The Avery Review
The Avery Review

Natalia Gulick de Torres & the Editors —

An Open Call for Essays on the Concrete and Conceptual Caribbean

Submissions due August 15, 2022

The Caribbean is at once a geographical reality and an imagined place. Writing in 2004, social scientist Michèle Praeger framed the Caribbean imaginary as a term that “whether collective or individual, is inextricably tied up with the inhabitants’ past and also with a forewarning of their future. The inhabitants of the Caribbean have everything to invent, as they cannot return to a particular culture or tradition.”1 Turning this imaginary toward the built environment and its representations, further questions arise. How has the Caribbean been invented by external and internal forces? What perceptions have been historically imposed, and how are they linked to the Caribbean's built and natural environments? What are the (counter) aesthetics of contemporary reimaginings?

The Saint Lucian writer and critic Derek Walcott describes the Caribbean as a landscape that “doesn’t have narrative, it has present tense all the time.” If, as Walcott proposes, the Caribbean is “an eternal summer,” then “how do you scan time?”2 Perhaps time is punctuated or needs to be accounted for in other ways—through our increasingly turbulent climate,3 through political changeovers, through commemorative landscapes.4 The constant tension found in the timelessness of the Caribbean’s past and future realities brings an ever-present timeliness to the topic of the Caribbean imaginary both within its geographic boundaries and diasporic spatialities.

A project of the 2022 guest editor, this open call is intended to provide a space for writers to grapple with the rich scholarship of the region while developing urgent work on its under-documented architecture and related fields. Aligned with a broader turn in radical scholarship toward the Caribbean as both a tangible chain of landscapes and an intangible network of thought, the Avery Review is seeking essays that, through their objects of review, cover a range of topics—urban frameworks, notions of the hinterland, colonial pasts, decolonial futures, public access, private developments, climatic concerns, tourist economies, nightlife networks, agricultural reassertions, musical spatialities, territorial conflicts, marginalized communities, insurgent citizenship, infrastructural precarity, diasporic bridges, and more.

This open call draws on the work of many others, like: Kamau Braithwaite’s assertion of the Caribbean nation language;5 V. S. Naipaul’s assessment of the Antilles as “half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made”;6 Yarimar Bonilla’s predictions of non-sovereign futures in a postcolonial or decolonial context;7 Derek Walcott’s definition of an aseasonal space-time;8 Sylvia Wynter’s projections of the human body within Caribbean space;9 Édouard Glissant’s transformative poetics of relation as mapped onto processes of creolization;10 and Michèle Praeger’s description of the Caribbean as a place that has been and must continue to be invented.11 These perspectives recognize the individual histories and distinct heritages of each landmass within the Caribbean Sea and reconceptualize the region as one of interconnectivity: as a series of overlapping moments that unite various trajectories and cultures into a uniquely shared experience.

Submission Guidelines


Submissions should take the form of critical essays on Caribbean books, buildings, and other architectural media, broadly defined. The intention behind this project is to highlight essays from the Caribbean imaginary, about the Caribbean imaginary. For this call, there is special emphasis on and encouragement for pieces from authors with strong ties to the Caribbean, especially those currently based in the region.


Submissions emerging from any field of study that takes architecture as a subject are encouraged. We're excited to workshop proposed ideas, but are unable to formally accept essays before a review of full drafts.


Avery Review essays are typically 3,000–4,500 words in length, and have some object of review at their core. We pay our authors $400 for all published essays. Texts should be submitted without images; you may provide six to eight images compiled into a separate PDF (keep attachments to 3MB max please).


Submissions should be emailed to editors@averyreview.com with the subject line “Open Call for Essays” by August 15, 2022.

  1. Michèle Praeger, The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). ↩

  2. Anita Sethi and Lawrence Scott, “Derek Walcott,” Guardian, March 17, 2017, link. ↩

  3. Ricardo Marto, Lourdes Álvarez, and David Suárez, “Climate Change Poses a Serious Threat to All Caribbean Nations Despite Their Low Contribution to Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions,” Inter-American Development Bank, link. ↩

  4. Nadine White, “Jamaica: Government ‘Has Begun’ Process of Removing Queen as Head of State,” Independent, March 23, 2022, link. ↩

  5. Kamau Braithwaite, Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986). ↩

  6. V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (London: Heinemann, 1994). ↩

  7. Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). ↩

  8. Sethi and Scott, “Derek Walcott.” ↩

  9. Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). ↩

  10. Édouard Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” Caribbean Quarterly 54, no. 1/2 (2008). ↩

  11. Praeger, The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary. ↩

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