Call for Book Chapter proposals: "After life: Reading Questions of Pluriversality and Spiritualism in Antillean Arts"

Colonialism provides an epistemic framework that has disarticulated colonized beings and separated them from the material and spiritual worlds they long inhabited. In efforts to exhume open these life-worlds, colonized and formerly-colonized peoples have moved against colonial logics and toward pluriversal thinking. The pluriverse, as their ideological terrain, has made operative alternative forms of being, sensing, and relating to the past, present, and future— cutting through neatly demarcated notions of time, space, and being. Employing a pluriversal politics, a host of Antillean thinkers and artists like Claude McKay, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, and Rita Indiana have (re)constructed folk spiritual forms, situating them as critical to overarching decolonial and pluriversal projects. Their efforts foray through the realm of the imaginative and in their works, they use fictive, time-traveling spiritual practitioners to forge a counter-public. These practitioner-figures, who haunt/pervade their works, occupy spaces of indeterminacy and multiplicity—crossing material and symbolic borders, and bending straitjacket notions of being and relationality. Drawing on a broad repertoire of practices, as well as a narrower taxonomy of oral techniques, these figures fuse together Antillean spiritual aesthetics and call into view the interrelations among worlds and the tensions that arise as different worlds (and ontologies contained therein) strive to sustain themselves. While their works offer ethnically and culturally situated perspectives, with each tale, a series of overlapping ties between Antillean worlds and the pluriverse (worlds elsewhere) become evident. The works reach expressly to the Caribbean but point firmly to the larger artistic and spiritual efforts that surface in the after-life(s) of colonialism. This volume draws from these creators, placing their reformations of spiritualism alongside abiding concerns with the post- colonial future-world(s). The volume seeks link the spiritual and aesthetic to the political, and place the Antillean subject more squarely into wider post-colonial discourses.

Possible arenas, themes, and topics include, but are not limited to: Environmental studies,

• Afro-futurist thought, Caribbean political thought, Religious and Spiritual studies,
• Humanism and Posthumanist studies, Science fiction and Speculative Fiction, Trans poetics, and Queer of color critique,
• Womanist thought, Ecofeminism, Transnational feminisms, Black literary feminisms, Decolonial, Post-colonial, and Anticolonial thought.

These are all conceptual-theoretical areas that can expand what the pluriverse means and overlap with the work that this volume seeks to do. Projects that attend to the questions of pluriverse and Antillean spiritualism but are rooted in these areas (or adjacent areas) may be accepted. Please, submit proposals of two pages (including a summary or abstract and a brief biographical note) to ebarnett@umass.edu for consideration.

Deadlines:

Proposal: April 1, 2025

Notification of Acceptance: April 15, 2025

Chapter submission (15-20 pages):  May 31, 2025.