Keynote Addresses

George Lamming himself will make a few remarks on the occasion of the celebrations marking the Lamming Evening.

Dr. Alison Donnell
“Minor Figures, Major Issues: Caribbean in Quiet Revolutions.”

Dr. Alison Donnell is a Reader in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, who will speak on the topic “Minor Figures, Major Issues: Caribbean in Quiet Revolutions.” Her main areas of research include post-colonial writings and theory, in particular Caribbean literature, women’s writing, black British writing, and feminist theory and its intersection with postcolonial theory. She has been joint editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies since the journal’s inception a decade ago and serves on the editorial board of The Journal of West Indian Literature. Formerly a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, she has supervised postgraduate work on Caribbean women's poetry, the landscape in Caribbean writings, cross-cultural Indian/African relations in Caribbean literature, and Caribbean queer narratives. In addition to articles on West Indian literature and culture in leading journals, she is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary and Critical History (Routledge, 2006) and the editor of Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (Routledge, 2002) and (with Sarah Lawson Welsh) The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (Routledge, 1996).

Dr. Sandra Pouchet-Paquet
"George Lamming's Serial Art: Myth and Archive"

Dr. Sandra Pouchet-Paquet is a Professor of English and the major faculty advisor in Caribbean Literary Studies at the University of Miami where she specialises in in the fields of Caribbean Literature, African-American Literature, and Women's Studies. She is the author of The Novels of George Lamming (1982), Caribbean Autobiography (2002), and co-editor of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2007). She has published numerous book and journal articles on Caribbean and African-American Literature and has served as guest editor of special issues of Callaloo ("Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean," 1997) and Journal of West Indian Literature (8.1-2 [1998-1999]). She also served as director of the pioneering Caribbean Writers' Summer Institute at the University of Miami (1992-1996)