Samuel Soyer
Before the Cradle and Beyond the Grave: Concerns and Considerations about Pedagogy and Caribbean Literature
Abstract:
I think literature is making, marketing and meaning.
We are accomplished at dealing with
meaning. The education system nurtures a vibrant lineage of critics and assessments.
But what of
making? Research shows humans in the womb respond to being read to, for example the books of Dr. Seuss. A year or so ago, the BBC reported Charles Dickens was to receive an award posthumously for the contribution of his novels to medicine. Given the vast reach of literature, much more can and should be done from the prenatal to post-graduate phases of life to encourage Caribbean engagement with literature. What are the stumbling blocks? How can we make them stepping stones?
And what of
marketing? There is no dearth of writers in the Caribbean but for how many is it easy to publish for the mutual benefit of society and themselves? What does publish even mean in 2021? I love literature and live about a hundred miles from St. Lucia/St. Vincent but cannot conveniently access the literary works of their people.
And what is
The UWI’s role? It has a publishing “arm.” It confers degrees in literature. Are students any closer to interfacing with literature for children? Young adults? The UWI also confers degrees in modern languages! Are students of literature any closer to interfacing with literature from territories whose official language is not English? How can this institution contribute to literature adding much more to the life of our peoples?
Institutional affiliation: University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Email: samuel.soyer@gmail.com
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Scott Ting-A-Kee
The Value of Popular Knowledge in Caribbean Literature Classes
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed mainstream education. Through the digital stratosphere, literature is now more accessible and relatable for students. However, the increased usage of this same digital world creates a chasm between students and teachers. On the other hand, this can be seen as an opportunity to experiment with pedagogical content knowledge within 21st-century literature classrooms. This paper argues that the integration of popular knowledge with information and communication technologies can reimagine, reposition and reform the way students engage with and attitudes towards literature as a subject.
James Banks (1993), in his essay, “The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education”, defines popular knowledge as “facts, concepts, and explanations” which are “institutionalized within mass media” and “other aspects of popular culture” (Banks, 1993, 7). This paper will discuss the value of using popular knowledge when teaching English Literature to Grade 11 students at The Bishops’ High School. The data was gathered through surveys and interviews with teachers and students. I will focus on specific forms of popular knowledge such as pop songs, videos, films, and memes in delivering the CSEC English Literature curriculum. Consequently, this paper will present a blend of my personal experiences and those of the other teachers. Additionally, the views and assessments of the students from my classes who would have experienced these teaching methods will also be taken into consideration. A total of four teachers, Ms. A, Ms. B, Ms. C, and Sir D were interviewed. The student group consisted of two Grade 11 classes.
Institutional affiliation: Independent scholar
Email: sc_joseph352@yahoo.com
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Amanda Zilla
Adapting Caribbean Literary Texts into Virtual Reality: A ‘User-Response Approach’
Abstract:
Stanley Fish asserts that if reader-response theories are to be used procedurally, then “the reader’s activities are/[should be] the centre of attention” (158)1. When explicating narratives across media, his statement remains true. While Caribbean literary narratives are yet to be adapted into virtual reality experiences, it is imperative to understand how citizens of the Caribbean want to experience, be seen and represented in virtual worlds. This paper discusses the findings from a primary data collection exercise in which 107 respondents were immersed in Khaled Hosseini’s
Sea Prayer, a non-Caribbean VR narrative as stimulus for dreaming of and theorizing what narratives which capture the spirit, events and horrors of the Caribbean would be like through virtual reality. More importantly, it examines the types of experiences and experiential identities that Caribbean users wish to have and adopt when engaging with Caribbean literature through new media. In this paper, the responses obtained regarding the focalization of narratives, storyworlds, avatar identities and virtual reality narrative ethics will be explored. These responses will be compared with existing literature in the area based on audiences outside of the Caribbean. Ultimately, the author will engage these findings to create a methodology for VR adaptation of Caribbean literature which is the primary objective of her doctoral research.
Institutional affiliation: University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Email: amandateneilzilla@gmail.com
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Thom C. Addington
Theorizing Traumatology in the Fiction of Curdella Forbes
Abstract:
Inspired by Jahan Ramazani’s reading of the wound and its poetics in Derek Walcott’s
Omeros, this paper considers how contemporary Caribbean writers theorize traumatology for the “wounds” of History by (and through) narrative. How does the scribal (re)imagination and (re)construction of the wound and/or wounding alter the ways we think about trauma, healing, and their archiving? What do these representations educe about our conceptions of power, relation, belonging, and being in the Anthropocene? What are the critical and theoretical stakes of positioning or considering narrative as social theory?
To these ends, this paper examines the figure of the wound – psycho-spiritual and otherwise – and the state of woundedness in the fiction of Curdella Forbes, particularly in her 2008 short story collection
A Permanent Freedom, her 2012 novel
Ghosts, and her most recent novel,
A Tall History of Sugar. I argue that Forbes’s engagements with wounds, wounding, and woundedness at once exemplify and stand out from a theorizing tradition of these adumbrated in contemporary West Indian writing. I contextualize her work within the ambit of Kamau Brathwaite’s, Derek Walcott’s, and George Lamming’s traumatological projects to highlight this. I argue that across her fiction, Forbes explores the metaphoric possibilities of the wound as a paradoxical site of entanglement and endowment while deconstructing the state of woundedness to reveal its capacity to collapse binaries.
Institutional affiliation: Richard Bland College of William & Mary
Email: taddington@RBC.EDU
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Tohru Nakamura
“Maybe broken is just the same as being”: Brokenness and the Body in Kei Miller’s Short Stories
Abstract:
This paper examines the theme of brokenness and the body in Kei Miller’s short stories, and suggests that he describes the body as a locus of existential realization of one’s racially and sexually fragmented selfhood. While his literary predecessors of the twentieth century like Derek Walcott, Jan Carew, Silvio Torres-Saillant, and Kamau Brathwaite aim to privilege the racial fragmentation caused by colonialism as integral to the Caribbean’s unique history and culture, Miller explores the idea of brokenness from the perspective of sexuality. Like Walcott who, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” famously emphasizes love as a glue that keeps together the racial fragments, Miller argues that “maybe broken is the way we love. / As if meeting someone else, one soul searches / the other for openings – a way to enter” (
There 47). Love is an existential empowerment for Caribbean subjects to recognize and celebrate their divided selves. Miller suggests that, with love, Caribbean queer subjects need to break societal limits and prejudices, which he explains as “the body.” To break the body is “the only way we could become / who we are / by breaking / out of into” (
There 51). This paper looks at Miller’s short stories, “Walking on the Tiger Road,” “The Fear of Stones,” and “This Dance,” which deal with queer experiences in Jamaica. Using Judith Butler’s gender performativity, it ultimately observes how the queer characters attempt to break the body so that “they could find themselves” (
Fear 156).
Institutional affiliation: Keio University
Email: nakamu.to.nakamu@gmail.com
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Seanna Viechweg
If I have to kill a tree child to save my child, I’ll do it”: Human and Nonhuman Extinctions on Hispaniola in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle”
Abstract:
In the Caribbean, postcolonial subjects not only grapple with recovering from centuries of exploitation but also from surviving the wake of natural disasters. In the eyes of white ecologists, Caribbean communities are not doing enough to preserve the life of the nonhuman, such as that of charismatic megafauna, despite the extent to which they too struggle with the ability to exist. To call attention to the precarity of postcolonial subjects, it is vital to turn to Caribbean writers such as Edwidge Danticat and Rita Indiana whose writing illustrate how slow and fast violence(s) of the colonial past—specifically in Haiti and the Dominican Republic—affect Caribbean communities’ survival. I argue that Danticat’s 2013
Claire of the Sea Light and Indiana’s 2015
Tentacle demonstrate how difficult it is to expect those struggling to save their own lives to also ‘save the world’ ecologically.
Danticat and Indiana’s writing are crucial to consider in the broader discussion of the futurity of Caribbean communities in a postcolonial context, especially as they parallel the extinction of postcolonial subjects with the extinction of nonhuman species. Theoretical frameworks by scholars such as Anthony Carrigan, Ursula K. Heise, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Rob Nixon, and Nicole Seymour undergird my discussion of the dangers of white ecologists trivializing the pervasive slow violence(s) of postcolonial life. Alongside these scholars, Danticat and Indiana’s novels can push us to consider human and nonhuman precarity simultaneously, as well as underscore the potential for Caribbean subjects to make unique contributions to ongoing practices surrounding species survival.
Institutional affiliation: University of Virginia
Email: seannaviechweg@gmail.com
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Suzanne F. Boswell
Rainbow Bright: Unsettled Futures, Queer Precarity, and Caribbean Apocalypses in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle
Abstract:
Queer theory and Caribbean studies parallel one another with their shared examination of lives on the edge of damage, devaluation, and annihilation. In this paper, I build on the ties between queer theory and Caribbean studies to look at how Caribbean precarity creates unusual conditions for queer futurity: a queer future made possible by a Caribbean apocalypse. I examine how queer precarity interacts with the logic of colonialistnation-making still at work in the Caribbean by analyzing Rita Indiana’s 2018 Dominican novel,
Tentacle (2018). In
Tentacle, Acilde, a time-traveler sent from the early 21st century to 1991 in order to prevent a nuclear disaster, chooses instead to do nothing, plunging the Dominican Republic - and by extension the world - into a man-made apocalypse. I argue that Acilde’s refusal to save the planet reveals the lack of an acceptable futurefor queer subjects in the Dominican Republic. Belying narratives of queer progress that rely on a colonial teleology of development, it is only in 1991 that Acilde achieves economic stability, social recognition, and survival: in his “home” timeline of the 21st century, Acilde’s trans status puts himin constant danger of violence, imprisonment and death. In refusing to stop the future apocalypse, Acilde reverses his own queer precarity. The novel uncovers how queer liberation can mimic the extractive logic of colonial capitalism, whose resourceextraction and pollution destroys the future in order to hold up the living standards of the present. Acilde’s nuclear sacrifice in exchange for queer safety thus invites us to consider what kinds of Caribbeanfutures are made possible through the genre of the apocalypse.
Institutional affiliation: Independent scholar
Email: suzanne.fboswell@gmail.com
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Michael Mitchell
Transgressive Loves: Images of Contemporary Trinidad in Novels by Three Women Writers
Abstract:
Derek Walcott's poem “Love After Love” is referenced in both the eponymous novel by Ingrid Persaud and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's
Mrs B, but it might equally well apply to the events described in Lisa Allen-Agostini’s
The Bread the Devil Knead. All three, using distinctive female voices, tackle themes of abusive relationships within a society in which centuries of exploitation have created potential for explosive violence as well as a longing for human closeness. All three use vibrant descriptions of Trinidad life as a background for a fearless confrontation with transgressive human relationships, and all three have surprising comments to make on the role of religion. I propose to investigate the similarities and differences between these fictional texts to map out current trends in Caribbean writing.
Institutional affiliation: University of Paderborn
Email: m.mitchell@warwick.ac.uk
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Lisa Outar
Of Chimeras and Churiles: Indo-Caribbean Feminist Reimaginings of the Monstrous Past
Abstract:
Indo-Caribbean women’s writing has long been preoccupied with themes of haunting by the past, specifically by the ways in which experiences of trauma and loss borne from indentureship, colonialism and gendered exploitations echo from one generation to another. This essay explores the ways in which contemporary Indo-Caribbean women writers trouble traditional understandings of teleology, genealogy and the divide between the “natural” and “unnatural” in their literary endeavors, revealing the hauntings of characters by intergenerational trauma and secrets and by the specters of gendered violence. Adapting theories of the hauntological to the post-indentureship terrain of Indo-Caribbean literature, the essay explores in particular the turn to Caribbean folklore on the part of writers such as Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming, Vashti Bowlah and Nadia Misir where the feminist possibilities of the mythical churile figure emerges. Following the work of scholars such as Giselle Anatol who explore the ways in which that which is repressed and denigrated about womanhood emerges in Caribbean folkloric figures, I track the reclaiming of such monstrous figures by Indo-Caribbean writers for the furthering of feminist visions of alternative and empowered futures.
Institutional affiliation: Independent Scholar
Email: leoutar@gmail.com