajectories, and aesthetic practices in the Caribbean in their relations
to Europe also provides a basis for rethinking Europe from the Caribbean. The conference
aims to challenge the hypervisibility of Western Europe by highlighting Caribbean
entanglements with othered and racialized Southern and Eastern Europes, as well as through
the frequently ‘forgotten Europes’ still claimed as overseas territories and regions in the
Greater Caribbean. What can Caribbean perspectives contribute to a different and more
nuanced understanding of Europe(s) today?
We invite contributions from different research fields including, but not limited to, literary
and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, history, geography, and
political science. Inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives are particularly welcome, as are
poster presentations of PhD projects. We welcome contributions in English, French or Spanish
and encourage handouts or presentation material in one of the languages other than that of
the oral presentation. Possible topics include:

• The Caribbean as a laboratory of European modernity

• The political economy of race and racialization of the Caribbean in Europe
• Migration flows linking Europe and the Caribbean
• Coloniality, incomplete decolonization, and European Caribbean territories today
• Capitalism and non-wage labor in Europe and the Caribbean: enslavement, second
serfdom, indentureship, apprenticeship
• European economic interests in today’s Caribbean: e.g., resort tourism, tax havens,
land ownership and free-trade zones
• European and Commonwealth citizenships in the Caribbean as well as Caribbean
citizenships in Europe
• Climate change, humanitarian crises, and disaster relief in the context of geopolitical
ambivalence and fragmented sovereignties in the Caribbean
• The Caribbean in European politics of memory: e.g., native genocide, enslavement,
CARICOM’s call for reparations from European countries
• Rethinking Europe(s) through Caribbean notions of transculturation, hybridity, and
creolization
• Aesthetic entanglements between the Caribbean and Eastern or Southern Europe in
literature, film, or visual arts
• Linguistic practices, interrelations, and language policies

Proposals for papers or posters (please state your choice) should include the author’s name
and affiliation, presentation title, an abstract of around 300 words, as well as a short paragraph
with biographical information.

Please submit proposals via e-mail to both conveners by 30 October 2017

Manuela Boatcă: manuela.boatca@soziologie.uni-freiburg.de

Annika McPherson: annika.mcpherson@philhist.uni-augsburg.de