Haitian Studies Association

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Call for submissions: ‘Queer Creoles and Creolization in Global French Contexts’

Note: This is not an HSA opportunity. We are sharing the word as a service. 

Contemporary French Civilization Special Issue

Co-editors: Ryan Joyce (The Ohio State University), Rashana Vikara Lydner (Georgia State University), and Matthew Skrzypczyk (University of Washington)

What might it mean to think Creole and Queer together? By moving beyond the confines of distinct disciplinary boundaries, can we forge new understandings of Queer Creole worldmaking? We ask contributors to consider how gender- and sexually nonnormative, expansive, and creative lives take shape through Creole languages, Creole aesthetics, and Creole imaginaries across the French-speaking world. Drawing on foundational thinkers such as Wilson Harris, Édouard Glissant, and Kamau Brathwaite, this issue approaches creoleness not as a fixed identity but as an open, relational process, what Harris calls an “unfinished genesis,” and what Glissant theorizes as a movement away from singular origins toward a “limitless métissage,” in which elements are transformed through unpredictable encounters. In this sense, creolization offers a critical framework for rethinking identity, belonging, and relation beyond stable categories, raising the question of how queerness might both inhabit and further unsettle these processes.

We especially welcome submissions that engage the questions: How do works of literature, art, music, and other cultural forms represent queerness, creoleness, and creolization? How do Creole languages and linguistic practices foreground, construct, or complicate gender and sexuality in productive ways? Scholars are encouraged to submit original research to “Queer Creoles and Creolization in Global French Contexts,” a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary French Civilization. Building on scholarly conversations in creolistics, literary studies, and socio-cultural studies, this special issue places these traditions in dialogue with queer and trans studies, queer of color critique, Black and Caribbean feminisms, and related fields. From Louisiana, Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, and other Creole diasporas, we welcome work that interrogates and refines the concepts of “queer creoles” and “queer creolization.”

We envision this special issue as a platform for scholars to explore and confront the many challenges facing the intersections in these fields of study (including Caribbean studies, Black Atlantic studies, African diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer and trans studies, etc.) that are all-too-often limited by the silences, critiques, violences, and absences that mark queer Creoles and creolization in global French contexts. As Alison Donnell posits, the spatial and cultural specificity of the Caribbean is “a creolized place that undoes the usefulness of thinking about identities in terms of origins, binaries, guaranteed lineages, and culturally discreet groupings.” This alternative framework poses as a unique challenge to otherwise dominant concepts that unite gender and sexuality exclusively to identity. In the undoing and troubling of heteronormative colonial histories and narratives, this issue seeks to explore the role of queerness across these spaces as they cross the imagined borders of the Global North and the Global South. Scholars like Vanessa Agard-Jones, Ronald Cummings, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley have established the many uses and influences of queerness in its localized capacity, while its ubiquity in the global context further complicates multiple meanings of non-heteronormative sexualities in the Caribbean. Furthermore, we anticipate conversations on how linguistic histories and practices across French, F(f)rancophone, and Creole worlds continue to inform and trouble (hetero)normative understandings of sexuality, gender, and desire in the Caribbean and its diasporas.

We welcome original research articles, theoretical interventions, and interdisciplinary analyses that explore contemporary stakes and practices of queer Creoles and queer creolization. Especially encouraged are submissions that foreground:

  • Creole language practices and linguistic politics
  • Cultural production (literature, music, visual art, performance, film, digital media)
  • Creative and aesthetic imaginaries of queerness and creoleness
  • Political praxis, activism, and community-based knowledge
  • Methodological reflections on creolization as a decolonial or critical analytic

Guiding questions for this issue include:

  1. How do understandings, theories, and practices of “queer” diverge or circulate across the Global North and the Global South, and how do they transform in the process?
  2. What silences around gender and sexuality structure the field and study of creolization, and how are these silences policed or normalized?
  3. What are the methodological stakes of theorizing “queer creolization” as an analytic rather than merely a descriptive category?
  4. Can creolization function as a decolonial analytic, or has it sometimes been mobilized in ways that neutralize gender and sexuality?
  5. How does queer creolization repair, celebrate, and theorize local histories and practices of gender and sexual nonconformity?
  6. What visual codes and practices constitute a queer Creole aesthetic?
  7. How do Creole language practices, vernacular aesthetics, and language politics mediate the production of queer worlds?

By centering creativity, relationality, and critique, this issue positions queer creolization as a vital site for rethinking identity, power, and worldmaking in the 21st century. Contributions, focused on literature, language, music, visual art, performance, film, activism, and/or digital cultures, should illustrate how social and cultural production materialize queer Creole imaginaries as sites of innovation, opacity, critique, and praxis.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words to be submitted by October 15th, 2026. Authors will be notified of accepted submissions by December 15th, 2026. Submission of completed articles in English or French, of 5000-6000 words, by March 15th, 2027. Please send an abstract with a short biographical note to queercreolescfc@gmail.com

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