CfP: Grace Jones: Post-Colonial. Cosmopolitan. Icon.

Call for Papers

Iconic Grace Jones - supermodel, songwriter, singer, record producer, actress and author - theatrically embodies intersectional identity politics.  Long before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the word intersectionality in 1989, Jones was performing a disruptive post-colonial politics that still engenders controversy around gender, sonicity  sexuality, race and class. Coming of age in the early years of Jamaican Independence, Jones contested the limiting definitions of working-class black female identity in an essentially neo-colonial society.  Raised in a Fundamentalist Christian home, Jones also broke the repressive religious bonds that constrained her. Assuming the persona of androgynous sex symbol, Jones epitomises liberation from multiple oppressions.  This anthology aims to explore Grace Jones's stellar, multimodal performance of identity in fashion, music and film, with particular focus on the transgressive and the post-colonial.  

Grace Jones's avant-garde work has been wide-ranging and distinctive, and we welcome a variety of approaches.  

Topics for papers can include, but are not limited to the following: 

• Grace Jones as Jamaican/Caribbean figure

• Grace Jones's music (any specific album or track or collaboration) 

• Grace Jones' Performance Aesthetic

• Grace Jones as Exemplary of International, Cosmopolitan Influence

• Blackness, Grace Jones and the Place of Africa

• Gender Politics and Grace Jones

• Grace Jones as Post-colonial Icon

• Grace Jones' style/fashion

• Grace Jones' and Queering Identity

• Film and the Image of Grace Jones 

• The Globalisation of Grace Jones

• Grace Jones, Transgression, and Identity Politics

• The Enduring Influence of Grace Jones in Music, Fashion, Film, Photography, Performance and/or Art

This anthology is slated for publication in the Sound Culture Series at The Press, UWI.  Contributions must be between 3000 and 6000 words and formatted in accordance with UWI Press style, found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NW6ashBtzIRYSp7FmV4ANwEspG_tGTyW8jabe_5QnbQ/edi

Please ensure that the formatting guidelines are carefully applied. 

The submission deadline for abstracts is December 31, 2020 and the deadline for full papers is January 31, 2021. Email all submissions to Dr. Sonjah Stanley Niaah at culture@kosmopole.page

Feel free to share widely within your networks.

Sonjah N. Stanley Niaah | Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer, Cultural Studies
& Head, Institute of Caribbean Studies & Reggae Studies Unit, UWI Mona Campus

Member, International Scientific Committee
UNESCO, Slave Route Project

Senior Research Associate
Department of Fine Art
Rhodes University, South Africa

Blog: http://www.dancehallgeographies.wordpress.com