Cornel Bogle and Linzey Corridon
"A dance better than geography": Reading Queer Imaginaries in the Works of Andre Bagoo, Faizal Deen, and Colin Robinson

Abstract:
In a 2017 column for the Trinidad Guardian titled “Imagining Leaving,” the late Colin Robinson argues that queer activism in the Caribbean ought to be concerned with “teach[ing] ourselves to widen our imagination to encompass the change we need to realise to live here” than holding out that we will be “guaranteed rescue, by other places, or judges”. In this paper, we read Robinson’s column and his poem “The Man Who Flew” alongside Andre Bagoo’s poem “After Olive Senior, ‘Flying’” and Faizal Deen's "Young Faggot" to consider how these writers employ mythic tropes of ‘flight’ to imagine queer life within and beyond the Caribbean. We argue that for Robinson, the motif of 'flight' signals the loss of intimacies and communities that queer subjects experience when they leave the region. Moreover, we assert that for Bagoo, 'flight' suggests the possibilities of imagining queer life in the Caribbean in ways that transcend pathologizing homophobic narratives of queer being in the region. As two queer poet-scholars from the Caribbean currently residing in Canada, we complement our critical reading of these texts through poetic responses to these texts that consider our own migrations, as well as the affordances and limitations of queer life in the diaspora. Through the creative and critical practices that comprise this paper, we contribute to an understanding of the negotiations of queer belonging made by Caribbean people, both in the region and its diaspora. 
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Alberta (Bogle)
Email: cjbogle@ualberta.ca
 
Institutional affiliation: McMaster University (Corridon)
Email: linzeyc@hotmail.com

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Elizabeth Jackson
Patriarchy and Queer Affiliations in the Contemporary Caribbean Domestic Novel: A Study of Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter and Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love

Abstract:
The most interesting studies of Shani Mootoo’s novel Valmiki’s Daughter have tended to focus on its challenges to heteronormative conceptions of identity. Agreeing with these readings, I would nevertheless like to pursue a different angle. Comparing Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter with Ingrid Persuad’s much-feted Love After Love, I argue that these two Caribbean domestic novels suggest that conventional disapproval of same-sex desire in Trinidad is rooted very precisely in social anxiety about threats to the patriarchy.
 
Both novels depict families with secrets based on various forms of transgressive behaviour. However, they also portray certain forms of transgression as more socially acceptable than others, precisely because they do not threaten the patriarchy. Examples of these more “acceptable” transgressions include male heterosexual adultery, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence, none of which are really condoned, but all of which are tacitly accepted in the community as normative male behaviour. Indeed, as Evelyn O’Callaghan rightly argues, Valmiki’s “sexual indiscretions with local white women” (with the collusion of his secretary) are “largely a front for his same-sex desire” enacted through a relationship with a working- class black man. The narrative reveals that Valmiki’s wife suffers not so much from his infidelity with the women, but more from her fear of social disapproval because of his same- sex relationship. Similarly, in Love After Love, everyone in the community seems to know about Betty’s abuse at the hands of her brutal alcoholic husband, but they reserve their greatest disapproval for what they call “buller men”. However, Betty’s loving friendship with the closeted Mr Chetan is a prime illustration of the often-observed phenomenon of women and gay men forming supportive alliances with each other because both feel marginalized by patriarchal society.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Email: elizabeth.jackson@sta.uwi.edu

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Kedon Willis
Neither Here nor Queer:  Battyboys, Bulldaggers and Bugarrons in the Age of Queer Liberalism

Abstract:
In the past decade, there has been a significant shift in the depiction of queer characters by queer and queer-allied Caribbean authors such as Marlon James, Rajiv Mohabir, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Rita Indiana and Gary Victor. This paper examines how these writers, representing diverse nationalities, cultural backgrounds, and even linguistic heritages, have all begun centering stories around mercenary queer characters eager to participate in economies of exploitation that subjugate their fellow citizens. This shift contrasts with a previous generation of writers such as Michelle Cliff whose marginalized queer characters were firmly sympathetic, at times even martyred, in the spirit of aligning them with the postcolonial hopes of their nation. I argue that this shift in queer characterizations by younger writers invites a more intense critique of how the nature of late capitalism in the Caribbean allows for the absorption of some marginalized people as upwardly mobile while still maintaining the alienation of a largely poor and mostly non-white citizen body. However, responding to David Scott’s call to reimagine the emancipatory potential of postcolonial thinking, I show how these writers mobilize the moral failure of their characters to inspire in the reader a historical and personal reckoning that raises a consciousness affectively connecting the Caribbean’s multiple subaltern populations. This consciousness, I argue, is a necessary utopian gesture to conceptualize the overthrow of capitalist logics that create marginalized populations along lines of gender, class, race, and sexuality throughout the Americas.
 
Institutional affiliation: The City College of New York
Email: kwillis@ccny.cuny.edu
 
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Jarrel De Matas
Daylight Come on the Converged Caribbean

Abstract
In Chapter 4 of Diana McCaulay’s Daylight Come, one of the characters Bibi explains that the ‘Convergence’ was when “the worsening climate converged with poverty, history, and geography” (26). Premised on McCaulay’s concept of the ‘convergence’, this paper seeks to contribute to the growing Caribbean scholarship on speculative fiction imaginaries in climate fiction. Through commonly associated tropes of speculative fiction which frame questions of indigeneity, technology, and ecology that are deployed in the novel, Daylight Come offers multiple layers of converging issues to frame McCaulay’s vision of Caribbean futurity.
 
As alluded to by the novel’s title which borrows from the popular Jamaican folksong ‘Day-O’, Caribbean futurity for McCaulay is presented as a grim reality that is identifiable in our present. Where sunlight in the novel has evolved beyond unbearable proportions for the characters and therefore something to be avoided, McCaulay calls attention to the exacerbated climate that is not changing, but has changed.
 
I argue that not only are our present, anthropocentric actions called into question in the novel but also our marginalization of other ‘nonhuman’ groups such as the ‘Tribals’ who are described as ‘like the Tainos’ in the novel. The conflict between the human characters and nonhuman environment and indigenous populations adds greater weight to the layered experiences of convergence played out during the novel.
 
Through a speculative fiction study of indigeneity and the eco-entanglements of humanity and technology, I direct greater attention toward the need to take both literary imaginaries and the present climate crisis more seriously lest the events of Daylight Come become our reality.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Email: jdematas@umass.edu

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Shareed Mohammed
“A toppled ruined tidal door in the greenhouse drought spectre of earth and sky”: The call for a visionary change of the breach in the ancient vestiges of synchronicity in Wilson Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar.

Abstract:
Wilson Harris claims that there “lingers an unspoken apprehension of an incalculable price to be paid in pollution, in the extinction of species, and in other elemental implosive cycles which leave their shadow upon the psyche of nature” (“Merlin and Parsifal” 62). According to Harris, such ‘cycles’ in nature, are “ancient vestiges of synchronicity” or “acausal” linkages of landscapes, riverscapes, skyscapes and oceanscapes” (“Merlin and Parsifal” 61-62). Harris further claims that these dismembered acausal or quantum links represent a breach in the “profound and unusual treaty of sensibility” (“Profiles” 202) between human presence and the natural environment.  Such treaty was represented in the ancient pre-Columbian world by the mythical Quetzalcoatl or “twinship of sea and sky, vegetation and star” (Harris, “Schizophrenic” 106). Most importantly, readers can trace the sensation of Quetzalcoatl’s acausal linkage of earth and sky in the language of Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar.
 
This paper will demonstrate that Harris’s use of an obscure metaphorical language in The Mask of the Beggar invokes the presence of Quetzalcoatl’s twinship of earth and sky to echo a quality of voice or redemptive cry for the fate of nature. This research will also undertake an evaluation of the explicit correspondence that Harris’s’ ‘ancient vestiges of synchronicity’ achieves with Kamau Brathwaite’s perception of those ‘abstract signals’ or timehri art that exist in the physical landscape. This paper will be guided by Wilson Harris’s shamanistic notion of the pre-Columbian treaty of sensibility, the Ventriloquist of Spirit, the ancient vestiges of synchronicity, and the psychophysical self-corrective medium of communication. The findings of this paper will reveal that the highly difficult metaphoric language of The Mask of the Beggar generate a sacramental awareness of the environment that humanity destroys or consumes in the name of progress.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Email: smshareed3@gmail.com
 
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Jovanté Anderson
‘Up Inna the Video Light’: Batty Boy and the Radical Refusal of Recuperation

Abstract:
This essay proposes that the 2020 short film, Batty Boy, provides an opportunity to think the queer implications of Krista Thompson’s theorization of the video light in dancehall sessions. A coming out story set in London, the film charts the turbulent journey of Dolcie, a young British Jamaican man, toward his eventual reconciliation with his sexual and gender identity which culminates in a celebration in the video light at a queer dancehall party.
 
Thompson argues that the video light, often attached to the roaming camera of the party’s videographer, is “intrinsic to the creation of a sense of community among dancehall participants through the modes of seeing and of blindness that it produces and makes visible.” I assert that the film’s use of video light refuses the romance of recuperation and visibility within the national and diasporic community and, instead, charts a space which lingers in the radical potential of abjection to shape the contours of alternative forms of belonging.
 
Finally, therefore, Batty Boy challenges us to think beyond what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “the epistemology of the closet,” a binary structural relation that might reduce Jamaica to the site of a spectacularized homophobia and might reduce its diaspora to a utopian alternative position. Rather, the film offers us a way to think through the possibilities of arranging more complex relationships to space and time in order to more carefully grapple with the often obscured grounds of the queer Jamaican imagination of the future.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Miami
Email: jaa392@miami.edu
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Andrew Kendall
Filming Heterotopias: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe as a textual, and cultural, survival strategy

Abstract:
Small Axe (2020), Steve McQueen’s long-gestating five-episode anthology TV series recounting the experience of black immigrants in 1960s-1980s Britain, has been hailed for its timely, empathetic representation of West Indian identity on screen. McQueen’s anthology is a rare entry in that medium which explores lives and identities of Black-British Caribbean immigrants, and one of the handful of works that explicitly engages with the Windrush generation. I propose to read McQueen’s series through theories of the cultural relationship between film and literature, by examining how this kind of televisual attention to themes (primarily explored in West Indian literature) is part of an important shift in the ways that West Indian identity is presented in popular culture, and an important part of changing trends in mainstream filmmaking.
 
The anthology as a televisual form has its roots in literary works, and Small Axe’s explores a quintet of discrete stories in a way that recalls collections of West Indian Stories. In examining the collection of stories as a filmic text, I intend to argue that filming the historical relationship between West Indian immigrants and white Britain is a necessary and natural development of film/TV’s emerging prominence as a cultural marker in the Caribbean region, and a valuable medium of presenting Small Axe’s central focus – depicting how West Indian immigrants create heterotopias of survival in a racist British society.
 
In this way, Small Axe becomes a literal and figurative survival strategy articulating the tension of Caribbean assimilation in white spaces: i) the anthology’s exploration of immigrant survival strategies through heterotopias in an imperialistic Britain is dependent on intentional creations of cultural spaces, and ii) McQueen’s anthology as a filmed survival strategy exploring stories of Black British immigrant within a media landscape which still ignores stories of Blackness/Immigrants on screen.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Guyana
Email: andrew.kendall@uog.edu.gy
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Michelle Ramos-Rodríguez
Project Caribbean Experiment: The Use of Science Fiction in Sr. Langosta’s Music Video ‘Island’s Loophole’

Abstract:
As the world continues to globalize, Caribbean artists utilize the mediums that have othered them in the past to create a space for redefining their experiences and identity. Science fiction is one of them. Accordingly, in their music video “Island’s Loophole,” Puerto Rican fusion band Sr. Langosta accentuates the social conditions of the Caribbean and its people through the use of dystopian worlds, otherworldly creatures, and uninformed experimentation. Sr. Langosta creates a hypothesize world where past problems have magnified, and the Western world continues to decide the future of the Caribbean region and its people in a constantly repeating cycle of exploitation and abuse. By briefly exploring the representations of the Caribbean in science fiction and Afrofuturism, I recognize how the band offers their perceptions on the relationship between the Caribbean and the Western world through their representations of technology and science fiction.
 
Institutional affiliation: Independent scholar
Email: michelleramrod@gmail.com

 

Leonard Obina Onwuegbuche
“Only the Fool Points at His Origin with His Left Hand”:
Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Celebration of His Authentic Origin

Abstract:
Black Africans in the diaspora faced with the unenviable history of being transplanted from Africa to the New World during the Transatlantic Slave Trade developed psychological problems. One of such problems is that they feel a sense of disconnection between their existence in the New World and their primary home in Africa. Caribbean writers expose the people's sense of rootlessness and the need to search for the authentic self. Through Historical Criticism and Post-Structuralism, this study interrogates the assertion of the tragic or fragmented self of the people ending in restlessness and sorrow. Edward Kamau Brathwaite's quest for his roots in Africa; his attainment and participation in African traditional worship; his communion with his ancestors and celebration of the new dawn of his reclaimed origin; his return to the Caribbean and the message he sent across by incorporating African languages into poetry. It aims at highlighting the need to rediscover the truth of one's being and rehabilitation of one's culture to re-establish one's dignity.
 
Institutional affiliation: Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu Alike
Email: leonardonwuegbuche@yahoo.com
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Alfrena Jamie Pierre
Who are We? Explorations of Self in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Mother Poem and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin

Abstract:
The connection between Barbados and England is distinct in that Barbados remained a colony of Great Britain, without external interruption, for more than 300 years. The experience endured by native Barbadians as a consequence of this perennial relationship with England has been indelible. As noted Caribbean theorist Gordon Rohlehr in his essay, “Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic: The Revolution of Self-Perception” has observed, “[M]uch was destroyed, much lost or obliterated” (1). Distinguished Barbadian poet, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and his compeer, the eminent Barbadian novelist, George Lamming, undertake the task of exploring and rearticulating definitions of self for Barbadian people of African descent which have been concertedly denigrated within colonial systems. Applying Caribbean poetics as its primary theoretical framework, this paper analyses Brathwaite’s 1977 anthology Mother Poem and Lamming’s 1953 novel, In the Castle of My Skin, with the overarching project of understanding the question of, “Who are Caribbean people of the African diaspora?” Furthermore, this paper also argues that, while Brathwaite and Lamming both maintain a pragmatic disposition as regards the outworking of the mission in their respective literary works, they ultimately present the African Caribbean descended individual with a poetics of hope and redemption which is inextricably linked to the continent of Africa and its diaspora.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Email: jamieita@gmail.com
 
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Evelyn Nwachukwu Urama
Traditional Performing Arts and Self Assertion:
Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Use of Musical Variations in Literature

Abstract:
Caribbean writers, just like writers from other parts of the world, represent Traditional Performing Arts in literature to display African historical, cultural, social, political, religious structures and ideologies. Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s in-depth knowledge of African culture helps him in re-educating his people and the Blacks all over the world on the need for their cultural and national identity. This is the major reason African culture manifests in the musical variations represented in his poems. Through Post-Structuralism, this study explores the style, locale, form, expression and relevance of the musical variations used by Brathwaite in some selected poems from his The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. It aims at enhancing cultural literacy, breeding nationalists by celebrating African historical past through music of solidarity and provides emotional support for black Africans freedom struggle in many parts of the world. It also exposes how going back to African indigenous knowledge and heritage of traditional norms and values foster self-assertion and actualization that are needed for sustainable development of Africa in this 21^st century.
 
Institutional affiliation: Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu Alike
Email: evelynurama@gmail.com
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Maria Grau Perejoan
Effects of and alternatives to the tourist industry in contemporary Caribbean poetry

Abstract:
Focusing on the poetry of Bahamian Sonia Farmer and Saint Lucian Kendel Hippolyte, this paper will show how contemporary Caribbean poets have recently responded to the impact of 21^st century tourism.
Building on the work of their literary predecessors, Farmer and Hippolyte present and denounce the neo-colonial dimension of a tourist industry which hinders the development of the archipelago. Their work offers insights into the social, economic, environmental and psychological effects of the tourist industry that West Indians experience in their everyday lives and denounces the lack of mobility justice, the feelings of homelessness and alienation caused by the industry and the complicity and subordination on the part of local governments. Their poetics underscore the inhospitable nature of the tourist industry for West Indians and highlights the neo-plantation dimension of tourism by analysing the myths of statism and isolation which continue to be perpetuated by the cruise ship and hospitality industries alike. Thus, their poetry does not only debunk the myths of island isolation and statism, but also advances new spaces and directions for the future of the region which call for the development of an archipelagic identity and the recognition of grassroots alternatives to the present milieu.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of the Balearic Islands
Email: maria.grau@uib.eu
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Keja Valens
Diaspora and Transnational Caribbean Home Cooking

Abstract:
“Home cooking,” the English term at the forefront of a wave of diaspora and transnational Caribbean cookbooks, refers to cooking carried out in a single home, in the domestic space of a family, or in a home kitchen, wherever that kitchen and that home may be located. The term also evokes a cultural affiliation with a geographical point of origin, a homeland, however nostalgic or remote. Thus, recipes for “home cooking” often signal and tell of cooking done far from “home.” This paper examines how in striving to reconcile nostalgia for a distant homeland with its recreation in a new home kitchen, “home cooking” serves up symbols of solidarity that reach through seas and oceans and engenders non-linear practices of de- and re-territorialization. Aida Lugo McAllister’s 2013 Aida’s Kitchen a lo Boricua, Jacinia Perez’s 2019 Puerto Rican Vegan Cookbook, Ana Sofia Peláez’s 2014 The Cuban Table, Nekisha Roachè’s 2014 From My Mudda’s Kitchen, Craig and Shaun McAnuff’s 2019 Original Flava, and Fendy Lamy’s 2018 Food for the Body, Food for the Soul, showcase diasporic and transnational Caribbean writer-cooks instructing reader-cooks—primarily of Caribbean descent, but also an interested general reading public—how to re-create the “taste of home” in their own (diasporic and transnational) kitchens. In so doing, they conjure up imaginary homelands in an idiom that, to cook with the words of Arjun Appadurai, “capture[s] the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations, and postnational identities” with new and old recipes for “complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance” (Modernity at Large, 166).
 
Institutional affiliation: Salem State University
Email: kvalens@salemstate.edu
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René Johannes Kooiker
Edward Kamau Brathwaite at Carifesta ‘72

Abstract:
Carifesta took place for the first time in 1972 with the sponsorship of Forbes Burnham’s PNC in recently independent Guyana, and the festival recurs around the Caribbean to this day. Relying on print resources and digitized archives, this paper recovers Kamau Brathwaite’s participation in the inaugural edition, which he praised as the “first ever meeting of the Caribbean.” In addition to reading from and lecturing on his own poems, he published extensive coverage of the events in the Barbados Sunday Advocate-News in an attempt to involve readers in the ephemeral pan- Caribbean public sphere the festival created. Although Carifesta ultimately did not live up to the great promise Brathwaite saw in it, the festival mirrors in many ways both the ideals he cherished and those we find in his work.
 
Institutional affiliation: Yale University
Email: rene.kooiker@yale.edu
 
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Samantha Stephens
(Type)ing Brathwaite: Digital Transformations from Paper to Pixel

Abstract:
The stylized X, a graphic symbol of difference, punctuates Kamau Brathwaite’s Barabajan Poems, 1492-1992 (BP). As a pioneer of experimental Caribbean writing and computing, Brathwaite’s use of the X serves a powerful aesthetic function. Further, his use of the computer in tandem with the appearance of the script style X, invites meaningful engagement with its textual production. Brathwaite’s use of script typeface, a style designed to mimic handwriting, is significant because the conditions of his typographic productions are unclear. While it is public knowledge that the poet used his personal Macintosh computer to write his poetry, and in the 1990s a StyleWriter to print his work, the particulars of his techniques and tools are unknown. This gap in knowledge is significant because his typographic innovations, coined Sycorax Video Style by Brathwaite himself, are almost universally cited as custom typefaces. Considering how vital the computer is to Brathwaite’s body of work, in my presentation I employ a digital humanistic lens and use digital tools to examine and analyze his type in ways that uniquely illuminate the conditions of the production of BP – effectively (type)ing Brathwaite. The (type)ing is both a reproduction of the type and an analysis of his typeface. This process requires that the X’s move from their material ‘home’ in the paper and ink of the book (back) into the digital world, to begin to uncover how the script type was created. The question emerges: is it possible that Brathwaite drew his own type?
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Virginia
Email: sls3ub@virginia.edu

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