Call For Papers Meridional 23: "Central America in the Caribbean/The Caribbean in Central America”
Meridional. Chilean Journal of Latin American Studies is pleased to invite you to participate in the dossier “Central America in the Caribbean/The Caribbean in Central America” which corresponds to our 24th number and will be published in April 2025.
Forty years ago, Argentine sociologist Carlos Vilas was invited to join the Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA) in Nicaragua, in the midst of the Sandinista revolution and at the beginning of an armed conflict that would soon involve all of Central America, as well as Latin America and the rest of the world at the close of the Cold War. Vilas candidly explains that he “knew almost nothing about the Atlantic Coast,” to the extent that he did not include it in his seminal work Perfiles de la Revolución Sandinista (3). However, he soon discovered that the Caribbean—hitherto unbeknownst to him—was the result of intense political, economic, social, and cultural exchange over the long term. The Central American Caribbean, far from being a marginalized region, was at the center of the geopolitical articulations of the region with the rest of the world.
Throughout the twentieth century, several studies situated the Caribbean in a central position when it came to understanding The Birth of the Modern World (Bayly 2004), in which the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 2003) was the space where political and economic relations sprouted, shaping the capitalist world order through large extractive enterprises and the transatlantic slave trade (Williams 1994). Scholars of the Caribbean even pointed out that it was impossible to understand the Era of Revolutions (Hobsbawm 2007) without the movements and pro-independence thought of the early American revolutions that took place in Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti (James 1989). Nevertheless, as several Central Americanists have pointed out (Mackenbach 2008), its Central American shore—which for historical, cultural and political reasons belongs to the Greater Caribbean—has been widely ignored within Caribbean Studies. Indeed, the Central American Caribbean has suffered a double exclusion: on the one hand, it has been marginalized internally by Hispanophone Central America. On the other, externally it has been excluded from the Caribbean understood as a fundamentally insular region (Benítez Rojo 1998).
In other words, the Caribbean is not an “unknown region” waiting to be “discovered.” What the Argentine sociologist did discover during that decade of revolutionary furor was, rather, the structural bias in Nicaraguan culture of the Pacific coast, which kept knowledge and practices of the Caribbean disconnected from the political, economic, and intellectual life of Managua. Therefore, in the words of Amanda Minks, historicizing, conceptualizing, and reflecting on Central America and the Caribbean involves the task of unraveling “the metanarrative” about the Isthmus, which “splinters into so many micronarratives and yet still recalls the impact of Spanish imperialism, often overshadowed by the metanarratives of Anglo-Saxon imperialism” (20).
Yet these biases are not exclusive to Nicaragua but have been reproduced with certain similarities and peculiarities throughout Central America, showing that the articulation or fragmentation of the Pacific, Central, and Caribbean regions is one of the main characteristics of the isthmus. This issue of Meridionial aims to revisit the social and cultural relations of Central America in the Caribbean and of the Caribbean in Central America. Its goal is to contribute from the humanities and social sciences to further the understanding of the interrelationship which is at the heart of the articulations, fragmentations, or biases that have structured the local, regional, isthmian and global relations of Central American societies. At the same time, it proposes that we rethink the limits—geographical, historical, cultural, and theoretical—of the Caribbean itself vis-à-vis its Central American shore, which borders with the Colombian coast to the south and the Mexican shore to the north.
While significant progress has been made in the study of relations, tensions, and disagreements between the Pacific and Caribbean regions of the isthmus (Putnam 2013), there remains ample space to develop the interconnected research about and between these regions. It is necessary that we study Central America through approaches that go beyond national borders and address relevant issues from a transnational, transisthmian, or global perspective. In this issue, therefore, our premise is that, due to its complexity, the question of the place of the Caribbean in Central America and of Central America in the Caribbean is better understood when approached through multiple disciplines (history, anthropology, literary studies, visual arts, music, culture, among others). Using the historical marginalization of the Caribbean within the isthmus as a starting point—whether it be from the Pacific shore of Nicaragua, the Central Valley of Costa Rica or the highlands of Guatemala—these are some of the main themes to which this call is open:
- Epistemologies and discourses about or from Central America and the Caribbean that study the relations or articulations, as well as the biases or ruptures, between these regions.
- Studies on intellectual, political, and affective networks, internal or external, either within the Central American Caribbean or in relation to other regions.
- Reflections on the geographical, historical, cultural, and theoretical limits of the Caribbean itself, particularly regarding the so-called Continental Caribbean.
- Cultural, economic, or political histories that reveal shared interactions or influences between the Pacific and the Caribbean, as well as between both regions and the rest of the world.
- Presentation and analysis of discourses about Central America that have been or are produced from the Caribbean and vice versa.
- Transnational or global histories that include transisthmian relations specific to Central America.
- Studies on how the Caribbean has been represented historically by Hispanophone Central America, as well as its historical ties.
- Reflections on archives, cultural artifacts, literatures, music, or performances in light of their transnational and transisthmian connections.
- Histories and counter-histories, as well as memories and counter-memories, specific to the cultural histories from or about Central America and the Caribbean.
- Contributions to the theory of social sciences and humanities from Central America and the Caribbean.
- Histories, reflections, and testimonies on the identity and (re)invention of Central American and Caribbean culture in all their diversity.
- Histories or case studies of transnational and global connections as structures by which we can understand the complexity of political, economic, social, and cultural articulations that shape the demarcation between Central America and the Caribbean.
- Studies on globalization as seen or understood from Central America and the Caribbean.
Meridional is incorporated in the following indexes and databases: ERIH-Plus, Latindex Catálogo, DOAJ, Dialnet, Gale-Cengage, Prisma.
The manuscripts’ deadline is on September 30th 2024.
Contact: revistameridional@gmail.com.
Dossier’s coordinators:
Dr. Carlos F. Grigsby – University of Bristol, UK
Dr. Antonio M. Casablanca – National University of Costa Rica
