Cyndi Celeste Marshall is a University of the West Indies (Cave Hill) graduate in Linguistics and Communication Studies, currently pursuing a Masters degree in Creative Arts. She is a National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) award-winning poet whose work has been published in The Caribbean Writer and the Arts Etc/NIFCA Winning Words Anthology.

Presentation 1: Cinémawon (Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, La Réunion and Paris) , Presentation 2: Cyndi Marshall (Barbados)

Plenary: Bridget Jones Award Presentations 1 and 2

Cyndi Marshall

Jean-Oneli Blaise is Project Manager for a local non-profit organization that caters to disenfranchised and youth at risk on the Island of St. Maarten. He has successfully obtained a double master’s degree in Business Administration & Management and Team Management at the European Business school of Barcelona. 

Presentation 3: Nelly Blaise (St Maarten) Roundtable: Cinémawon, Cyndi Marshall and Nelly Blaise

Plenary: Bridget Jones Award Presentation 3 and Roundtable

Jean Oneli Blaise 

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert completed a PhD in Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. She is a practising literary translator and is currently working as an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin on a research project entitled “Rethinking Translation Studies from Caribbean Meridians: Towards an Ecosystemic Approach”. Her first monograph, The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (Oxford, Peter Lang) was published in 2020, following receipt of the 2018 Peter Lang Young Scholars Award in Comparative Literature.

Laëtitia St Loubert: Decolonising translation flows from the Caribbean (Welcome: Pat Noxolo; Chair: Miriam Gordon; Moderator: Isabella Bromfield)

Welcome and Postgraduate Keynote 1 : Laetitia Saint-Loubert

Laëtitia St Loubert 

Kristy Warren researches the social and political history of British colonialism in the Caribbean and the lingering legacies of this past in the region and the United Kingdom. Kristy has worked on a number of research projects. Most recently she was a research associate at the University of Leicester working on a collaborative project with the University of Guyana entitled ‘Mental Neurological and Substance Use Disorders in Guyana’s jails, 1825 to the present day.’ Other projects include the ‘Legacies of British-Slave Ownership’ project at UCL, and the ‘Common Cause’ and ‘Bigger Picture’ projects at the University Nottingham. She also works with cultural institutions to help create content and programming that better reflects the histories, experiences and desires of marginalised individuals and groups in the UK.

Roundtable discussion, with Meleisa Ono-George, Jade Bentil, Kristy Warren and Katie Donington (Chair: Kesewa John; Moderator: Shantel George)

Opening Plenary: Futures in Caribbean Studies: Black British History

Kristy Warren

Katie Donington is a Senior Lecturer in Black, Caribbean, and African History at the Open University. Her research focuses on the history, legacies, and representation of British transatlantic slavery. Her doctoral and post-doctoral work was conducted with the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. She is author of The bonds of family: Slavery, commerce and culture in the British Atlantic world (Manchester University Press, 2020). She is interested in public history and co-curated the exhibition Slavery, Culture and Collecting at the Museum of London Docklands. She was an advisor on the Colonial Countryside project exploring histories of slavery and empire at the National Trust. She has taught modules on slavery, empire, and Black British history at UCL, the University of Nottingham, LSBU and the Open University.

Katie Donington

This panel of leading scholars and cultural heritage professionals from both Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago will discuss how galleries, museums, archives and libraries, and the cultural heritage sector generally, are marking and thinking through this moment of 60 years of independence from British rule. How are these celebrations different from 50th commemorations a decade ago? How do these institutions see themselves in regard to education, information, culture and knowledge at this juncture? What visions of/for these nations are being articulated in official discourse? And is this discourse being problematized, or even resisted in other spaces?

Closing Plenary: Independence Now: Culture, Politics and 60-Year Commemorations in Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago

Carolyn Cooper

Jasmin Simmons is the Director of the Heritage Library Division, NALIS. She holds a wealth of experience in libraries spanning over 25 years which includes short stints as Director of the Educational Libraries Services Division, Director of the Public Libraries Division more recently Deputy Executive Director (ag), NALIS.
She is a 2010 Salzburg Fellow and 2016 International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Fellow. She has served on the UNESCO Memory of the World Committee where she demonstrated her passion for the preservation of documentary heritage of Trinidad and Tobago.

She is also an avid puppeteer, storytelling aficionado and budding spoken word artist. She believes that it is imperative that in this present period we create a media and information literate citizenry. Ms Simmons is a championing for authors, through her involvement  with  NALIS ‘ First Time Authors Appreciation Programme  a consistent feature of NALIS over the last twelve years.

Jasmin Simmons

Shani Roper, PhD is Curator of the University of the West Indies Museum. Roper's interests lie in museums educational practices and the intersection between museums and histories of trauma in black majority contexts. Her museum programs Monuments in the Caribbean Series and Emancipation Day Matters? Series seek to challenge historic and contemporary political and linguistic boundaries that maintain colonial silos in the region.

Shani Roper

Dr. Rupert Lewis is Professor Emeritus of Political Thought in the Department of Government, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, where he lectured for forty years in political science, political thought and Caribbean, African & global politics. He recently served as the inaugural Research Fellow in the PJ Patterson Centre for Africa- Caribbean Advocacy at the UWI working with former Jamaican Prime Minister PJ Patterson to build bridges between the Caribbean and Africa. He has an international reputation as a scholar of the Garvey movement and Caribbean radicalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He collaborated with colleagues to organise two international academic conferences on Marcus Garvey at The University of the West Indies in 1973 and 1987. He co-edited two volumes, Garvey, Africa, Europe and the Americas and Garvey: His Work and Impact emerged from these conferences.
In 2018 he published a biography of Marcus Garvey in the Caribbean Biography series published by the UWI Press. He is author of the book Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought and has edited books on George Padmore, the Trinidadian Pan- Africanist and Richard Hart, the Jamaican Marxist. His essay ‘Black Power in the Caribbean’ was published in the Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Constitutions in 2020.

Conference Keynote : Rupert Lewis

Rupert Lewis

Meleisa Ono-George is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She is interested in the everyday ways people negotiate and navigate structures of power and inequality, as well as the legacies and politics of writing such histories within contemporary society. Her current research focuses on the life of an enslaved albino women of African ancestry,  who was exhibited in late eighteenth-century Britain and the archival remnants of her life. Meleisa is also developing a community-engaged project which looks at the history of Black mothering in Britain and the use of creative and digital storytelling in historical production. 

Meleisa Ono-George

Cinemawon is a film collective of filmmakers and film professionals based mainly in Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, La Réunion and Paris. It was founded in 2016.
Our name can literally translate to “Cinemaroon” in English and our goal when we started was to screen films from the Caribbean, Africa, the Americas in general and other afro-diasporic communities around the world that had been overlooked from mainstream distribution. We want to reconnect spaces that were historically disconnected (in appearance). It is about creating those conversations through films and between filmmakers and audiences.
Séverine Catelion is a co-founder of Cinemawon. As a film professional whose activities include curating, producing and marketing, her main goal is to do what it takes to make films meet their audiences. Born and raised in Martinique, she lives in Paris and has a keen interest in revealing talents and films from the African diasporas.


Cinemawon-Séverine Catelion

Cinemawon is a film collective of filmmakers and film professionals based mainly in Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, La Réunion and Paris. It was founded in 2016.
Our name can literally translate to “Cinemaroon” in English and our goal when we started was to screen films from the Caribbean, Africa, the Americas in general and other afro-diasporic communities around the world that had been overlooked from mainstream distribution. We want to reconnect spaces that were historically disconnected (in appearance). It is about creating those conversations through films and between filmmakers and audiences.
Wally Fall is a filmmaker of Senegalese and Martinican descent who grew up in Martinique. He’s also a co-founder of Cinemawon. After many years in Europe, he’s back in the Caribbean in Guadeloupe where he lives and works. He strongly believes in the need to (re)activate alternative networks to make and distribute films from the African diasporas that remain culturally rooted and sustainable at the same time.


Cinemawon - Wally Fall

(Chair: Willy Pedroso-Aguiar; Moderator: Regan McDonald)

Expo

Cyndi Marshall

Bridget Jones Award Winner

Jean Oneli Blaise

Bridget Jones Award Winner

Laëtitia St Loubert

Keynote 1 Speaker

Kristy Warren

Roundtable participant

Katie Donington

Roundtable participant

Carolyn Cooper

Roundtable participant

Jasmin Simmons

Roundtable participant

Shani Roper

Roundtable participant

Rupert Lewis

Keynote Speaker

Meleisa Ono-George

Roundtable participant

Cinemawon-Séverine Catelion

Briget Jones Award Winner

Cinemawon - Wally Fall

Bridget Jones Award Winner

Antonio Romero

TBC