Lipman, Nardia

This paper examines Rebel Women Lit (RWL), a Jamaican-born online book club/bibliotherapy community, as a case study of a Caribbean Heterotopia space occupying the digital. Undergirded by the theorizations of Carole Boyce Davies’ ‘Caribbean Spaces’, Schuyler Esprit’s ‘Heterotopia of Resistance’, and Tonya Haynes’ ‘Caribbean (cyber)feminisms’, this paper employs a mixed-methods approach – offering a ‘close reading’ of RWL website and a few recent Instagram posts – to elucidate representations of Caribbean queerness, bibliotherapy, and Pan-Africanism. Specifically, the paper makes an attempt to engage some these concerns: How is diversity pursued by RWL? How does RWL foster conversations around anxieties, traumas, and violation? How does RWL embody the act of taking up space, as theorized by Esprit and Davies? And how can RWL and the spaces it occupies be read as rich archives for the study of Caribbean feminism? This paper notes its relevance to the field of Caribbean Studies in its effort of putting Caribbean and feminist thought in conversation with the field of digital humanities. By considering the ways in which engagements with the literary in the 21st century have moved beyond physical texts and locations, the field of Caribbean literary study is subsequently rendered more expansive, inclusive, and complex.

Rebel Women Lit: Short Case Study of a Caribbean Heterotopia Space via the Digital

PhD Student of English at The University of Miami

Samlal, Keisha

This study is an exploratory sociological investigation of female fatness within the context of Trinidad and Tobago. It aims to interrogate the social construction of meanings and values around female fatness, taking into consideration the wider socio-historical contexts that shape and influence the experiences and treatment of fat women, within Trinidad and Tobago. The intention is to extend the investigation to examine the active negotiations of fatness by fat women in Trinidad and Tobago, beginning with their first-hand experiences. Thus, it begins at the individual level and seeks to connect these personal experiences of fatness to the wider structures and systems of power within the society, thereby undertaking a multi-level analysis of the construction of female fatness in Trinidad and Tobago. Utilizing intersectionality as a theoretical framework, qualitative methodology was employed to guide this research. Through narrative inquiry as the research design, interviews were conducted with 11 participants residing in Trinidad and Tobago, who either identify or have been stigmatized as fat women. The data was analyzed through thematic analysis. A key theme emerging from the data analysis was the ‘thick’ female body, as an acceptable type of fat body for women in Trinidad and Tobago.  According to the data, the ‘thick’ woman is a popular female identity in Trinidad and Tobago and while the scholarly literature predominantly addresses the fat female body as negative, the findings suggest a level of acceptability and attractiveness around female thickness within Trinidad and Tobago.

Acceptable Fatness: Exploring Female Fatness in Trinidad and Tobago

PhD. Candidate in Sociology at University of West Indies - St. Agustin

Andrew, Aurora

Although buried in the archive and despite the unfortunate manner in which Mina enters history, the Arrogante case exposes both the ways in which White cannibalism manifested (i.e. literally, by proxy, endo-matically and auto-matically) in transatlantic waters to the Caribbean and how it was regarded by both Africans and Europeans. As such, the objective of this research essay is to expose these manifestations of White cannibalism, that being the “literal [act] of eating...flesh” for the purpose of White consumption. In turn, the African conception of the White cannibalistic capacity will be confirmed. Before all else, however, it is necessary to probe the origins as well as the developments of the word ‘cannibal.’

White Cannibalism in the Transatlantic Context

Masters Student

Philogene-Heron, Adom 

‘Rivers have memory’, so the saying goes in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean, the most mountainous isle of the Antilles. Waitikubuli, ‘tall is her body’, is the name given by the island’s indigenous Kalinago people to a volcanic, rainforested landmass with its rivers that come perilously to life with heavy rainfall. Their memory is revealed by their shifting courses, moving along fluvial plains and paths where they once flowed. During hurricane Maria of 2017, Dominica’s rivers ‘showed themselves’, as one friend and survivor put it. They demonstrated their propensity for destruction as they carried boulders, trees, debris and vehicles through communities, causing loss of life, livelihoods and destruction of homes along the way. Yet, in the aftermath of such storms the river also becomes a vital place to wash oneself, one’s clothes, much as villagers had in earlier times. Rivers become meeting points and places of sociality too. And they wash down seeds, soils and objects, depositing them anew in novel locations - bringing life in unexpected places.  Returning to my maternal ancestors’ island in the wake of a hurricane and tropical storm this paper plots a fragmented route through three cyclones – recent and historic – that have deeply impacted Dominica. It bears witness to these effects on friends and loved ones, then tracks some of their survival plots - place based narratives of living on from such disasters. My intention here is to think how rivers form moving sites of destruction and repair for those who dwell besides them. And, then to ask what can be learned from the memories they bear; to investigate the animate power and place of the river in the cosmologies of Caribbean peoples. People who are more often thought of in relation other bodies of water - ocean and sea - than the rivers, ravines and streams that cleave their land.

PG Conference Keynote: Rivers Have Memory

Télémaque, Nathaniel

‘Everyday Things’ is a Geography (practice-related) research project that visualises the experiences of a kinship collective of young Black adults living in White City, Shepherds Bush, West London. The project combines two main methodologies. The first is an archival focused work, aimed at recovering White City’s former imperial and colonial site, the Great White City Exhibition grounds (1908) but also the site’s more recent histories as a London County Council developed inter-war estate. The second is a form of collaborative photographic research taken up with the kinship collective  as well as their social peers. Depictions of young Black adult’s lives are rarely seen in British academic research. Inspired by the work of ‘everyday’ urban essays created by photographers in post-war America and the examinations of British landscapes by Black British photographers. My practice-related research facilitates site-specific dialogues, focused on contemporary and archival visualisations of White City. This body of work also engenders photographic practices capable of intervening in representations of White City, as well as West London based representations of Black life.  My paper will seek to retrospectively explore the diasporic Afro-Caribbean and West African heritages shared between myself and my kinship peers living in White City and will present an Everyday Things Photobook and Postcards series, as well as their interventional politics of dissemination. In doing so this paper will visually attend to Afro-Caribbean communities in West London, whilst making links and connections to the geographies, histories and representations of the White City locale.

Everyday Things White City: Exploring landscapes of Afro-Caribbean Heritage

Visual Artist, Writer and Researcher. PhD Student in Geography

Sharples, Catriona

This paper will examine the role of the British West India Regiments in scientific knowledge making and exploration in the greater Caribbean. Scholarship on the history of science and empire in recent years suggests that military personnel were key participants in colonial science projects, however, research in this area is still developing and much remains to be explored. The West India Regiments provide an interesting focal point for the study of military personnel as agents of scientific exploration, due to the unique character of these regiments (officers of lower socio-economic backgrounds, rank-and-file men of African descent, and increased rotation between different imperial territories). Regimental personnel were frequently stationed in the frontiers of the British Empire, and while many of their operations were strictly military, they also participated in various scientific projects throughout the nineteenth century. This paper will focus on the case study of an 1872 expedition to the Kaieteur Falls in British Guiana, which was led and documented by a Major Webber of the Second West India Regiment. The expedition is recorded as a mission to enhance British knowledge of the region; particularly regarding the geology of the Kaieteur Waterfall and ‘physical configuration of the surrounding region’. The party also produced some of the first photographs of the area to ever be seen. Thus, my paper will explore the convergence of military and scientific discovery in British Guiana, and how this feeds into wider themes of imperial expansion and scientific knowledge making in the British Empire.

‘‘To the Kaieteur and Back’: Scientific Knowledge Making and the West India Regiments in the Nineteenth Century’ 

PhD candidate

Kramer-Taylor, Elanor

In  1952, the Caribbean Labour Congress (CLC), a regional labour organisation established in the British West Indies in 1945, fell apart. The CLC had in many ways represented the peak of a democratic, socialist, regional independence movement in the Anglophone Caribbean.Yet, by the early 1950s, Cold War splits in the global labour movement and the growth of British anti-communist tactics resulted in the oppression of the CLC’s far-left members. And, as O. Nigel Bolland has stated, caused ‘irreversible division within the labour movement in the British Caribbean...’ But while the CLC disbanded and regional leftism in the Caribbean declined, in London, not all hope was lost. In 1948, a London Branch of the CLC was established by West Indians in Britain. With its location in the imperial metropole partly sheltering it from British McCarthyism, this group provided sustained support for the twin movements of self-government and labour rights in the Caribbean, lobbying the British press, politicians and public on the plight of Caribbean workers. And attempting to unite West Indians in Britain around regional self-government. The CLC London Branch thus provided an alternative platform to articulate the far-left, nationalist demands being purged in the West Indies itself. As Gerald Horne has noted, London became ‘the CLC left stronghold’. Using the CLC London Branch, this paper will explore how West Indians in Britain attempted to utilise the relative freedom of the imperial metropole to assert the progressive demands of the Caribbean Left that, due to global Cold War politics, were increasingly under threat.

A ‘strong-hold’ of the Caribbean Left in London?: exploring the Caribbean Labour Congress, London Branch, 1947-1956

PhD Candidate in History

Wenham, Leanne

Founded in London in 1966, the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) provided a multi-disciplinary forum for Caribbean artists including novelists, poets, playwrights, theatre directors, historians and academics to connect over a shared Caribbean aesthetic. Much of the published literature about CAM centres the achievements of men. This paper employs a Black feminist framework to examine the reasons why scholarship has developed in this way. It uses Anne Walmsley’s seminal text, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-1972 as the starting point and seeks to re-address this gender imbalance, by revisiting key primary and secondary sources to uncover the role that women played within the Movement.   Opting to eschew Walmsley’s categorisation of CAM women as either ‘wives’ or ‘highly valued participants’, instead contending that women were involved in the Movement in two ways; they were either artists or undertook support roles. It is argued that both groups of women had a positive experience within CAM and played an integral role in achieving its aims. I also examine how attempts by scholars to provide a chronological account of the Movement has led to the side-lining of women, as these accounts almost inevitably start with the male founders. In recent years, there have been attempts to integrate CAM into various thematic analyses however these do not pay due regard to the continual activism of Black women.  This paper provides a novel look at a Movement that inspired future generations of Black artists in the UK, Caribbean and further afield.

A woman’s place? What role did women play within the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in Britain between 1966 – 1972?

Student. MA in Black British History

Lyncook, Deanna

My paper will be taken in part from my PhD thesis which explores the experiences of West Indian children migrating from the education system in the West Indies to the education system in Britain from the 1940s to 1980s. This paper will chronologically explore education policy in the West Indies, with a focus on Jamaica and St Kitts and Nevis.   Funding impacted the colonial education system in the West Indies. It also impacted policy and the unspoken but very apparent aims of the system. Education in the West Indies was an ‘an immersion in Britishness,’ for the majority. Some scholars believe this policy was ‘unwritten,’ and merely a consequence of the nature of education. However, I will argue that the policy was deliberate and a key component of the provision of education from emancipation until the early 20th Century.   The paper will ultimately argue that the British colonial education shaped the experiences of the children who could afford to partake. It was a system that socialised them as “British”. It set them up to be members of a colonial society that looked to Britain culturally, socially and financially. This paper will begin to draw the links between this socialisation to the post-war migrations of the ‘Windrush Generation’. 

An Immersion in Britishness” British Colonial Education Policy in the West Indies.

PhD student in History

 Jamie Pierre, Alfrena

In the third chapter of George Lamming’s 1953 novel, In the Castle of My Skin, the theme of formal education is introduced within the narrative. The main setting for the chapter is the school yard and the opening paragraph begins with a detailed description of the space: “In one corner where the walls met there was a palm-tree laden with nuts … The school was in another corner … In another corner was the church”. We are then told that the boys never really understood why these two buildings were erected within the same space. The boys of Groddeck’s Boys Primary School, Lamming’s fictional representation of his alma mater, are oblivious to the consanguinity of their school and the church but the proximity of both structures points to the interrelationship of the institutions. The deleteriousness of both is poignantly intimated when the boys’ display for the English school inspector and the English supervising minister of the church on Empire Day is compared to, “an enormous ship whose cargo had been packed in boxes and set on the deck”. This imagery evokes the postmemory of the transatlantic slave trade upon the postcolonial psyche. This paper argues that In the Castle of My Skin employs a myriad of literary devices and narrative strategies to effectively deconstruct notions of innocuous colonial systems. It also contends that these devices are used to simultaneously sensitize the (post)colonized individual to the trauma of colonialism thereby enabling him or her to effectively transition from a colonized state of being to postcolonial consciousness. 

Colonial Systems Interrogated in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin

PhD Candidate in Literatures in English

Laguardia Martínez, Jacqueline

Medford, Kendall

This research explores the contemporary language attitudes of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic towards Haitian Creole. Using 4 ethnolinguistic interviews conducted in 2022 in a former batey town of the Dominican Republic, the author provides a case study of the complex sociolinguistic situation of Haitian descendants in the country. Focus is placed on how speaker’s command of Haitian Creole impacts their sense of ethnolinguistic identity and group belonging within the Haitian diaspora. This group of speakers expresses feeling excluded from both Haitian and Dominican nationalities because of their language use, employing the term patois to describe their variety of Creole, as opposed to kreyòl, thereby setting themselves apart from Haitians.  The symbolic importance of Creole fluency – “kreyòl puro” – is a strong prerequisite for ethnic self-identification for these speakers. Through this case study, this work provides a detailed examination of the idiosyncratic characteristics associated with a particular variety of Creole in the diaspora.

“Eso no es Kreyòl”: A case study of linguistic insecurity among Haitian Creole speakers in the Dominican Republic

PhD student in linguistics

Sealey-Huggins, Leon

Xueyi Li

Chinese literature in Europe, North America, Australia, and Southeast Asia has long been an expanding and diversified field. On the contrary, little attention has been paid to Chinese Caribbean literature until the last decade when a few scholars began to study Chinese Caribbean writers and their works. Still, both the amount and diversity of works in this field cannot be compared to that of Chinese American or Canadian literature. Although Anglophone Chinese Caribbean literature can be traced back to Easton Lee, it truly became a literary phenomenon after the 1980s. Since then, a group of Chinese Caribbean writers became an active voice in the literature. For quite a long time from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, Chinese characters only appeared as secondary figures, portrayed as outsiders, exploiters, and parasites who undermined the independence, progress, and interests of local people. Since 2010, Sino-Caribbean ties have been deepened. Corresponding to that, since the end of 2010, one of the biggest features in Chinese Caribbean literature is that it breaks through the shackles of the shopkeeper image and begins to write Chinese characters with other identities, especially with attention to Chinese Caribbean women. This new era emphasizes the richness and complexity of the Chinese experience in the Caribbean. This paper draws attention to the shifting Chinese images in Pao by Kerry Young, and compare them to prior works to broaden the diasporic identity of the Chinese in the Caribbean.

The Chinese Presence in Contemporary Caribbean Literature

PhD Student

Haynes, Alicia

Shifting Gender Landscapes is a qualitative study that explores how Caribbean feminists delineate digital platforms as sites that may extend their political aims of advocacy and activism. Feminist discursive practices that simultaneously engage and focalize shifts in gender ideals, community-building, and justice-oriented political practices will be examined. Social media converges space-time dynamics and lived reality with the virtual. I will therefore investigate enabling modes of sexism and violence that pervade in a digital public space, intrinsic to the cultural experiences of Caribbean women and associated ramifications. Close analysis will foreground how Caribbean women engage in on-offline public spaces on their terms and resist acts of violence, although social expectations persist, given historical underpinnings and structured axes of power, that are specific to the geopolitical Caribbean.  I centralize social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as online publics constituted by private affairs, various mainstream publics, networked publics, and counter-publics, characteristic of Caribbean cultural dynamics. Empirically, publics, counter-publics, and private spaces convene around digital fronts. Digital social space will be conceptualized to complicate ideas of a public that incorporates other publics, is fluid, transient, divergent, conflicting, unstable, and diffuses power in a dynamic, ambivalent ecosystem. This frame will offer insight into how discourses emerge, circulate, take precedence in a digital age, run parallel, and disrupt mainstream knowledge as women’s vulnerabilities are made visible. My arguments will offer a layered, interconnected view of the importance of digital spaces to Caribbean feminist activism and consciousness-raising around women’s issues.

Shifting Gender Landscapes: Social Media Platforms, Caribbean Feminism and Digital Practices of Caribbean Publics

MPhil Student

Omotayo, Alao Luqman

Textile design and textile craft have always played a significant social, cultural and economic impact on any society and it is a major component of material culture. ‘Jadire’ a Jamaica textile derived it name from combining Jamaica with the Yoruba word ‘’Adire’’ meaning (tie and dye textile) an indigo-dyed cloth made from southwest Nigeria by Yoruba women using a variety of resist-dyeing techniques. Among these techniques are Adire Alabela (candle wax), Adire Eleko (starch resist), Adire Oniko (tie and dye), Adire Alabere (stitching method) and so on which involves creating patterns, either by stamp or free hand treating certain part of the fabrics in some ways to resist dye. These techniques were brought to Jamaica through bilateral relations with Nigeria’s governments under their technical aids corps whose objective was to create its typical model of tie dye/batik cottage industry in Jamaica. This paper will discuss textile culture ‘Jadire’, creation of jadire cottage industries in Jamaica, pioneering artist and it business development among Afro-descendants of the Caribbean. However, our relationship with fabrics begins right after birth, as clothes protect us from the climate and it is our second skin to interact with others in a society. As Jamaican developed their own drawings and patterns for textile to express their culture, adire from southwest Nigeria still representing the cultural identity of it people and it is viewed as the products of technology, cultural symbolism, works of art, or as items of trade.

Pioneering a Textile Culture ‘Jadire’ a Jamaican textile

artist and Volunteer/Cultural diplomat. PhD candidate at University of Benin

Webber, Yvonne

Session 2: Digital Identities and Visual Arts

PhD Student in Cultural Studies

Alladin, Fareena

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted persons’ food consumption patterns while highlighting and exacerbating existing disparities in food availability and accessibility. Using Bourdieu’s social constructivism and the Community Nutrition Environment Model, the present study explored changes in healthy and unhealthy food consumption before and during the pandemic, as well as the role of cultural capital, food availability, and accessibility. An online survey of persons residing in Trinidad and Tobago (n = 386) was conducted between July and October 2021 to investigate household availability, accessibility, and individual consumption of healthy and unhealthy food items. Data analysis was performed using SPSS 26.0 There were significant differences in food availability, accessibility, and consumption comparing before and during the pandemic. Generally, consumption of both healthy and unhealthy food items decreased. Significant differences in consumption during the pandemic were found to be based on educational level and relationship status, but not on sex. Moreover, food consumption during the pandemic was found to significantly differ based on objectivized and incorporated capital, but not family institutional capital. While these results indicate differences in food availability, accessibility and consumption before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, they also highlight the role of cultural capital and point to the need for future studies on the ways in which the pandemic has affected multiple facets of social life.

Food in the Time of COVID-19: Exploring Consumption of Selected Food Items during the COVID-19 pandemic in Trinidad and Tobago

PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

Carballo Concepción, Jorge Alfredo

Bheecham, Rachel

SCS 2023 Postgraduate Conference

The dialect of English spoken in the Anglophone Caribbean is commonly accepted by Caribbean people and non-Caribbean people as “broken English.” As such, Caribbean education systems and society pressures the upcoming generations to learn how to speak “proper English.” Even though the various countries that make up the Anglophone Caribbean have unique dialects and patterns of speech based upon its colonization history, the idea of Anglophone Caribbean people speaking improperly is universal. But how does the Anglophone Caribbean categorize what English is “broken” and what English is “proper”? Kamau Braithwaite challenges the idea of “proper English” in his piece, Nation Language, specifically referencing the kaiso as a form of protest. In this paper, I will look at the history kaiso songs and the usage of kaiso––in the Caribbean, now commonly known as Calypso––to explore the expectations and stereotypes that have been imposed onto Caribbean English through the teaching of “proper” English. I will use kaiso lyrics to analyze the critiques of “proper” English, and by extension, analyze how the Caribbean has been harmfully shaped by British colonization.

Alumni