Abstracts
Abstracts are listed in alphabetical order by Last Name
Ricardo J. ARRIBAS - Disruptive Spacings: Undoing the Colonial Gaze Through Art in the Caribbean
The most recent work of Caribbean visual artists often reflects a recurrent preoccupation with how the
insidious structural persistence of colonial paradigms continues to shape the Caribbean subjects’
relationship with their physical scapes and with themselves. From critical skepticism, through anguished
ambivalence and ironical distance, to playful or deceptively naïve appropriation, contemporary
Caribbean artists such as Annalee Davis, Roberto Diago, Ibrahim Miranda, Steve Ouditt, and Miguel
Luciano, incarnate in their works various attitudes regarding the homogenizing prevalence of the global
Capital in the region that nonetheless point to a common goal: the exposure and undoing of the perverse
knot that ties the Caribbean subjects with inherited modes of representation that alienate them from the
space they inhabit, frequently condemning them to a (self-)negating (self-)annihilating logic.
Through an analysis and discussion of some of the most representative work of these artists, I intend to
highlight how the spacing of persisting problems bespeaking colonialism across different geographical
locations in the region, provide the opportunity for a breakage from the sometimes morbid circuit between
physical space, its representation and the subject it prefigures. I will contend that these artists’ renderings
impel us to be acutely aware and think through the sheer materiality as well as the materializing power of
the modes of representation that nowadays still totalize the process of production of Caribbean
subjectivities, in order ultimately to force us to imagine ways of re-signifying, re-configuring and re-inscribing
the relationship between gaze, subject and space in the Caribbean.
Carol BAILEY - “Exploring a “Situated” Poetics in the Twenty-first Century Caribbean Fiction”
Critical discourse on Caribbean literary aesthetics has centered on a multiplicity of locally-derived
approaches to storytelling in fiction from the region. From the various studies have emerged articulations
about a turn to creole languages, which have then spurred literary versions of local languages, and
recourse to the oral tradition. New and emerging fiction writers therefore have an established tradition from
which they can draw to write fresh stories. How have recent authors been shaping their stories? What
different approaches are apparent in contemporary works? And how do these newer works facilitate a
theorization of Caribbean literary aesthetics? In this paper I analyze fiction by Marlon James and Kei Miller,
and Robert Antoni’s recently published novel From Flies to Whatless Boys to explore current trends in
structure, voice, and language. I argue that while the generic turn to creole and Caribbean speaking
voices initiated in the mid-twentieth century and solidified in the latter half of the twentieth century
remains, more recent works illustrate fresh renditions and simultaneously underscore a “situated” poetics
that has been characteristic of Caribbean fictions. The paper concludes by exploring what role the
internationalization of creole cultures and languages might play in the aesthetics of these recent works.
Agnel BARRON - The Transoceanic Imaginary and the Counter-culture of Modernity in Nalo Hopkinson’s
The Salt Roads
Cultural theorist, Edouard Glissant, views the plantations of the New World as a contradictory place that
fostered both the hegemonic discourses of the master as well as the subversive discourses of the slaves. In
his opinion, the plantation system thus initiated modernity into the Caribbean through colonialism and
slavery, as well as its counter-culture (what he refers to as a counter-culture of modernity) which was
represented by the systems of subversion associated with the enslaved. In this paper, I maintain that Nalo
Hopkinson’s 2003 novel, The Salt Roads, explores this counter-culture of modernity from a gendered
perspective to highlight the female role in the discourse of resistance to slavery that was articulated on the
plantations of the colonial Caribbean. Through the characters of Mer, a female plantation slave, and the
diety and sea Goddess, Ezili, Hopkinson constructs the sea as a feminine, originary space that exerts
tremendous impact on human behavior. In so doing, she renders in fictive form what Elizabeth DeLoughrey
describes as “the transoceanic imaginary.” DeLoughrey uses this term to refer to anti-colonial and antiimperialist discourses that emphasize the interrelatedness of land and sea to interrogate the tendency to
view islands and their inhabitants as bounded, static, terrestrial entities with little or no relation to the sea. In
presenting the sea space as central to the discourse of resistance articulated by the female slave,
Hopkinson also alludes to and revises the work of an older generation of Caribbean writers to privilege the
often marginalized female element in these works.
Ian A. BETHELL BENNETT - Living Landscapes or Soulless Worlds: Writing, Law and the Way We Live in Nature
This paper continues a visual and critical study that began with ‘Caribbean Re-scaping’ exploring the
annexation of Caribbean land for tourism, and the colonial legacy of disenfranchisement and
dispossession that goes along with it. The paradigm of development that currently operates in the region is
a rent-seeking, foreign-focused, dis-associative model that chooses to render local development victim to
foreign-direct investment.
Walcott often criticises the St. Lucian governments for their development behaviour. The landscape, he
laments, has been erased to become a Miami, which is significant to the understanding of self that Glissant
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Abstracts
ascribes to the history and landscape of place. There is thus a radical transformation of place and the
relationship with space changes. Persons move away from traditional lives into modern understandings of
progress and development.
This work draws on laws, literature, criticism and cultural transformation through visual and written
representations of change. It shows how many local communities have become utterly deculturated
through the selling of land and state seizure of the same. The coast is removed from the commons.
Beaches and fishing grounds are closed off to local access. Historical understandings of ownership are cut
to provide for willingness to become service providers in glitzy restaurants and bars and trendy gated
communities emptied of real soul.
Lisa R. Brown “Knowing Rivers, Seas and Oceans: Surveying the ‘tripartite self’ in Paule Marshall’s Triangular
Road.” Cristina Marras in The Role of Metaphor in Leibnitz’s Epistemology observers that “in using the
metaphor of the ocean and other aquatic metaphors, Leibniz wants to stress not only the methods of
organizing knowledge or the ability to deal with what is unknown, but also how to find the ‘right route’ in
the difficult ‘journey’ of research” (204). The ideas of ‘route,’ ‘journey’ and the ‘unknown’ are also central
to the task of life-writing where the writer attempts to confront issues of identity and belonging self and
other through various strategies of self-representation. In writing by women, especially women of colour
with multicultural roots, the strategies of self-representation must necessarily incorporate aspects of a
complex heritage.
In this paper, I discuss how Paule Marshall’s travel memoir Triangular Road,read as autobiography, functions
as a site where her complex heritage-American, Caribbean and African- is interrogated through this
epistemological process of deploying aquatic metaphors of bodies of water: rivers, seas and oceans. In the
context of travel, Marshall becomes a surveyor of specific bodies of water-- The James River, The
Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean which allow her to re-map the sources of displacements and
ruptures that constitute a ‘tripartite self’.
Michael BUCKNOR - Conceptual Residues of Imperialist Ruination: Waste, Weeds and The Poetics of Rubbish
in the Edward Baugh’s Black Sand and Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics
“The men are gone, the rot remains with us” (“Ruins of a Great House” Walcott)
“Someone must recollect your rubbish” (“Mass Man” Walcott)
In the poetry of Edward Baugh and Olive Senior, one is likely to find an emphasis on the poetics of refuse:
images of historical detritus that record both the material and metaphysical violation left in the post colony.
One of the main interventions of postcolonial criticism is to wage war on the epistemological legacy of
imperialist damage. For Elizabeth Deloughrey, imperialism led to, among other things, conceptual
corrosion: the “erasure of indigenous knowledges” and the “erection of a hierarchy of species”
(“Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place” 265). Beneath the material ruins of landscape, sea-scape and nonhuman nature that Deloughrey identifies as sites for eco-critical readings of West Indian literature, there is
also a metaphysical “rubbish heap” that postcolonial poets interrogate and challenge (265-275). The idea
of conceptual rot is taken up by Anne Laura Stoller in an article entitled “’The rot remains’: From Ruins to
Ruination” in which she takes Walcott’s “Ruins of a Great House” as an eco-critical treatise for analyzing the
mental ruinations of imperialism. In this article, Stoller asks “how empire’s ruins contour and carve through
the psychic and material space in which people live and what compounded layers of imperial debris do to
them?” (2). Both Baugh and Senior help us to answer this question. Through their poetics of rubbish, the
poets use the motifs of waste and weeds to expose the way in which hegemonic attitudes to the land are
transferred to human subjects. I argue that both Baugh and Senior revalue waste and the rejected weeds
of our society and, in so doing, engage in salvaging subjectivity from the sediments of imperial
constructions that require also the rehabilitation of our conceptual horizons about community and
humanity.
Ronald CUMMINGS - “Mek me Tell You ‘bout Kingston”: Representations of Rural and Urban Masculinities in
Jamaican Popular Performance
The narrative of the young man newly arrived to Kingston from the “country” is a recurring one in Jamaican
popular culture. This paper examines the play “Shebada Come to Town” as one particular telling of this
story that allows us to mark the presence and recurrence of particular narratives about urban and rural
masculinities in the Jamaican popular imagination. Shebada functions as a useful figure around which to
orient this discussion. Several critics have talked about his performance of queer masculinity on the
Jamaican stage. But if critics have consistently focused on Shebada’s first play “Bashment Granny” in
which he articulates his often quoted line “Me deh pon di borderline”—a comment in response to a
question about his gender, my discussion here also examines how he is complexly situated between and
traverses the borderlines between rural and urban masculinities in “Shebada Come To Town”. In my close
reading of this play, I examine how the relational social hierarchy which inscribes urban masculinities as an
aspirational norm vis-à-vis the rural, in many ways lends to a queering of rural masculinities. In particular, I
discuss the ever-present figure of the rude-boy and the girls-man (invariably associated with Kingston) as
built on a relational narrative which constructs rural masculinities as the opposite of this hegemonic norm.
My discussion here also examines the textual strategies and tropes through which this relational contrast is
sustained. In calling attention to these contrasting representations, my work also offers a broader
consideration of how the study of contemporary Jamaican theatre might help to facilitate a reflexive
engagement with the performative dimensions of Jamaican masculinities.
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Leann COPELAND - Feminism and memory in Nuestra señora de la noche by Mayra Santos Febres
This study examines the theme of feminism and memory in the novel Nuestra senora de la noche by Mayra
Santos Febres. A tradition of masculine domination and feminine subordination as a result of the norms and
social codes that favoured men and oppressed women, existed for many centuries in Hispanic American
countries. This study focuses on the subject Isabel, “la Negra” Luberza Oppenheimer who represents the
historical processes that took place in space and time convened in archives which narrate the history of
Puerto Rico. With reference to the theory of feminism as a guide, this study reveals how Santos Febres sets
out on a journey that ends in the subversion of various aspects of the patriarchal Puerto Rican system.
Santos Febres interrogates the chronicle of a black woman and her social ascent in a patriarchal society.
She emphasizes the way in which Isabel Oppenheimer was able to escape from the hole that society has
carved out for her, take control of her life and accomplish her desires, thereby gaining power, affluence
and influence in society. In this way Febres captures the essence of social hierarchy in the Puerto Rican
society. This study examines the theme of feminism which encompasses a literary analysis of poverty,
prostitution, racism. It also scrutinizes marginalization of social class, denunciation of patriarchal values,
god-parenting and the theme of memory. Lastly, the study reveals the novel as a testimony of Isabel’s life,
and indeed, a reflection of the history of Puerto Rico.
Adonis DIAZ FERNANDEZ - The Look from a Corner: The lost voice in Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Maroon
This article explores the world views of various lifestyles which expose the evolution of an individual who was
classified in canonical terms as the marginalized “other”. The paper also intends to identify the stereotyped
attitude of the three Afro-Cuban religious rules IFA, Mayombe and Carbali which are present in the
testimonial novel Biografía de un Cimarrón (1966) by Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet. The paper’s
discussion method will be to assess the presence of the lost voice from the points of view of its implications
to find a static harmony among literary texts related to Afro-Cuban religion by employing the
transculturation theory but without falling into a mere search for anthropological information. Through
close analyses of text fragments containing allegories of Afro-Cuban religions, we will be able to identify
the lost voice and using as examples; three transition phenomena in the transculturation theory by
Fernando Ortiz. Finally, we seek to examine the presence of codes related to Afro-Cuban religion that
allow us to create a strategical link between the literary text and the socio-historical-cultural environment
through the so-called lost voice presented/identified in the work.
Keywords:
other,
marginalized,
religion,
Afro-Cuban
religion,
identity,
voice,
cultural,
Orichas
Patricia DONATIEN - Into the womb of space : the eye-narrator on Guyanese horizons in Wilson Harris’
Palace of the Peacock
In 1960, Wilson Harris, the Guyanese writer and essayist started the publication of a series of novels which
would completely revise the definition and limits of literature. In Guyana Quartet and especially in his best
work Palace of the Peacock, he experiments genuinely emancipatory practices redefining the horizons of
fiction and narration. Exploring the forest, the river and humanity, Harris reshapes the boundaries of reality
and dream, life and death, good and evil, through a new vision of history, time and above all space and
environment.
At the light of his founding essay The Womb of Space, this paper will try to demonstrate how the concept of
horizon (that I have chosen as essential in the comprehension of the Guyanese space and environment) is
central to Harris’s writing. My presentation will investigate how the Guyanese writer explores the many
acceptations of this complex term, dealing with human and spatial limits, and revisiting the idea of quest
and redemption, in a striking reconstruction of myths and history.
This paper will also try to enlighten the powerful structures and systems of imagery that allow Harris an
evasion into the realm of poetry and the universe of metamorphosis and ambiguity; not in a rejection of the
canons, but in a fulfilling revelation of the subterranean tradition and in the opening of the spiritual third
eye of his dead narrator who introduces the reader to a new vision of the forest and fluvial environment.
Dania DWYER - “Both for Beauty and Use”: Figurations of Caribbean Spaces in Eighteenth Century British
Fiction
There exists a burgeoning body of scholarship that suggests that many British literary works from the long
eighteenth century may lend themselves to postcolonial readings. Such readings often require examination
of forces and phenomena that may not always be readily apparent, but that help to shape particular
figurations of colonial empire and their Others in interesting ways. This paper examines the scribal
representation of Caribbean geographical spaces in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’sPamela. I argue that in these works, Caribbean territories figure, subtly and
explicitly, as problematic, excised, controlled and controllable spaces which at once serve the machinery
of imperialism and, to varying degrees, destabilize it. These novels inadvertently invest in a kind of
spatializing that helps write the myth of Caribbean territories as vacuous, pristine enclaves, ripe for
colonization, escape and redemption – helping incite the quarrel with history in which many Caribbean
postcolonial writers are engaged.
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Abstracts
Tricia FERDINAND - Brave New Caribbean World: How Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber Re-imagines the
Caribbean
In her novel Midnight Robber, Jamaican-born science fiction and fantasy writer Nalo Hopkinson brings to
life a fictionalized Caribbean colonized planet which stretches the boundaries of traditional West Indian
literary cartography. Her novel expressly references and draws upon Caribbean language and dialect
styles, folk belief and folkloric figures from several distinct nations within the Anglo-phone Caribbean to
effectively create a fictional futuristic pan-Caribbean community that boasts several aspects of West
Indian culture. I argue that, in addition to playing with the concepts of national vs. regional identity within
the Caribbean and with folk motifs as cultural iconography, this novel brings into question contemporary
Caribbean culture’s relationship to physical ‘place’.
Curdella FORBES - Territory, Kinship and the Global City: Reading Haiti through Frederick Douglass and
Akashic.
The paper compares the different concepts of ‘universal humanity’ into which discourses about Haiti are
deployed in two contrasting types and periods of writing: contemporary Haitian and post-(Haitian)
Revolution African-American. Specifically, the 2011 story collection Haiti Noir published by Akashic Books,
and the group of African American newspapers that most consistently engaged Haiti during the 19th
century: Freedom’s Journal and the Frederick Douglass newspapers are examined. Akashic’s Noir series, in
charting the ‘distinctive inner darkness’ of the cities and modern spaces of Europe, Africa, Asia and the
Americas emblematizes a peculiarly post 9/11 vision of globality and the human condition. The equally
global vision of the 19th century African-American newspapers, and their unique chain of association with
Douglass’ diplomatic dispatches during his stint as US ambassador to Haiti, form a curious contrast with this
perspective. How is Haiti expanded as symbolic territory between the different discourses then and now,
there and here? What are the different ways in which kinship and ‘humanities’ are deployed in that
cartography? What does it all mean, for the terms in which we think about Haiti now?
Elizabeth DELOUGHREY, George HANDLEY, Lizabeth PARAVISINI-GEBERT,
Revisiting Caribbean Literature and the Environment: 10 Years Later
and
Elaine
SAVORY
-
Nearly a decade ago, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley published the first booklength volume to stage a dialogue between ecocritical theory and Caribbean literature.
Entitled Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (U Virginia Press, 2005) the
collection’s founding premise arose from the visionary work of Edouard Glissant, who argued that the
history of diaspora and plantation slavery created a rupture between nature and culture in the region’s
imaginary. Organized into four thematic sections-- “Natural Histories,” “Myths of Origins,” “Hybridity and
Creolization,” and “Aesthetics of the Earth”-- the collection included prominent voices in the field, including
Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, and Raphaël Confiant. Issues
addressed by the contributors in the collection included challenging myths of paradise, interrogating
plantation slavery and agricultural regimes, exploring Sylvia Wynter’s division between the plot and
provision ground, queering the landscape, mitigating issues of deforestation through visual imaginaries, and
addressing the complex pressures of tourism and globalization. Ten years later, we’d like to reflect on some
of the assumptions and issues that seemed integral at the start of the third millennium, and comment on
the ways in which the field has expanded and changed in the wake of climate change and what is
increasingly called the “anthropocene.” As a roundtable, this panel will stage a conversation about
ongoing issues as well as how new ecological challenges in turn shape aesthetics.
Anthony J. DIGESARE - Confining City, Confining Country: Imagined and Visible Environments in Caribbean
Cinema
Early in Sugar Cane Alley (1983) director Euzhan Palcy goes to great lengths to show the openness of the
landscape surrounding the small shacks the film's characters live in. However, once the overseer -- a white
man, dressed in white, riding a horse -- comes around, the children run and hide; they all squeeze into a
tiny shack to eat lunch rather than enjoy their food in the vast country. In Horace Ové's film Pressure (1974),
the main character Tony is seen walking along the Thames as a white man passes him on a mechanized
boat; this is after Tony has been turned down for multiple jobs, unable to assimilate. Although the former
film takes place in Martinique during the 1930s, the latter in London during the 1970s, by drawing on Stuart
Hall's ideas of diaspora in the Caribbean population, not only do the landscapes effect the viewer, but also
the historical connection between the cultures becomes obvious: Jose writes about Africa, Tony dreams of
the Caribbean bringing forth another type of landscape: an historical one, one they dream of and hold in
their cultural memory. Both boys are trying to find a way to survive in the modern world; both face adversity
while attempting to assimilate and advance: Ové and Palcy control the viewer’s understanding of the
filmic themes by using environmental motifs.
Orrieann FLORIUS - Excavating the Subterranean in Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone
For my paper, I am interested in exploring the trope of the subterranean in Dennis Scott’s play An Echo in
the Bone. The “subterranean” is excavated from the existing idea of the “submarine.” The submarine, as
examined by Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Édouard Glissant, is a “subtle and submarine” way to
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Abstracts
describe convergence of influences that is needed to create unified Caribbean sense of history and
memory. The submarine details the importance of the sea in the physical journey of people to the
Caribbean (i.e. the Middle Passage) and uses the physical qualities of the sea to describe the
metaphysical process of creolization; the fluidity of the sea mixes all historical influences together and
submerges them in its depths. Like the submarine, the subterranean is also an unearthing of history and
memory but it focuses on the metaphysical qualities of the landscape. Working, owning, and inheriting
land roots characters in their ancestral history and counteracts feelings of cultural and temporal
displacement.
In An Echo in the Bone, Scott invokes the subterranean to exhume history from Jamaica’s landscape.
During the Nine Night celebration for Crew, a man who is found dead after he is blamed for the murder of
a white landowner, memories are unearthed and the living become possessed by the spirit of their
ancestors. Time periods merge to (re)construct a consciousness grounded in family land. For Scott, family
land is a spiritual space in which memories and histories are deeply buried.
Kela Nnarka FRANCIS - Mapping the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival Ritual
There are two general strains of discourse regarding Trinidad and Tobago carnival—political and
performance. However, while carnival can be a site of rebellion and theatre, the festival is also the site of
spiritual and social ritual. The ritual potency of carnival has been examined and championed by writers
such as Earl Lovelace and Kamau Brathwaite, while Hollis Liverpool and JD Elder establish the African
ancestry Trinidad carnival to give the briefest of lists. Yet the mapping of the ritual remains, by and large,
undone. Carnival has become a structured ritual with set days for ritual activities and a set route. Recently,
the National Carnival Bands Association and the National Carnival Council attempted to change the
parade route which indicates the necessity of outlining what the carnival ritual is and how it functions.
This paper will map carnival as a space for ritual performance, discussing the ritual significance of the
events, the order in which they take place, and the parade route using the theories of vital force and the
“fourth stage.” This paper will also discuss the significance of the ritual as a national event as used in
Lovelace’s Is Just A Movie.
Melissa GARCIA - Myth and Fantasy of Place in Children’s Literature
“The life of the landscape/riverscape/skyscrape is pertinent to the reality of place. That life differs from
human life but is of invaluable importance” – W.Harris
As eco-criticism and concern for sustaining the ecology increase features of setting that incorporates
landscape as well as watersheds become central to reading literature of the Caribbean region. Similarly
lacking in sufficient academic attention are issues surrounding Caribbean childhood (The Child and the
Caribbean Imagination, 2012). Issues within the Caribbean around treatment of the natural ecology as well
as that of children are layered in historic and economic factors, however, through examination of
Caribbean literature these layers are peeled away to expose what and how geography, history, culture,
and nature relate to one another.
Through my exploration of children’s literature set in the Caribbean I examine what makes a Caribbean
Children’s story and how does the text present the natural and physical environment to the child reader.
These questions are significant in light of the role that children’s literature plays within a global community.
Simultaneously there is a growing emphasis placed on reading literature through the lens of the
environment. By exploring the setting of modern children’s texts that employ the natural environment I will
discuss the relationship between Caribbean Children’s literature and attitudes towards the Caribbean
ecology.
Margaret GILL - Charisma and Leadership
The contest for and control of state resources, which includes contests over the power to proscribe, and
govern the actions and ideas of community members is an arena in which leadership is usually examined in
political science. George Lamming also undertakes such examination in the worlds he creates in his novels.
One of the ways he represents this contest is through a type of character which he calls “The Honourable
Member”. Fellow Barbadian writers Jeanette Layne Clarke and Calypsonian, the Mighty Gabby, similarly
remark on the failings and flaws of this character. Layne Clarke calls them “a veritable breed apart” and
Gabby wants to expose “their history”, because while their privileges enable them to enjoy the life,
“Westminster killing we”.
David W HART - The Eco-Machinations of Etzler in Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys
Antoni’s imaginative tale of his own family history provides a glimpse into the trials and tribulations of the
Trinidad Emigration Society, headed by the German inventor and utopian charlatan JA Eztler (an actual
historical person), and including thirty-six members of the Society who decided to relocate their lives from
England to Trinidad in 1845. Antoni’s novel is steeped in literary narrative stylistics rooted in the very human
tale of William S. Tucker and his family. Their story is likewise intertwined with Etzler’s goals of overtaking the
soil, wind and waters of the Western world. This particular narrative of colonization in Trinidad may be
viewed in ecological terms.
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This discussion will explore how Etzler’s romanticized promise of Paradise in the New World becomes more
of a King Lear-like tragedy as Antoni’s thoroughly postmodern novel carves out its own literary map of the
spatial geography of Trinidad’s land, history, and people. Further, Etzler’s desire for physical control,
harnessing the power of the land, air, and ocean, is parallel to the physical and spiritual ownership of the
land at Chaguabarriga, where there is often a disjuncture of ownership to interaction with the land
between the ruling elite, the members of the TES working the land, and the local help from African and
Warahoon laborers.
Elizabeth JACKSON - Rewriting Heart of Darkness in Guyana: Landscape as an active character in David
Dabydeen’s Our Lady of Demerara
Given the history of colonial appropriation of land in the West Indies, followed by ongoing environmental
destruction wrought by irresponsible governments, local businesses and multinational corporations, Edward
Said has argued that “the land is recoverable at first only through imagination”. There are of course many
different ways of imagining the natural environment, and Edouard Glissant has identified a literary discourse
in which “landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full
character”. This is certainly true of David Dabydeen’s characterization of the Guyanese jungle in his 2004
novel Our Lady of Demerara. Here the protagonist’s journey up the Demerara River has obvious
intertextual references to Marlow’s journey up the Congo River in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like
Conrad’s Marlow, Dabydeen’s alienated character Lance is attempting to trace the journey of someone
who has gone before him, in this case a missionary priest who disappeared into the jungle many years
previously. In addition to satisfying his curiosity, Lance is seeking spiritual redemption and escape from the
alienating effects of metropolitan “civilization”. However, far from idealizing nature, Our Lady of Demerara
presents it, like the garden in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, as a place of decay and
decomposition as much as of regeneration. Although Dabydeen personifies the jungle and emphasizes its
“unruly” aspects, he, unlike Conrad, does not present it as a threatening presence. On the contrary, he
shows the continuities between human desires, human activities, and the processes of so-called “nature”,
implying that we ignore these vital connections at our peril.
Dannabang KUWABONG - “Dramatizing the eco-politics of land and empowerment in Dennis Scott in An
Echo in the Bone and David Edgecombe’s Kirnon’s Kingdom.”
The politics of land ownership and sustainable development in post-abolition and post-independent
Caribbean nations is formulated by Frantz Fanon, 2004: 9) in The Wretched of the Earth. He writes that “for a
colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first the land, the land which will
bring them bread and, above all, dignity”. In order to achieve this, Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism
argues for the use of a revolutionary imagination that recognizes imperialisms acts of “geographical
violence through which virtually every space in the world is . . . brought under [European] control . . . . “
and which results in “the history of colonial servitude inaugurated by the loss of locality to the outsider”
(1993: 77) I take a postcolonial eco-critical perspective to argue that “far from putting an end to old-style
imperialism … modern (post-war) development finds new ways of instantiating it, e.g. through the ongoing
collaboration between national governments and gargantuan transnational companies . . . whose
financial and technical assistance is provided in terms that continues to favor the West,” ( Graham
Huggan, and Helen Tiffin, 2010: 30) to read Dennis Scott’s (2008) An Echo in the Bone, and David
Edgecombe’s (2001) Kirnon’s Kingdom. I argue that Scott and Edgecombe show radical awareness of
land ownership and sustainable usage as the best form of emancipation that can avoid a repeat of the
“environmental and human degradation” of the “earlier historical violence of the Atlantic slave trade and
slavery in the region” and which “tourism [is now] linked” in the present. (Jana Evans Braziel, 2005:115,
Stephanie Black, 2001, Abderrahmane Sissako , 2006) I conclude that Scott’s and Edgecombe’s poetics of
nationhood are rooted in their passionate genealogical, performative, historical, and geographical
identifications with their Caribbean cultural, historical, and linguistic poetics of emancipation.
Corey LAMONT - The “Matter” of Visibility: Negotiating Caribbean-Canadianness in Nalo-Hopkinson’s “A
Habit of Waste”
The Canadian government’s reliance on the appellation “visible minority” (a designation codified in its
1984 Employment Equity Act) as part of an effort to strategically manage its expansion of imported labor,
particularly from the global “south,” including the Caribbean, exposes the contradictory nature of a
nationalist project that discursively imagines the state as staunchly anti-racist yet organizes its “citizenry” in
explicitly racialized terms as “Canadians” and “others.” Canada’s project of nation building, rooted firmly
in its discourse of “multiculturalism,” is thus deeply invested in the culturally and politically fraught “matter”
of visibility, the policing of racialized identity at the level of the skin. In this regard, the skin, especially for
those who are racially “othered,” can be a burden. In her short story collection Skin Folk (2001), Nalo
Hopkinson gives voice to this burden in her treatment of both the limits of identity that are inscribed at the
surface of the skin and the immense possibilities that exist in a world beyond that surface. This paper uses
the story “A Habit of Waste” to examine Hopkinson’s concern with sociocultural values ascribed to raced,
sexed and gendered codes of identity which render the body intelligible. The story engages gendered
dimensions of the relationship between race and nationality, specifically the ways in which Afro-Caribbean
women’s bodies are “read” culturally concerning questions of racialized citizenship in Canada. As Judith
Butler notes in Bodies that Matter, some bodies “exist” in (an)other domain and “do not matter in the same
way” (xi) as those inscribed as the normative “sign” against which the construction of otherness is
determined. I argue that Hopkinson’s exploration of these issues radicalizes Canada’s official policy of
multiculturalism.
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Suelin LOW CHEW TUNG - Sketches of the human Grenadian landscape
A Patch of Bare Earth: Sketches of the human Grenadian landscape (2013), is written by a painter who
writes short stories. I propose to speak to my preoccupation with visual verse, by illustrating the following
paintings described in the sketch Against the Roundness of a Belly.
Appointment in the Cemetery: A wife seeks help from an obeah woman, who invokes spirits to retrieve a
wayward husband from another woman’s clutches. In the foreground is a freshly covered grave, lit by
three candles. Midground, the wife removes her clothing in preparation for the ritual.
Rum Punch: On a bright sunny day, a man slips from his perch in a mango tree, and dies in a patch of
empty rum bottles, spent lottery tickets and rotten fruit. Several of the bottle labels allude to his name. A
cricket match is in progress in the background.
Bawling in Dusty Rose: Reminiscent of the Scream a distressed woman is screaming. Just outside a mental
institution painted dusty pink, and situated on a bluff over a rushing river. Behind her, the staff of the
institution approach, across a bridge. Nearby is a small doll in christening clothing, flung carelessly to the
ground.
If I had a Hammer: Through lacy curtains, a man is seen beating his wife with a big stone, presumably taken
from a heap next to the wash basin in the yard. The neighbours in the foreground are laughing unaware. In
the background, a woman pulls in her door, another closes her shutters.
Antonia MACDONALD - Reading Old Postcards of Grenada
Caribbean picture postcard production has always been deeply entangled in a colonial enterprise.
Through this visual representation, the Caribbean was being discursively managed and regulated by a
variety of aesthetic codes, ones which in their fetishizing of the Caribbean were oblivious to the material
reality of its citizens and more fundamentally, to Afro-Caribbean subjectivity. Specifically, Caribbean
ordinary and everyday activities by virtue of being put on photographic display were exoticized, backbreaking labour sanitized.
This presentation focuses specifically on some ‘labour’ postcards of early twentieth century AfroGrenadians. Making a case for the creative and often unpredictable ways that individuals negotiate their
environment so as to offer forms of resistance to domains of power, I am contending that in spite of this
exoticization of labour, these images of Afro-Grenadians workers can be read as moments when they were
able to transcend their subaltern location, so as to become the subjects rather than objects of inquiry. I
offer these images of Afro-Grenadians at work as interventions that destabilize the presumed hegemonic
visual economy of a paradisial Grenada. Further, I am suggesting that the analytical lens with which we
read postcards need to be refocused, so as to show more clearly what was being back-grounded in these
postcard images rather than what dominated the foreground. Such contrapuntal readings, in making
omissions visible, will help to uncover stories of Afro-Caribbean subjectivity and agency embedded within
imperial narratives of the Caribbean.
Keilah MILLS - Gender, Place and Colonial Discourse in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Toni Morrison’s
Tar Baby: An Ecocritical Reading
This paper explores the ways in which Rhys and Morrison use the relationship between gender and place to
engage a critical reading of discourses of colonialism in the Caribbean. By refracting the analysis to the
female lens, the logic of gender and place in relation to the Caribbean becomes open to commentary. In
both works place is the space in which various notions of self- and womanhood, cultural and historical
legacies are re-examined. For the protagonists, their respective relationships with place function as
metaphors for their journeys to locate the self and a place of belonging, as well as the means to set their
own terms of womanhood. Place is also the symbolic repository of the warped dynamics that characterize
the European (colonizer) and African (colonized) relationship in African Diaspora history. The representation
and juxtaposition of rural and urban places underscores the clashing of inner and outer conflicts the
female protagonists face in the assertion of their identities. This connection also aids in debunking certain
myths associated with European and African concepts of female identity. The open-ended conclusions of
the narratives and the journey of the protagonists mimic the dialogue that governs the unfinished process
of reconciliation between the European and African worlds.
Paula MORGAN - Evil Forest and Paradise Regained: Playing in the Darkness of the Haitian Earth
Haiti caries an overdetermined location in the global imaginary. The site of the first black republic to
appropriate freedom from imperialism since 1804, the nation and its people have been demonized for
rejecting a subjugated position in the imperial signifying system. That Haiti should dare to consider its right to
be free and moreso should go on to seize that freedom is an assault that the Western World cannot readily
forgive and will not forget. In retaliation, the representational and political wars rage, in increasingly subtle
forms, until today. With reference to visual and literary texts, this paper explores representations of Haiti in
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life and literature as evil forest and tourist playground; as symbolic locus for the contagion of blackness and
disease; and, as repository of resistance, endurance and healing.
Nicole ROBERTS - Personhood and psychological trauma: Reading survival in the novel Cualquier miércoles
soy tuya by Mayra Santos Febres
In the Hispanic Caribbean, studies in popular culture, alterity and resistance to dominant culture became
increasingly popular from the 1980s onwards. Moreover, the potentiality of the body also assumed an
importance. My interest in this paper lies specifically with the representation of identity in the Hispanic
Caribbean and on the ways in which contemporary Hispanic Caribbean narrative is a site in which
constructions of alterity highlight the re-imaginations of identity. For the Afro Puerto Rican writer Mayra
Santos Febres, the urban centre of San Juan presents the reader with characters who experience
multifaceted problems and through whom we learn poignant details about ourselves and the
dehumanised Caribbean that we are creating today.
In this paper, I make a close critical reading of Santos Febres’ novel Cualquier miércoles soy tuya [Any
Wednesday I’m yours]. Set in contemporary Puerto Rico, the novel is a sort of fiction noir which recounts the
transient life of the urban underworld in San Juan and in which two murders take place. My analysis uses
the concept of Intersectionality to analyse the oppressive institutions which mark the lives of urban
inhabitants in the novel. Specifically the paper examines the character of Tadeo and describes the ways
in which he must navigate race and poverty (or class); all dimensions of his social life. Through these social
charateristics, the paper analyses the ways in which Santos Febres describes the oppression in the country
as systematic and suggests that it is endemic across the Caribbean archipelago.
Kezia PAGE. Re-visioning “postcolonial” environments: Imagining Alternative Genealogies
Mark McWatt’s, “The Tyranny of Influence” in his linked collection Suspended Sentences and Curdella
Forbes’ “Stele” in her collection A Permanent Freedom make a fascinating pair as they, through fable,
present myths that chronicle creation and apocalypse using meta-narrative and mytho-poetics. Both
narratives are themselves about narrative; they employ fable to provoke/inspire a (re)thinking of the
Caribbean, to make sense of origins in the face of crumbling societies and in the face of dispersal and
diaspora. In this paper I will focus on the imaginative landscapes/environments McWatt and Forbes choose
in order to establish new genealogies for Caribbean experience. How do these imaginative spaces impact
and reveal the cross-generational social worlds they span? How do they expand postcolonial genealogies
beyond the colonial archive?
Kaneesha C PARSARD - Reproducing the land, reproducing the laborer: The anti-picturesque in Michel Jean
Cazabon’s Trinidad landscapes
The archive of nineteenth-century Trinidad is small: the landscape paintings of Michel-Jean Cazabon, a
free man of color, provide some of the clearest scenes of this period and place. While scholars have
argued that his technique is derivative of European traditions, I argue that Cazabon’s landscapes feature
an anti-picturesque aesthetic, making visible through cleared paths and laboring bodies the transformation
that the plantation labor is effecting on the landscape. Accordingly, I conduct a reading of View of Port of
Spain from Laventille Hill and Sunrise near Port of Spain in conversation with two sources: historical
documents concerning indentured Indian women and their conditions on sugar estates and Lawrence
Scott’s 2012 novel Light Falling on Bamboo, which fictionalizes the life of Michel Jean Cazabon. The
juxtaposition of these scenes and discourses troubles the reproduction of Marxian labor power and the
landscape in the post-emancipation plantation economy. Here, I pose an Atlantic-Indian Ocean
modernity, concerned with the ways in which colonial administrators ordered the landscape, built
environments, and racial difference. In this paper, I argue that Cazabon’s activity during the midnineteenth century gestures to the rise of indentureship and changes in access to land and soil and use
practices. Likewise, contemporaneous Colonial Office memos reflect anxiety about the skewed sex ratios
among Indian migrants and the possibility that Indian men would couple or collaborate with African
women. In conclusion, this project foregrounds labor and sexuality in Michel Jean Cazabon’s landscapes to
challenge colonial ways of surveying, seeing and knowing.
George Micajah PHILLIPS - “Other than a Pebble”: Lamming, Deforestation, and the Limits of the Human
The long history of West Indian imperialism tells a story displacement, slavery, and deforestation. It is a
history that begins with the importation of African slaves in the 17th century who were tasked with clearing
land for the region’s first sugarcane plantations. These three factors—forced displacement, slavery, and
deforestation—remained interconnected for the next three hundred years of colonial rule.
This paper argues that Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin ought to be read in this context in order to
recognize the links between western imperialism and ecological crisis. The novel’s central story, the
development of G., takes place against the backdrop of Barbadian modernization that includes logging its
forests to make way for railways. These narratives converge when Pa bids G “look at how the face o’ the
village change,” and G. must come to terms with a formerly wooded “view” that was now “unobstructed.
Not a tree in sight within the village.” As a former migrant worker on the Panama Canal, Pa also presents
readers with the possibility that midcentury Barbados was heir to the legacy of early-20th-century Panama:
a site of the massive imposition of industrialization onto an iconic natural landscape and one of modernity’s
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classic stories of industrial might subduing the natural world. Just as historians are now recognizing the
building of the Panama Canal as an important event for considering the environmental effects of imperial
policies, literary historians today can read Castle as a micro-narrative telling one story of the age of the
Anthropocene.
Candice PITTS - Nationalism, Landscapism, and the Struggle for Identification and Belongingness in
Jamaica
In Margaret Cezair-Thompson's The Pirate's Daughter, the concepts of independence and nation in
Jamaica become invidious social constructs defined by those in power—particularly wealthy, influential
middle-class men. The story of May Flynn, the titular character, is set against the backdrop of parallel
nationalist discourses that occur on Navy Island, led by Errol Flynn, and mainland Jamaica, led by male
nationalist leaders. She is not claimed as a biological daughter by Errol Flynn, which makes her refer to
herself as a “bastard”; and her European features earn her the epithet of the “other Jamaican,” which
makes her feel as someone on the “outside,” and as one not “belonging anywhere” both within her family
and her nation (indeed, the colonial system of Jamaica omitted certain kinds of people, such as
“bastards,” until Michael Manley adjudicated concerns of illegitimacy by passing the Bastard Act of 1972).
May attributes her exclusion to the male imagining and the superstructure of the nation that perpetuates,
upholds, and sanctions certain colonial legacies. She therefore deploys her ideology of landscapism to
challenge the exclusiveness and artificiality of the nation. May claims that landscapism is a love for the
land as opposed to the nation; the emphasis is not on patriotism, it is on landscapism. This paper will
examine the implications of positioning landscapism as a viable alternative to nationalism, and it will
examine the implications of a re/turn to the land as the primary form of self definition and identification.
Dr. Debra PROVIDENCE - [De]territorialiasing Tan Tan in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
Nalo Hopkinson’s works have been celebrated for the ways in which they mesh science/speculative fiction
with elements of Caribbean folklore. Equally important is her centering women’s experiences as her texts
implore readers to visit alien landscapes and dystopian futures. With a focus on Midnight Robber this paper
will explore Hopkinson’s treatment of Tan Tan’s mental and physical experiences draws parallel with her
presentation of the landscapes of two disparate worlds. Hopkinson constructs two realities for Tan Tan: the
structure and order of the regulated spaces on Toussaint are associated with the innocence of her
childhood and the wilds of New Half-Way Tree with her experience of mental and physical violations. Her
narrative also highlights the ways Tan Tan’s mental and physical selves are territorialized within societies that
are founded on prohibitive ideas of women’s bodies and her deterritorialization as she journeys between
worlds and into the hostile landscape of New Half-Way Tree. Finally, this paper will highlight how Tan Tan’s
mental and physical deterritorialization becomes key to her survival in a threatening landscape.
Kim ROBINSON-WALCOTT. A Borrowed Suffering: Middle-class Political Protagonists in John Hearne’s Voices
under the Window and the Cayuna Novels
Writing in 1969, Sylvia Wynter said:
One can only hope that [John] Hearne’s next novel…will break new ground… for it is only there …
that Hearne will cross his Rubicon; will learn, through a new emotional identification, how to see the
white Mahler through the black Henneky’s eyes… This new kind of eye, the outsider’s eye, will
mean that Hearne, having paid his dues, will have learnt how to really sing the blues for a Henneky;
he would then have no need of a borrowed suffering.
Hearne was being criticised by Wynter for what she saw as his light-skinned, upper-middle-class cultural and
political orientation, his detachment from the dispossessed black Jamaican majority, as expressed in his first
5 novels – a criticism that was also expressed by others such as, famously, George Lamming, resulting in
Hearne’s exclusion from the emerging West Indian literary canon continuing up to today. Yet this
orientation was in fact shared by the light-skinned middle-class men and women who piloted the
emergence of a nationalist movement and the forging of a new national identity. This paper examines
Hearne’s first novel Voices under the Window (1955) and his four subsequent Cayuna novels published in
the period 1956-61. Voices features a light-skinned, upper-middle-class Jamaican protagonist whose
journey of social and political awakening and activism is familiar to those knowledgeable of the
emergence of nationalism in pre-Independence Jamaica. The Cayuna novels depict a Jamaican middle
class increasingly disenchanted with political radicalism. Hearne’s writing reflected the motivations of the
class that was, and is still, instrumental in the process and realization of independence. More critically, it
described the limitations of that class, and the tensions and complications of Jamaican national realization
that actually occurred. Hearne’s work, then, offers a new way of thinking about the political dilemmas and
search for solutions that Jamaica experienced over his lifetime and continues to experience today.
María Cristina RODRÍGUEZ - Hybrid Biographies by Andrea Stuart and Julia Alvarez: In Search of Unknown
Voices and Presences
Caribbean women writers rescue shards of a past where women are absent, invisible, erased, or minimized.
Men act, resist, and forge a postcolonial society where women are very seldom protagonists. Dionne Brand
in At the Full and Change of the Moon and Mayra Montero in Del rojo de su sombra bring back Marie
Urzule to claim gods, land, and a place in history. Maryse Condé in Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? and
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Jamaica Kincaid in The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel write the memoirs of their women ancestors,
those who were denied a voice, an image, a story of their own. These and other women writers from across
the Caribbean create literary cartographies by drawing new maps of geographies as movements, fluid
zones, erasures of boundaries, and open histories, always with the possibility of change and of becoming
more inclusive. This paper explores two hybrid biographies by Andrea Stuart—Sugar in the Blood and The
Rose of Martinique, A Life of Napoleon’s Josephine—and Julia Alvarez’s In the Name of Salomé and Saving
the World as projects to rescue, through new mappings of Caribbean history, historical figures that
remained on the sidelines of official crónicas, diaries, letters, travel reports.
Zenaida Sanjurjo RODRÍGUEZ - (Re)Imagining the Past: The Importance of Landscape Margaret CezairThompson’s The Pirate’s Daughter and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones
Isabel Hoving’s In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women’s Writing argues that writers
“use the close association between landscape, time, and memory to create their narratives of past and
present” (104). Landscape is tangible; therefore, it is “filled with (often repressed) collective memories”. The
need for landscape and space as an alternative site of memory is felt in Caribbean literature too, where
the absence of meaningful history is felt more acutely. (105)
The historical novel--defined as just not a “retelling” of historical events as would a textbook but a reexperiencing of the past through an imagination an re-interpretation--is present in the works of several
Caribbean authors and is constantly being analyzed and researched; yet it is the connection between
landscape and history within the historical novel that sparks my particular interest for presenting this paper.
Although it could be argued that this affinity between landscape and history can be seen in the
Caribbean novels regardless of gender, works done by women bring to the table elements of the female
experience worth examining and researching. This paper explores Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s historical
novels: The Pirate’s Daughter and The True History of Paradise as well as Michelle Cliff’s Abeng in order to
highlight the importance of history within the Caribbean novel and at the same time bring into the
discussion a possibility of re-imagining the past through the use of landscape—the story found in the
contours of the Caribbean island.
Malena RODRÍGUEZ CASTRO - Memory, Oblivion and Forgiveness: The Massacre River rewritten by Women
One of the most enduring and symbolic spatial figures in Caribbean Literature has been the river. As such,
all the meanings that culture has endowed it have been explored: oblivion, life, purification, transit,
paradox of stillness and movement and as a frontier that either divides, reconciles or negotiates. The
Massacre River that traces the geographical, linguistic, ethnic and political border in La Hispaniola
between Haiti and the Dominican Republic has been the site of a series of narratives told by many voices
from different islands and from multiple perspectives. The River is a zone of economic exchanges
(merchandise that includes human bodies) and also a zone of war (in the pursuit of hegemonies that
includes identities). As such, it is a topic more akin to a masculine gaze. Nonetheless its relevance within a
more contemporary poetics has been engaged by woman writers such as Rita Indiana, Julia Alvarez,
Mayra Montero and Edwige Danticat. As Edouard Glissant has stated we are people of the sea (pueblos
del mar) in an extended marine horizon that is at the same time cojointed by a subterranean mountain
range. But we are also inland people, condemned to look at each other across river banks. My
presentation proposes how the stories knitted by these women resignify the geographical and cultural
meaning of the frontier that the river presupposes establishing a new relationship between memory,
oblivion and forgiveness through other symbolic strategies that involves other exchanges: of stories
yuxtaposed and intersubjetivity.
Petal SAMUEL - Ecological Archives: Landscape/Seascape as Archive in Caribbean Literature
Caribbean studies, as a field, has long grappled with questions of historical erasure and archival silence,
with scholars such as the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot calling our attention to the epistemological “silencing”
of the Haitian Revolution. However, as Edward Baugh argues, the “’loss of history’” has constituted “a
positive, creative condition of Caribbean man, and the supremacy, for Caribbean man, of imagination
over history.” My project pursues this line of thought by asking: how might the treatment of literature as a
form of archive challenge what we understand, ontologically and epistemologically, to be an “archive”?
In this paper, I consider the ways in which Caribbean writers and artists turn to landscapes and seascapes
as alternative forms of archive. In his collection of essays, Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant writes: “So
history is spread out beneath this surface, from the mountains to the sea, from north to south, from the forest
to the beaches…Our landscape is its own monument.” Glissant suggests here that imaginative meditations
on Caribbean landscapes open up alternative narratives of black life under colonialism, that combat
historical silencing. My paper will attend to such “ecological archives” imagined by writers such as Maryse
Condé and Sylvia Wynter. I suggest that these writers attempt to cultivate a radical form of historical
consciousness that responds to the destruction and devaluation of documentary archives of black life.
Rather than historical paradigms that rely on a static material source, these writers construct archives in
changeable and organic mediums and depict sources as themselves live and in flux.
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Karen SANDS-O’CONNOR - Caribbean Nostalgia or British Activism?: The Environment and Publishing for
West Indian Children in Britain
Following publications such as the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants’ report on The
Education of West Indian Immigrant Children (1968) and Bernard Coard’s How the West Indian Child is
Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System (1970), educational publishers in the UK began
to produce supplemental reading materials designed to address the children of West Indian immigrants in
British schools. While some of these texts, such as Pamela Schaub’s My Friend’s Country (1973), were written
by British authors, others came from authors born in the Caribbean, including Sam Selvon’s A Drink of Water
(1968), Beryl Gilroy’s A Visitor from Home (1973), and Dorothy Jolly’s The Little Scarlet Ibis (1976). Although
often appearing to invoke nostalgia for West Indian people and places, all of these texts use the natural
environment of the Caribbean to make subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—political points about
colonialism, economic development of the Caribbean, West Indian immigration to Britain, and the
interaction between West Indians and Britons. Using scholars of the Caribbean and the environment such
as Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Helen Tiffin, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, this paper will examine the political
messages stemming from environmental motifs in these texts, and also contrast the lived and the imagined
environments of the West Indian child in British educational publishing in the 1960s and 1970s.
Elaine SAVORY - Colonial and Postcolonial Nutritional Ecologies in Anglophone Caribbean Texts.
Food (production, preparation and ingestion) is at the core of human culture, a constant daily concern,
deeply implicated in the emergence of hierarchies and a key element in globalization. Cultural
anthropologist Sidney Minz’s Sweetness and Power (1985), directs attention to the centrality of the food
chain in Caribbean history. Richard Drayton’s study of British imperialist obsession with plants and their uses,
(Nature’s Government, 2000) offers much evidence of ways empire altered food sources. In The Tropics Bite
Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (Valerie Loichot, 2013), francophone Caribbean texts are
read as cultural “eaters” of colonizing texts.
Informed by such scholarship, this paper explores ecologies of food and nutrition in Anglophone texts:
Richard Ligon’s The True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657), Mrs. Carmichael’s Domestic
Manners (1833), Eric Walrond’s “Drought” (1926), Willi Chen’s “Trotters” (1988), Pauline Melville’s The
Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) and Austin Clarke’ s The Polished Hoe (2002). This group of texts references the
role of food in particular Caribbean cultures from the beginning of colonization to the twentieth century,
colonial to anticolonial and postcolonial. Food is important as content, but also positioned through
language and textual structure to persuade the reader to “ingest” what they are reading with regard to
Caribbean culture and history, in effect acting as a key element in a particular textual “ecology” which
functions within a particular historical moment.
Geraldine SKEETE - A Literary Account of Hurricane-Devastated Grenada – Charting Paul Keens-Douglas’s
Oral/Scribal Performance in “Story of a Storm: Ivan was an Education”
This year is the tenth anniversary of the passage of Hurricane Ivan through the Caribbean in 2004 – one of
the most intense, severe and catastrophic storms ever experienced. Grenada suffered immense
destruction and faced acute humanitarian and environmental crisis. Storyteller Paul Keens-Douglas – a
Trinidadian with Grenadian roots – narrates the devastation and plots not only the hurricane’s path across
the island and its consequences but also the people’s attitude and reaction while preparing for,
experiencing, and recovering from the ordeal. In the foreword to Keens-Douglas’ Role Call (1997), Mervyn
Morris observes that the book of poetry and short stories, like the author’s previous publications, is
“entertaining and serious”. Much the same can be said for his short narrative “Story of a Storm: Ivan was an
Education” in his 2008 publication As Ah Was Sayin’… in which the distinctive features of his oeuvre are
employed in didactic, satirical, and humorous ways to convey the fear, loss and suffering of a hurricanedevastated nation; the resolute spirit and optimism of its people; and the lessons to be learnt about
awareness and preparedness in the wake of this natural disaster. The paper focuses primarily on KeensDouglas’s oral account on the page and secondarily on the audio recording by examining Creole usage,
perspective and voice, oral / scribal techniques, literary tropes, humour as a didactic and mitigatory
element, and the generic structure of the joke to convey his success at using the short story to depict how
“Ivan was ah experience” (As Ah Was Sayin’…, 44).
Rodolphe SOLBIAC - Caribbean Canadian Literary Cartography of the Caribbean in the 2000 Decade:
Writing Canadianess, Remitting Caribbeaness.
This paper examines the features and the stakes of representations of the Caribbean and Canada in
Caribbean-Canadian novels published in the 2000 decade. It argues that in Ramabai Espinet’s The
Swinging Bridge, David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Austin Clarke’s More, representations of the
Caribbean Canadians’ experience in Canada and of memories of the regional Caribbean consist of an
act of emancipatory literary cartography contributing to a positive memory re-rooting of the Caribbean
Canadian diasporic subject in a rehabilitated Caribbean as well as to the transformation of hostile alien
Canada into home.
It demonstrates that those literary reexaminations of traces of Caribbean characters’ experience in
Canada produce a memory of their transformation into Canadians which, when combined with a
decolonizing revision of their Caribbean memory, contributes to create a Caribbean-Canadian historically
informed sense of place.
This study proposes an investigation of the procedures of this literary revision of the Caribbean cartography
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at work in these novels that designates the body of the Caribbean diasporic subject as the locus of this
process through explorations of memory. It consequently grounds on Michael Bucknor’s proposition of body
memory as the distinctive poetics of Caribbean-Canadian writing of the decades preceding the 2000 one.
It concludes that the rehabilitated Caribbean created through this writing of the Caribbean Canadian
experience possesses the dimension of a “remitting contribution” of one site of the diasporic Caribbean to
the regional Caribbean.
Emily TAYLOR - Queer Creoles: Narrating Place and Sexual Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean
The construction of national identity often depends upon an idealized construction of sexuality, usually
patriarchal and heterocentrist. This is true in Europe, the Americas, and especially true in the Caribbean,
when post-Independence narratives pinned the success of the nation-state on the realization of a
particular type of gendered and sexual identity. How then, do novels in the Caribbean narrate queer
subjects as belonging to a nation-state? This paper considers how novels from the Anglophone Caribbean
(Tide Running by Oonya Kempadoo, In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand, Cereus Blooms at Night
by Shani Mootoo) use local Caribbean Englishes and Creoles (often referred to as “nation-languages”) to
territorialize queer identities as belonging to the Caribbean. A central tension for many writers who
construct non-normative gender and sexual identities is the challenge of representing those identities as
native to the Caribbean (and not as some kind of cultural import from former colonizers). I argue in this
essay that the use of particular nation-languages allows these novelists to situate these queer identities
within the space of the nation.
Keja VALENS - Bajan Cooking: Natural Resource, National Resource
Anthropologists, historians, and cultural and literary critics study the articulation of national culture through
food, but with little attention to food writing itself and even less to cookbook writing. Much “Caribbean”
food writing has been part of either colonial or neo-colonial practice, imposing the ways of the colonizer
and rendering local tradition inferior, extolling the exotic wonders of colonial products, or making local
tradition accessible to Euro-American tourists. However, in Barbados, as in much of the Caribbean, local
cookbooks emerged in the 1960s alongside independence. But if, as Frantz Fanon writes, authentic
national culture is directed at an insider audience, can cookbooks participate in the articulation of
national culture? Who are Barbadian cookbooks written for? What purpose do Barbadian cookbooks
serve beyond conveying recipes? This paper examines Barbadian cookbooks published as part of
fundraising efforts for non-governmental organizations, Carmeta Fraser’s National Recipe Directory, and
works of Jill Hamilton alongside those of Bajan Laurel Ann Morley and of Guayanese-Barbadian Cynthia
Nelson that position themselves as Caribbean as well as cookbooks such as The American Women’s Club
of Barbados’s Yankee-Bajan Cooking and Paul Owens’s The Cliff, Barbados. This paper explores the kinds of
independence and interdependence that Barbadian cookbooks articulate, how they depict Barbadian
plants and dishes as natural and national resources, and how they figure food independence and culinary
tourism as integral to Barbadian nationalism. It also examines how positioning cookbooks, authors, cooks,
and audiences as Barbadian, Caribbean, expatriot, or immigrant, serves, or fails to serve, national and
regional culture.
Sylvia R WALKER - Who am I? Where am I going? – Unpacking the geography of Jennifer Rahim’s poetic
oeuvre
This paper contends that the spatial and topographical dimensions of Jennifer Rahim’s five collections of
poetry conflate inner spaces and outer places to voice an ethics of existence in the Caribbean
environment. In that regard, the informing premise is that humanity is ceaselessly engaged in a search for
meaning, hence the opening question of the paper’s title, namely, “[w]ho am I? [w]here am I going?
Structured within a paradigm consisting of Wilfred Cartey’s theory of innerness and Wilson Harris’ quantum
immediacy, the argument of this paper is designed to illuminate not only the reflective dialogue between
Rahim and the Caribbean landscape but also the ethical dispositions that the poems contextualize and
declare. Cartey’s idea that innerness is the “personal and private altar of each human person … wherein
resonates the music of the self, soul, and spirit (58) facilitates the reading of Rahim’s poems as lyrical,
reflective articulations from the unconscious, the first collection entitled Mothers are not the Only Linguists
(1992) being seminal in that regard. However, the associations that this paper will disclose relative to
unpacking the ethical geography of Rahim’s poems are informed specifically by Harris’ perspective on
quantum immediacy. According to him, the term embraces a range of associations which underscore the
fact that “parts of ourselves are embedded everywhere … parts [that] are very frail [yet] enduring” (Riach
& Williams 81). Indeed, agreement comes from the speaker of the opening poem in Rahim’s most recent
collection, Ground Level (2014): “An island rests in me …” [250 words]
Fay WHITE - Alternative Maternal Spaces and Autonomous Female Sexuality in Staceyann Chin’s The Other
Side of Paradise: A Memoir
This paper firstly interrogates the importance of the maternal to the fashioning and facilitating of female
identity and sexuality. Furthermore, concerns, contentions and complexities connected with female samesex eroticism – when constructed and navigated within a heteronormative, heterosexist, and homophobic
Caribbean space – come to the surface. Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (2009),
the focal primary text under examination, is a contemporary autobiographical narrative which employs
female subjectivity to unearth the body politic which prescribes and proscribes specific constructions and
33rd West Indian Literature Conference, Barbados 12
Abstracts
expressions of female sexuality in Jamaica. Hegemonic religious narratives and cultural mores foster
misconceptions, endorse heteronormativity, and are associated with homophobia, homophobic violence
and closeted sexualities. Nevertheless, the calculated manipulation of the thematic and structural
elements of the memoir positions it as a counter discourse which subverts the power of religious ideology
over the female homosexual body, and challenges normative female sexuality in the Caribbean.
The reticence of the maternal figure to facilitate dialogue on issues regarding the erotic body serves to
repress and regulate emerging female sexuality. At the same time, alternative sexual behavior is
problematized, prohibited and policed by the motherland in this narrative, Jamaica. The female
homosexual is overtly vilified and victimized and her sexual citizenship is challenged and contested. Chin’s
homeland, a cultural space which obstructs negotiations of alternative female sexuality, and holds
homoeroticism captive within a closet, is ultimately rejected and abandoned through migrancy. The
author’s pursuit of a place of exile is concomitant with her quest to excavate a new cultural space where
homoerotic desires can be explicitly exhibited.
Bartosz WÓJCIK - “Your journey, even when bumpy,/will be sweet”. Jamaica in Kei Miller's A Light Song of
Light (2010).
The paper focuses on the representation of Jamaica in Kei Miller's collection of poetry A Light Song of Light
(2010). Centred round the figure of the Singerman and divided into “Day Time” and “Night Time”, the book
is a lyrical if painful exploration of the Caribbean island with its folklore (rolling calf, duppy, obeah, the ninth
night), musical traditions, and socio-historical nuances. All of them still influence the present-day Jamaican
reality, turning the West Indian state into a spectacle of beauty as well as brutality, providing in turn Miller's
readers with vivid and complex portraits of islanders. It is through my interpretation of their poetic
monologues and narratives that I am hoping to present the country of “de Blue Mountains”, the land
connected by “the Singerman's roads”, and the place of “red-gold songs”.
33rd West Indian Literature Conference, Barbados 13