Southpaw–a literary left-hook from the Global South

Issue 1: displacement

Southpaw is a punchy new literary journal that will feature the voices and perspectives of writers from the South. Entering into dialogue with artistic communities across the South, it means to develop links, provoke conversation and share knowledge. Launching in 2011 from Melbourne Australia, it will feature fiction, creative-nonfiction, cultural commentary, essays, poetry, drawings and other graphics from writers and artists in the South.

Southpaw is currently looking for submissions in each of the above categories: short fiction, creative nonfiction, commentary, poetry, drawings, and essays up to 3000 words.

The first issue of Southpaw will be shaped by the experience and idea of ‘displacement’ – a theme with which Southern communities are especially familiar. But this is not necessarily to imply a negative encounter with change or trauma: displacement (in practice and thought) also suggests new possibilities and positive challenges that enliven thinking and burst into creative expression. Southpaw is looking for contemporary voices in all forms of writing. The energy of the South and the alternatives its many cultures and individual creativities offer today will be a challenge and antidote to the traditional sources of cultural influence and activity.

Please make your submission in Word by 30 April 2011.

Email your writing or drawing to: submissions@southpawjournal.com

Alison Caddick, for Southpaw editorial group

Samoa – Tracing Footprints for tomorrow: past lessons, present stories, future lives, July 2010

Samoa Conference II

Tentative Date scheduled: July 5th – 7th, 2011

The National University of Samoa (NUS) invites scholars, artists, vocational trainers, public servants, private consultants and researchers to participate in its second Samoa Conference to be held in Samoa, July 2011. Samoa Conference II provides an opportunity for participants to share in a comprehensive international forum showcasing scholastic, vocational and artistic works on Samoa in Samoa, on the peoples of Samoa, its environment, cultures (popular, national, local, international and diasporic), traditions, laws/lores, arts, musics, worldviews, politics, medicines and technologies. Samoa Conference II complements our bi-lingual, bi-annual Measina Samoa Conferences.

Abstracts for paper presentations and poster displays are now sought from national, regional and international presenters and authors. Language for all formal oral presentations and posters is English. Presenters who wish to present in Samoan or other non-English language must provide an English translation for their work at their own expense

The Samoa Conference II theme is: Tracing Footprints for tomorrow: past lessons, present stories, future lives”.

The theme focuses on the oft-cited wisdom that moving forward towards a safe and prosperous future requires learning from the past to enable the present and secure the future. The theme asks: What have we learnt from the past? What do we do in the present? How do we move forward into the future?

Abstract Papers submitted must be in Microsoft Word format with a length of 3000-5000 words.  Abstract submissions close October 31st, 2010

Stayed tuned for upcoming details and information on the Samoa Conference II 2011 hosted by the National University of Samoa.

To register your interest and sign up for updates contact samoaconference@nus.edu.ws.

Savage Europeans! Settler colonial studies call for papers

Call for Papers: What is Settler Colonialism?

SAVAGE EUROPEANS!
Ye doubted at first whether the inhabitants
of the regions you had just discovered
were not animals which you might slay without remorse,
because they were black,
and you were white.
[…]
In order to repeople one part of the globe,
which you have laid waste,
you corrupt and depopulate another.

Presumably Diderot, ‘On the history of settlements and trade’
(from Abbe Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History, 1770).

Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present. There is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler colonialism because settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends. Not all migrants are settlers: they are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity. And settler colonialism is not colonialism: settlers want Indigenous people to vanish (but can make use of their labour before they are made to disappear). Sometimes settler colonial forms operate within colonial ones, sometimes they subvert them, sometimes they replace them. But even if colonialism and settler colonialism interpenetrate and overlap, they remain separate as they co-define each other.

settler colonial studies accepts articles that align with this theme (‘What is Settler Colonialism?’), but will consider articles that do not. Submissions for this theme must be received by October 30 2010. For further information on submission details, click here.

Dreaming of islands

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS LiNQ VOLUME 37 2010 – ISLANDS

Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or fear, it doesn’t matter—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.

Gilles Deleuze

Our new issue of LiNQ considers the theme of islands, both metaphorical and real.  Deleuze’s contemplation of islands is just one view—and a Western and Northern Hemisphere one at that.  Southern islands, both in the South Pacific, in South East Asia, and connected to this island continent need not be part of this frame. Joanna Murray-Smith, Dorothy Cottrell, E.J. Banefield, Randolph Stow, Oodgeroo Noonuccal are writers all linked powerfully in the public imagination with particular islands.  There are many hundreds of islands central to our region in the archipelago of the Great Barrier Reef alone. 

The point of departure for this issue will be the environmental writings of Vance and Nettie Palmer and their writings about Green Island. Their nine-month sojourn became a search to understand the meaning of the island, as well as the surrounding reef and its relationship to the sea—for all those who inhabited and used that region.  For the Palmers, the search to understand was deeply connected to the search for words and ways to write about it. Nettie’s poetic lyricism of modernism offered a form to entice the reader, then.  How do we write islands, now?  Memoir, autobiography, eco-writing, and travel are just a few modes that some writers use when they consider islands. 

LiNQ calls for academic submissions that address Island Writing/ Writing Islands in its range of meanings, discussing literature and/or culture, present or past, with preference given to the Antipodean North: North Queensland, the archipelago of the Great Barrier Reef, the Pacific this side the Equator. Similarly, LiNQ is seeking poetic, fictional, and creative non-fiction treatments of islands from the evocation of a numinous island landscapes to the enduring effect of landscape, history, culture.

Dr Deborah Jordan of the School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, will serve as guest editor of the special issue.  
Submit manuscripts to
Email:          d.jordan@uq.edu.au
Or through our submission portal on the LiNQ website.

Articles must be no longer than 6000 words.  Include a brief abstract of the article or creative submission (no more than 75 words) and a 50-word biographical note. Reviews are also welcome.  Follow MLA citation style and format.  All contributions should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file, double-spaced in 12 point font.  All images must be used by permission only.    
SUBMISSIONS CLOSE ON  AUGUST 30, 2010 for Issue 27 December 2010.