Conference Abstracts | Conference | English

Michelene Adams (UWI, St. Augustine)

Title: Jazz and the Chronotope: Space-time in Louisiana by Erna Brodber and Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan 

Abstract: Probably the biggest bruggadung of modern times is the one brought on by Naziism, and  a bruggadung that has echoed worldwide for six centuries and counting is the enslavement  of Africans and its fallout. Ghanaian-Canadian Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues tells the story of  three Black jazz musicians who are members of a band based in Berlin during the rise of  Hitler’s movement before World War II. Two of the musicians are African-Americans working  in Germany, but the third is a mischling—of mixed German and African ancestry—who doesn’t  speak English. Louisiana by Jamaican Erna Brodber is also set in the 1930s but a continent  away in that Southern state, the cradle of jazz. The Jamaican-American protagonist whose  lover is Congolese, immerses herself in a community in New Orleans and discovers the links  between diaspora blacks; this epiphany leads her to her spiritual moorage. Let us begin by  proposing that, as a rule, writers counteract disorder by creating design and acknowledge  that these authors’ designs are parallel. The novels are similar in terms of their temporal  setting, but also because they feature a multicultural “cast” that speaks not only difference but  also linkage. That history-- time-- is a central concern in both novels is a given, but each also  foregrounds place, raising Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. Interestingly, both  writers weave jazz through their tapestries, suggesting that this music with its African roots is  an elemental aspect of space-time in these contexts. In this paper, I will explore how the  chronotope functions and investigate the place of jazz in the space-time of the worlds that  Brodber and Edugyan have built.  

Ra Bacchus (University of Miami)

Title: Measure by Measure: Reflections on Building a Quiz Map for Critical Caribbean Digital Pedagogy

Abstract: This article-presentation reflects on the web development of a digital quiz map designed to help students critically engage with the representation of the Caribbean in digital space. Emerging from workshops held as part of Visiones del Caribe—a digital humanities initiative using maps and archives to teach Caribbean history, culture, and cartography—this tool responds to students’ inquiries about the region’s spatial boundaries. The quiz invites students to select on a map the countries and territories they consider part of the Caribbean, prompting reflection on the diversity of perspectives shaping Caribbean identity. Drawing from critical cartography and digital pedagogy, I examine how mapping is not neutral, but a political and ethical problem shaped by colonial legacies, languages, and ideologies. Applying Antonio Gaztambide-Géigel’s framework defining the Caribbean across four categories: 1) ethnohistorical, 2) geopolitical, 3) Greater colonial, 4) plantation-cultural, the beta version of my quiz map used polygons to code a program that defined certain vectors as Caribbean. Producing this tool led to a reflection on the ethics of measurement. I consider how the interactive topographic map differs from a standard political map by being more capacious in its geo-representation, reigniting debates about overlapping borders (such as Hispaniola or the renamed Gulf of America) and competing linguistic frameworks (such as Taíno). This process reveals how emerging digital tools can both reinforce and challenge dominant narratives. I argue that counter-mapping practices offer a powerful way to reimagine the Caribbean as a plural, evolving space, deepening pedagogical engagement while foregrounding the stakes of digital representation for the Caribbean in particular in this era of artificial, automated, and hyperdigital information.

KV Bailey (University of Virginia)

Title: ‘The Black womb is a maw’: Sexual Crisis and Autopoetic Slackness in the Novels of Erna Brodber

Abstract: In Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980) Erna Brodber weaves together the  narrative of Nellie Richmond that disrupts the mid twentieth century nationalistic and aesthetic investments of West Indian Literature through the dissolution of formal and generic purity and  the restorative potential of afro-folk cultures. For example, in narrating the anxieties that contour  Nellie’s aunt Becca/Khaki’s pathologies around black reproductive futurity, Brodber intertwines  Jamaican folk proverbs to reorient the Eurocentric interpretative schema that toxifies black life  (142-143). Within the context of Aunt Khaki’s prolonged belief that the “black womb is a maw”  to be sterilized, Brodber uses the proverb “woman luck at dungle heap, fowl come scratch it up,”  an an interpretive lightning rod that repolarizes Khaki’s pathology as circulating within the  body(nation) and not cast upon it. Brodber’s deft rescripting, akin to Sylvia Wynter’s notion of  the autopoetic overturn, creates a work that not only functions within Afro-Jamaican cosmogonies, but reorients black women’s positions within its paradigm. Drawing on Carolyn  Cooper’s work on slackness as (h)ideology, this paper interrogates the presence and function of sexuality in Brodber’s inventive cosmogonies. I posit that Brodber’s uses of afro-folk culture to  reclaim the body/image of the black woman from the national imaginary, fails to successfully return black women’s bodies to themselves. Through tracing the development and use of folk culture in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa and Nothing’s Mat, and by deploying ‘slackness’ as a heuristic, I argue that the inventive capacities of black women’s sexual freedom are relationality foreclosed within a folk culture that denies their narrative futurity. 

Carol Bailey (Amherst College)

Title: Triumphant Renditions in Caribbean Diasporic Writing

Abstract: In his essay, “Tropical Apocalypse: Globalization and the Caribbean End Times,” Martin Munro names four horsemen that characterize the persistent and damaging impact of colonialism in a postcolonial and globalizing world. They include: ecological crisis, slavery, social divisions and exclusions, and the crisis of criminality. Munro argues that the Caribbean region may well be a “harbinger” of these global ills. In this paper, I suggest that immigration is a fifth horseman/horse person that often breeds displacement, dehumanization, and now more so than usual, ever-present threats of deportation and denial of human rights. Caribbean writers have always been engaged with colonially-driven migration, prompted by the unhomeliness of former colonies, locations that fit the poet Warsan Shire’s description, “the mouth of a shark.” In this presentation, I examine two literary representations written decades apart, each of which confronts the racism, dehumanization, and virtual existential threats that Caribbean immigrants encountered as they sought to establish new and economically improved lives in Britain. I place Samuel Selvon’s “Obeah in the Grove” in conversation with Yvonne Weekes’ “First Journey” to address the simultaneous acknowledgment and rejection of a sustained catastrophe specific to migration. In both texts, the persona and characters reach back home – psychologically and culturally – to disrupt the threatening systems and structures that undermine their humanity. These two works illustrate how Caribbean writers have historically “challenged the prevailing narratives of trauma and immobility” even as they acknowledge the potentially debilitating mechanisms of tyranny and exclusions that confront them daily. Ultimately, I argue in favor of triumph as one response from Caribbean writers across time.

Tikkun Bambara (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Title: How The Marvelous, The Sacred & The Haitian Imaginary Code breathe new life in times of crisis: A review of Suzanne Césaire, René Depestre, and Astrid Roemer. 

Abstract: This paper foregrounds Suzanne Césaire's conception of “The Marvelous” alongside René Depestre’s use of “The Haitian Imaginary Code” to trace the role of the West Antillean imagination and the sacred in responding to ecological and socio-political crises through three Caribbean novels: Popa Singer and Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre and Off White by Astrid Roemer. Centering paradigms offered by Césaire and Depestre, this paper reads the West Antillean imagination and the sacred through a Caribbean-Surreal feminist lens. Through this engagement, I demonstrate how the deployment of the West Antillean imagination and the sacred in the work of Depestre and Roemer offer expansive imaginaries in getting beyond crisis toward fostering solidarity in the face of social, economic, and environmental catastrophe. Divided into three sections, this paper theorizes the West Antillean imagination and the sacred, in three ways: First, I look at the role of imagination in Hadriana in All My Dreams and how it aides Hadriana through her battle with possession as she imagines her childhood home, its garden and its symbolic representation of the Caribbean as a whole. Second, I examine the use of the sewing machine as a form of natural magic in Popa Singer that allows for a deepening of the political imagination in the minds of Depestre’s characters during the height of the Duvalier years. Third, I track the use of spiritual and culinary practices (the Winti séance and baking “fiadu” in Off White) as forms of defying death and building sacred kinship in the aftermath of Dutch colonialism. Through this exploration, I return to Césaire’s definition of “The Marvelous” as an analytic that fosters new theoretical paradigms that stretch the syllabi of Black Diasporic Literature and privilege understudied cultural expressions from the Caribbean that reinvigorate how we engage Black Study proper.

Alejandro Beas Murillo (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Title: Intergenerational Afro-Boricua Feminist Survival in Mayra Santos-Febres’s La otra Julia

Abstract: The publication of Afro-Boricua writer Mayra Santos-Febres’s latest novel, La otra Julia (The Other Julia, 2024), a critical fabulation of the life of Julia de Burgos, has led to renewed interest in the work, radical politics, and iconography surrounding the poet, especially in the aftermath of Juan Dalmau’s success in the last elections in the archipelago as well as the growing pro-independence sentiment in the territory and its Diaspora. In this essay, I follow Santos-Febres and Vanessa Pérez Rosario in repurposing the idea of “the other Julia” both as a theory with which to grapple with the marginalization of Black women writers in Puerto Rico and as a methodological shift in our understanding of the afterlives of slavery and inherited trauma and resilience in the archipelago. My mobilization of “the other Julia” as praxis and theory is informed by the work on fractals of  Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Erna Brodber, and Santos-Febres herself, as well as Dionne Brand’s recent redefinition of sovereignty as a site of Black spiritual, philosophical, and emotional independence in Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. Through my close reading of the overlaps and gaps between the two narratives—one a critical fabulation of those intimate, painful aspects of Julia de Burgos’s lives that have been erased from her official biographies, the other following an unnamed writer following in de Burgos’s steps—I propose “the other Julia” as a way for us to honor the intergenerational mechanisms by which Black feminist knowledge and resistance is passed down from one woman to the next, even within the cycles of gender and white supremacist violence that haunt Puerto Rico to this day. 

Joseph David Berrios Diaz (Colegio Marista el Salvador)

Abstract: The narrative of puertorican writers is permeated with excruciating trauma and pain. The literature of our ambivalent Commowealth revisits up to this century the eternal question that has no answer still: What are we? Furthermore, when we analyze deep down the unconscious anguish of this identity defacement, there´s a loop of neverending melancholy. For example, The House on Cristo Street by René Marqués, Usmaíl by Pedro Juan Soto, Macho Camacho's beat by Luis Rafael Sánchez, The House of the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré, and so many others, bestow great importance to the crisis that the islanders experiment ever since the beginning of our national consciousness. Nevertheless, alongside the torment of not knowing who we are, water appears as an omnipresent symbol that suggests that, in order to grow as a nation, we need to move on away from the misconceptions of our identity and accept our acuatic uniformity. During the XXI century, writers try to innovate the way we narrate our lives and our multiple identities. Moreover, Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón attempt to redefine how can Puerto Rico reconstruct itself after the powerful Hurricane María devastated our land in September 20, 2017. In their anthology named Las réplicas del desastre, each of the writers endeavor to see beyond trauma and pain so as to recognize the importance of water in our existence and how we can achieve independence through self-sustainable energy and self-management of our food seeing that trauma does not define who we are, water does. 

Frances Botkin (Towson University)

Title: Reckoning with Disaster: Higglering in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun

Abstract: With its grim depiction of the Jamaican hustle economy in the late 1990s, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here  Comes the Sun furnishes a harrowing account of the destruction of Jamaica’s physical, cultural, and  economic environments in a small village on the touristic North coast. Structural adjustments and global  tourism have subjected its Black working class to forces of domination and extraction, intensified by drought and land development that have destroyed the natural resources critical to their subsistence. The  novel situates the street market as a site of hostility fueled by alienating capitalistic values that erode traditional ethics of camaraderie and care. Delores, a higgler, peddles crafts, produce, and (sixteen years  earlier) her daughter Margot’s virginity, instilling in her daughters a perception of the Black female body  as a commodity worth no more than “what’s between her legs” (281). Here Comes the Sun represents the  corruption of kinship and community in Jamaica as the desperate pursuit of survival and profit undercuts  intellectual, cultural, sexual agency. It thus sounds a warning bell in its interrogation of social issues  (skin-bleaching, rape culture, sex work, and homophobia) and environmental problems (for fisher people,  farmers, and vendors), emblematized by a dangerous riptide, the ghost of an enslaved woman  impregnated by her enslaver. My paper explores the higgler figure within this context. Higglering started in Jamaica when enslaved people grew and sold food from their provision grounds,  developing the island’s informal economy. After Emancipation, formerly enslaved people with small  plots practiced small scale trading. By the twentieth century, urban higglering increased as access to land  dwindled. Though higglers have become an emblem of Black women’s creative resistance, they have also  a reputation for “rudeness” and cunning. Here Comes the Sun exposes their resistance to and  accommodation with the bleak realities of their environments. 

Sabrina Bramwell (Howard University)

Title: Caribbean Mythopoetics: Mapping through Space Towards Freedom

Abstract: Wilson Harris is a Guyanese author, essayist and theorist born in 1921. His diverse  cultural makeup comprises of “English, Hindu Indian, Afro-Caribbean and indigenous  Amerindian ancestors” (Bundy 1) and his practice centers perceptions of freedom and myth that  can be traced through his essays and works of fiction. The Age of the Rainmaker (1971) was his  11th work of fiction which contains the story “Arawak Horizon” where Harris urges readers to  confront their limited perceptions of space and time within the Caribbean psyche. This process of  de-/re-construction, according to Harris, must be facilitated by myth that grants access to fluid  perceptions of individuality which are reinforced by fugitive boundaries of space and time. As  such, I argue that Caribbean mytho-poetics serve as a dynamic mode of expression that  transcends "traditional1" spatial (space) and psychic (time) boundaries to illustrate the  possibilities in Harris's understandings of freedom. Foregrounding my analysis of Harris's  intentional demolition and reinstitution of space and time I consult his essays "The Amerindian  Legacy" (1970) and "Profiles of Myth and The New World" (1996) and situate key portions of  their analyses within Harris’s short story “Arawak Horizon.” My project centers on the content  and narrative of “Arawak Horizon” to explore the ways they intentionally challenge conventional  notions of space and identity, highlighting a need for the West Indian thinker to break through  physical and psychological barriers.

J. Dillon Brown (Washington University in St. Louis)

Title: Transcending America: The Mythopoetics of Derek Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller

Abstract: Derek Walcott’s 1981 poetry collection, The Fortunate Traveller, represents some of his first  negotiations with the experience of actual, geographical exile, with poems ruminating at length on  what it means to be a Black Caribbean person residing in the United States. The volume charts the  path of the poet – the ironized fortunate traveller of the title – as he struggles to reconcile his initial  antipathy to the racial and imperial history of the United States with his discovery of the beauty of  its natural environment and, eventually, with a modulated sense of solidarity with many of its  residents. Examining the poems’ oscillating narrative and linguistic registers, their syntactical  gestures toward ambiguity and ambivalence, and their layered topographical imagery, this paper will  map out how Walcott seeks to bring together a sense of his Caribbean identity with the sometimes  overwhelming scale and scope of his newfound mobility within the U.S. and, ultimately, the globe.  In the end, the paper will argue for Walcott’s book as an early effort at poetically articulating a  planetary space, one in which the United States, despite its massive hemispheric influence, is seen as  a minor component of a much longer, cyclically destructive trajectory of human history still urgently  in need of redress.  

Tobi Brown (Syracuse University)

Title: Neglected Infrastructure, Ravaged Ecologies: Images of (Dis)pleasure in A Small Place

Abstract: This essay grapples with the image of (dis)pleasure, vis-à-vis place and space, in relation  to the Antigua portrayed in Jamaica Kincaid’s creative nonfiction A Small Place. The image of  (dis)pleasure is defined as an analytic approach to interrogating beauty and ugliness in literary  works. It lies at the crossroads of visual pleasure and visual upset that is rendered in written  forms. It is concerned with how beauty and ugliness exist side-by-side, coalesce, imbricate,  interweave—ugly beauty and beautiful ugliness, beauty that, in excess, transforms into its  hideous underbelly. In the context of A Small Place, the image of (dis)pleasure deals with  perceptions of beauty and ugliness in the text, and how these perceptions inform whether  Antigua is viewed as a place by the black Antiguan local, or a space by the white North  American/European tourist. Place is positioned as a rival yet overlapping geography to space,  where the former represents the environment people live in and make their home and the latter  represents how that same environment is conquered and/or explored, but not inhabited (Grosz,  210). I extend the issue of rival geographies to examine the phenomenon of the tourist seeking to  escape the displeasure of their native home, and extract pleasure from the Caribbean “paradise”.  Additionally, this essay mobilizes the concept of the images of (dis)pleasure to analyze the  literary techniques Kincaid utilizes, including Juvenalian political satire and descriptive imagery,  and the themes they portray or elicit—colonialism (rebirthed), the extractive processes of  tourism and political corruption, national identity in question and in flux, and under-resourced  public infrastructure. I argue that in the context of A Small Place, the image of (dis)pleasure  contends with interconnected perceptions of Antigua as it relates to spatiality, illuminating power  relations within the neo/colonial cycle of ecological exploitation. 

Michael A. Bucknor (University of Alberta)

Title: “‘Living in the Wake’: Affective Epistemologies and Sound Technologies in Lillian Allen’s Decolonial Dub Poetry”

Abstract: 

It was the singing …/that full my throat and blind my 

eye/with sunlight” (Baugh, Black Sand)

“the noise that it makes is part of its meaning”

 (Brathwaite, History of the Voice)

Edward Baugh’s “wake work” (Christina Sharpe) in the poem, “It was the singing” engages a poetics of grief and trauma that celebrates the power of music to express pain, but also to heal, celebrate and to cauterize the psychological wounds of tragedy. Baugh’s poem introduces the idea of sonic technologies as affective power, so valuable for reflecting on the traumas of Black lives. Lillian Allen’s Psychic Unrest, for example, traces the psychopathology of racialized subjects and sounds out a sonic source of potential healing through her dub poetics. Like the Blues that combines pain and joy, creating possibilities in afro-futurist dream work, dub offers its own version of sound phenomenology built on the sonic technology of a bass rhythm. For Christian Habekost, “the basic feature of dub is the riddim, bass and drum” (Verbal Riddim): the essential rhythmic and affective nature of reggae reroutes ancestral African drum-sound technology as resources for New World survival. Self-consciously attending to her dub poetics as a “black apostrophe to pain” (Dennis Scott, “Epitaph”), Allen also uses psychological language, as well as tropes of brokenness and numbing silence, to mark the violence done to Black Canadian subjects. For Allen, “nothing can be as numbing as that silent/shade of power”. Yet, she invites us to consider dub poetry as an exploration of affective interiority, racialized psychoses, and sonic healing. Building on the work of several thinkers—Cooper’s idea of “noise as disruptive power” (Noises), Brown and Garvey’s recognition of madness as a sign of a “pivotal aesthetics” (Madness), and Antwi’s conceptualization of dub poetry as a “sound archive” (a site of intimacy and phenomenology) (“Anticolonial Dreaming”)--this paper explores reggae-infused dub poetics as a potential source of healing for psycho-racial trauma. Recognizing Black Canadian subjects as “living in the wake” (Sharpe), in “states of anxiety, anguish, or hyperawareness that characterize [their] psychological conditions” (Ledent et al), Allen asks us to consider the potential of dub poetry to be a visionary poetics that reimagines black futures through psycho-sonic healing. 

Anne Castro (Florida International University)

Title: “Ghosts, Duppies, and Colonial Violence in The White Witch of Rosehall”

Abstract: In Herbert George de Lisser’s 1929 potboiler The White Witch of Rosehall, a sadistic  white mistress rules over her haunted Jamaican sugar plantation by conjuring spectral terrors and  ghosts, seemingly at will. In this paper, I show how de Lisser uses the generic conventions of the  Gothic ghost story to promote his racist, pro-colonial agenda throughout the story, which was set  in 1831 Jamaica and published in the island’s premiere conservative literary magazine almost a  century later. I contend that by turning Annie, the white mistress of Rosehall into the  embodiment of slavery’s secret cruelties and pleasures, de Lisser tries to both titillate his readers  and blame the plantocracy’s overindulgences for the cruelties inherent within Jamaica’s slave holding past. By analyzing the presence of haunting and demonic spirits called duppies in the  novel through psychoanalytic and historical frameworks, this paper shows how the novel tells an  altogether different uncanny narrative than the one first presented, a narrative rooted in the  haunting cruelties of rational, colonial law and economics. Throughout the novel, de Lisser attributes the past and future crimes of Rosehall with the  violence of the slave system, but concentrates that violence in the foreign, licentious and un repressed figure of Annie. However, I contend that the duppies that populate The White Witch of  Rosehall resist de Lisser’s own narrative constructions by revealing that the violence the author wants to contain within Annie is actually rooted in the varied mechanisms by which British  authorities maintained submission on the island, including the process of plantation book keeping called “valuation.” The “legal sorcery” of de-humanization developed through Acts of  Assembly was made materially manifest through physical violence as well as the financial rituals  of valuation, which ascribed monetary value to slaveholder’s assets in ways that conflated human  and animal property. What is more, I show that no matter how much de Lisser tries to disenchant  the Jamaican consciousness at the end of his ghost story, the island’s history of Imperial  investments will always render it a haunted space. 

Arselyne Chery (University of Virginia)

Title: Dreadful Kinship and the Black Female Body in Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon (2023)

Abstract: This paper reads Sinclair’s memoir of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing in 1980s and 90s Jamaica as an inquiry into what it means to live as an Afro-Caribbean female subject, as a “woman discarded / and woman emerging,” in a patriarchal, postcolonial family and world.1In How to Say Babylon, Sinclair illustrates the ways in which her family unit was once inextricably tied to her Rasta father’s desire to resist white colonialist impostions of power, thus transforming “family” into an alternative form of political governance meant to oppose Babylon and its abjection of Blackness. Unfortunately, her father’s enforcement of what I term “dread kinship” soon becomes dangerously dependent upon the regulation and subjugation of Safiya and the other women in her family, where the female body and female subjectivity are treated as the utmost site of Babylon and its sinful nature. In this way, I contend that Sinclair paints her father as both the rebellious Caliban and colonizer Prospero of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with the Rastafarian dawta and daughter functioning as what Sylvia Wynter calls “Caliban’s woman.” But by tracing the dread(ful) kinship practices (dreadlocked hair, corporeal punishment) that work to restrain and harm young Safiya and the women in her family, I also highlight the subtle ways that Sinclair the poet and memoirist stages and narrates Safiya-the-subject’s becoming. Ultimately, I argue that How to Say Babylon embodies what I am naming a “Black feminist dread aesthetic,” – a poetics of resistance that, like the Rastafari, embraces being dread, Black, and oppositional to exploitative systems of power, while also centering the plight and power of the subaltern, absent-but-present, Caliban’s dawta/daughter. 

Raphael Dalleo (Bucknell University)

Title: “Orlando Patterson’s Die the Long Day and the Caribbean Human”

Abstract: Orlando Patterson’s concept of social death is frequently invoked as a way of understanding slavery and black life. Similar to how Agamben theorizes the state of exception simultaneously depending on and producing bare life, Patterson offers a theory that foregrounds slavery and its aftermath as an ongoing disaster that challenges the very possibility of humanization. For Patterson, thinking about slave status as a form of “double death—the demographic nightmare of pervasive physical death reflected in the centrality of the slaves’ death rituals and social life, and the social death of absolute tyranny, natal alienation, and parasitic degradation” (Patterson 2018: viii)—points to the extent of the challenge of building integrated post-slavery societies or assimilating former slaves into the category of the human. In this paper, I make the case that Patterson’s work on social death forms part of larger Caribbean debates about the human from the decolonization era that engage on the one hand with human rights discourse coming out of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and on the other hand with Caribbean critiques of the human as a category of exclusion. Looking at how Patterson represents the human in his work—not only his nonfiction such as Slavery and Social Death but also his 1972 novel Die the Long Day—shows how Caribbean people navigated between a rehumanization project that would allow the claiming of universal rights and a discomfort with the historical use of the human as a technology of domination. 

Soham Das (The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad)

Title: Bruggadung Digitised: A Study of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s Mytho-Poetic World through the Lens of Poetics of Relation

Abstract: The Caribbean has long been a space of rupture and reckoning—where histories of colonial violence, rebellion, and ecological upheaval collide. In Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, this collision unfolds as both narrative and play, presenting the region as a site of perpetual "bruggadung", the Kamau Brathwaite-inspired explosion of disorder and change. This paper examines how the game’s mechanics, setting, and narrative structure embody Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, transforming the Caribbean into a digital space of entangled histories and speculative futures. Through its open-world design, Black Flag offers a mytho-poetic traversal of the Caribbean where players navigate shifting alliances, imperial violence, and ecological catastrophe. The game’s mechanics, naval combat, free-roaming piracy, and insurgency missions mirror the relational chaos that Glissant describes, where identity and history are never fixed but always in flux. Yet, while the game reinforces certain colonial and Eurocentric tropes of adventure, it also presents opportunities for counter-hegemonic readings, particularly through the character of Adewale, whose trajectory in Freedom Cry reframes resistance as an ongoing, networked struggle rather than an individualistic hero’s journey. By framing "bruggadung" not just as collapse but as an emergent space for reimagining Caribbean agency, this study interrogates how video games can function as interactive poetics—both reinforcing and subverting dominant narratives of the region. Ultimately, Black Flag’s bruggadung moment is not just one of destruction, but of potential: a playable rupture where the Caribbean’s past, present, and imagined futures are contested and rewritten.

Arnab Das (Indian Institute of Technology Madras)

Title: "Sun, Sand, and Systemic Oppression: Ecofeminist Readings of Tourism and Trauma in  Cherie Jones’ How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House and Contemporary Caribbean Literature"

Abstract: Interwoven into the complex web of Caribbean socio-cultural and ecological space  is Cherie Jones' How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (2021), which is a moving  commentary on the chasm between the polished and picturesque veneer of the Barbadian  tourism sector and the deep-seated oppression of its burgeoning underclass. Within its  ecofeminist lens, this paper explores the interplay of beauty and violence of the island's key  tourist zones and how they epitomize more significant Caribbean problems with neocolonial  exploitation and intergenerational trauma. The following examination of the protagonists, Lala  and Adan, argues through a close reading that their strength lies in the ways they resist  patriarchal and colonial oppression that attempts to regulate their bodies as well as the territory  they live upon. Comparative readings alongside Caribbean contemporaries, including Nicole  Dennis-Benn's Patsy (2019) and Kevin Jared Hosein's Hungry Ghosts (2023), also enable  insight into the patterns of displacement and survival that permeate the lives of marginalized  women who occupy specific spaces in this work. By doing so, this study calls for a new  conception of “paradise” in which silenced voices and submerged spaces, often seen as  marginal and unworthy of postcard-perfect representations, are brought to the fore and argues  that they might offer prime sites of decolonial imagination within the framework of the  examined literary works. Through the exploration of the entangled intersectionality of gender,  environment, trauma, and other socio-political realities of the moment, the discourse hopes to  add to the burgeoning canon of Caribbean literature as an urgent and important yet nuanced  commentary of our time—a time this book echoes in the resonant bruggadung of struggle,  survival and resurgence across the region. 

Jarrel De Matas (University of Texas Medical Branch)

Title: Douen Medicine: A Novel Approach to Integrating Caribbean Ancestral Healing into Healthcare 

Abstract: Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring depicts marginalized Caribbean communities  abandoned by conventional medical systems and turn to their ancestral Afro-Caribbean  healing practices for survival. I combine a close reading of this novel with interventions in  narrative medicine and health humanities to conceptualize literature as a ‘bruggadung’ tool to  reckon with health injustice. In doing so, I underscore the potential of integrative medicine,  the practice of combining traditional healing with biomedical approaches, to address  healthcare disparities and enhance patient outcomes. My argument for integrating Caribbean ancestral healing into conventional healthcare uses  the metaphysical significance of the folkloric figure, the douen, to advocate for a specifically  Caribbean healthcare model which is, like the douen, mystical, unseen, spiritually inflected,  and dual in the sense of looking forward with feet that point backward. Presently, the institutional integration of ancestral healing practices has been attempted  through the Traditional and Complementary Medicine Unit in Trinidad, Cuba’s Green  Medicine Initiative, the medicinal plant trade in Suriname, and a feasibility study conducted  by the Mental Health Innovation Network which analysed the introduction of culturally  adapted CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) to Haitian spiritual leaders in Vodou, along  with Catholic and Protestant, communities with the intention of building skills in talk  therapy. Through my analysis of Brown Girl in the Ring alongside real-world Caribbean integrative  medicine practices, this study highlights a novel ‘bruggadung’ approach to disrupting contemporary healthcare discussions. It argues that incorporating cultural medicine into  modern healthcare can empower marginalized communities, promote holistic well-being, and  foster more equitable health systems. To emphasize the applicability of my ‘novel’ approach,  I provide a five-phase roadmap for the implementation of literary approaches in medical  pedagogy, policy, and clinical practice.

Kathleen DeGuzman (San Francisco State University)

Title: The City Is History: Gentrification and Sam Selvon’s London Fiction

Abstract: It goes without saying that Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) is a canonical work in Caribbean literature. But it is perhaps less known that Selvon’s London fiction informed the work of Ruth Glass, the sociologist and urban planning scholar who is credited with coining the term “gentrification” in 1964. My presentation will trace how Glass, in her 1961 study Newcomers: The West Indians in London, cites from Selvon’s short story collection Ways of Sunlight (1957) to provide data points about housing costs and predatory practices by London landlords. By bringing this confluence of Caribbean literature and urban studies to light, my presentation will root the history of gentrification in a specific process of Caribbean displacement. In the novels The Housing Lark (1965) and Moses Ascending (1975), Selvon depicts the symbolic and material power that accompanies homeownership. By placing Selvon’s fiction in dialogue with the process of “gentrification” that Glass described in London during the 1960s, I propose that the Trinidadian author best known for his lighthearted style was in fact alerting readers to a concrete process of urban dispossession that continues to imperil Caribbean life. Indeed, the crisis of gentrification has become an all-too familiar struggle in cities around the world that the Caribbean diaspora calls home, including Miami and New York. By framing Selvon’s London not only as a Caribbean literary capital but as a ground zero for Caribbean displacement, my presentation will highlight the unit of the city as a surprisingly neglected site for practicing Caribbean literary history, which has primarily been attuned to spaces such as the plantation and the sea (e.g., Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation”; Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History”). 

Catheline Desire (University of Miami)

Title: Exile and return- Diasporic discourse in the contemporary Haitian context

Abstract: 

“Yes, there is relief, too! I'm going to tell you what - it's the earth, your own plot of land that you've cleared by the strength of your arms, with your own fruit trees around it and your own stock in the pasture, everything you need right there - with your own freedom bounded by nothing but the weather, good or bad, rain or drought.” (Master of the Dew) 

In Master of the Dew (1947), Jacques Roumain presents return as a form of salvation for Haiti, both environmentally and socially. After years of exile in Cuba, the novel's protagonist, Manuel, returns to restore both the land and the fractured community. Through his return, Roumain proposes a vision in which migrants, equipped with knowledge and experience gained abroad, hold the key to Haiti’s restoration. Almost 80 years later, Haiti continues to experience mass emigration, largely caused by political instability and economic hardship. However, scholars such as Anthony Catanese (1999) and Jacobson (1989) argue that Haitian migration should also be understood as an environmental phenomenon, as deforestation, soil erosion, and climate change contribute significantly to displacement. Therefore, Haitians should be considered as environmental refugees too. This paper explores Master of the Dew in light of contemporary migration patterns, examining how Roumain’s vision of return engages with broader discourses on exile, displacement, and ecological crisis in the Caribbean. Furthermore, it considers how this vision of return aligns with or diverges from other diasporic narratives, particularly those articulated by Kamau Brathwaite in Timehri (1970), who conceptualized return as central to Caribbean identity, roots, and belonging. By analyzing Manuel’s return as both an environmental and sociopolitical act, this study interrogates whether return, once framed as a remedy, remains a viable or meaningful solution for Haiti today. In doing so, this paper situates Roumain’s work within ongoing debates about migration, belonging, and the role of the diaspora in shaping Haiti’s future. 

Meredith Eget (University of Miami)

Title: Aquatic Reckonings: Caribbean Literature and Visual Art as Excavators of Submerged Histories

Abstract: This paper explores how Caribbean literature (Edwidge Danticat’s 1998 novel The Farming of Bones) and visual art (Scherezade García’s 2012 postcard ethnography project  Memory of Perejil) employ water as a metaphor for the fragmentation of memory, home, and  identity in the wake of state violence and forced displacement. In Danticat’s novel, water is for  protagonist Amabelle Désir as much a source of pain and displacement as it is one of power and  homecoming: trapped in a limbo between past violence and future hope, Amabelle returns to  memory—as she does the river where her parents drowned in the 1937 Perejil Massacre—to  grapple with her traumatic past, fragmented memories, and fractured selfhood. Similarly,  García’s ethnographic installation—conducted in the border towns of Dajabón and  Ouanaminthe—relies on a communal return to the site of the Haitian-Dominican frontera to  collect, decode, grieve, and heal collective traumas. Both artists evoke a living past, or the belief  that legacies of violence live on in the land and collective psyche of a populace long after the  official memory of the state has disregarded them. At the heart of Danticat and García’s works is  an excavation of these submerged histories. Both life-giving and lethal, water operates as a  dynamic third space that embraces contradiction in its fluidity and creates the conditions for  reckoning, remembering, and reimagining historic atrocities.  By foregrounding scholarship in Caribbean memory, trauma, history, and the blue  humanities in my close reading of these works, I chart how water enables a form of cultural  recycling: a re-circulation of pain that, rather than retraumatizing, transforms. In embracing  memory as fragmented, living, and ever-shifting, Caribbean writers and artists craft new methods  of survival and solidarity—ones that pursue historical responsibility, communal healing,  individual identity formation, and the contestation of enduring anti-Haitian rhetoric in  Hispañola.

Kim Evelyn (Bowie State University)

Title: Bruggadung Braps: Heritage Site Demolition in Jasmine Sealy’s The Island of Forgetting

Abstract: Jasmine Sealy is a member of the new generation of Caribbean authors concerned with the  exploitative neocolonial dynamics of mass tourism and its impacts on Caribbean people. Of the  many moments of forgetting and loss in her 2022 novel The Island of Forgetting, one poignant  example is the destruction of “the Castle,” a historic hotel, in order to develop an all-inclusive  resort (a fictionalized version of Sam Lord’s Castle in Barbados, now essentially a landscape  feature at the all-inclusive Wyndam Grand Barbados Sam Lords Castle resort). The novel’s  timing corresponds with Barbadian historians loudly ringing the warning bell to alert fellow  Barbadians to the need for preservation of sites ranging from an enslaved burial ground to a  former prison. The novel’s elites have sold the site and a Canadian company is charged with  demolition and development. Sealy prompts us to “Imagine [developers] coming to a place  [they’ve] never been before and crushing one of its landmarks into dust [with the ability to] sail  away, and never look back” (147-8). Incensed Barbadians have limited recourses through call-in  radio programs and a small protest led by preservation groups; the demolition goes through,  sounding as though “the earth itself is cleaving open” and two children die in the collapse (147).  This fictionalized demolition critiques: i) how mass tourism paves over Caribbean history with  facilities that require tourists have little engagement with the local population, environment, or  culture; ii) how little say residents may have in these initiatives; and iii) how preservation is  often determined by a site’s value to tourism. Ultimately, Sealy’s treatment of the destruction  of a heritage site for the development of an all-inclusive resort is a reckoning with one of the  “emUrgencies” the Caribbean faces in this moment: that despite understanding the value of  heritage, preservation is still at the mercy of the tourism dollar.  

Erin Fehskens (Towson University)

Title: Merle Collins’s “Tout Moun ka Plewé”: Critical Resilience and Deep Listening in the  Eye of the Hurricane

Abstract: Speculative writing in the Caribbean and recent turns in climate  fiction around the globe have increasingly contributed to utopian visionings for dwelling in  interspecies futures that are nonetheless borne out of the destructive effects of climate change. But joy is not only to be found in the imagined Caribbean future. In this paper, I will  read Merle Collins’s essay, “Tout Moun ka Plewé (Everybody Bawling)” (2007) at the  intersection of critical resilience and deep listening to attend to the joyful and playful ways  the essay urges us to apprehend a Caribbean-centric history of the region through its  collective, community-based experience of hurricanes, both meteorological and political.  Collins’s writing draws together concepts of critical resilience and deep listening to  theorize on a Caribbean engagement with hurricanes and their disruptive forces that throw plant, animal, and human life into new assemblages of connection and care. Typical  resilience rhetorics buttress neoliberal ideologies in their valorization of the individual’s will  to survive despite and in the face of hardship. These rhetorics are predicated on a  progressive and comparative narrative that emphasizes suffering to then celebrate the  overcoming of that suffering through personal initiative or “grit.” Critical resilience, on the  other hand, does not deny a people’s will to survive through disaster, but it turns to  practices of care, the centrality of community, and the cyclical nature of catastrophe to  anatomize disaster even while joyfully celebrating “survivance,” a portmanteau of survival  and resistance. I will argue that Collins engages with practices of deep listening and  dispositions of critical resilience so that regional experiences of hurricanes are not marked  only by disaster and deprivation but also become occasions to express commitments to  community and care through the confounding joy of the impossible and the pleasures of  collective “survivance.”

Stephanie Fullerton-Cooper (University College of the Cayman Islands)

Title: A Storm of Words: Cataclysmic Cayman Concerns and the Writers’ Response

Abstract: Current concerns in the Cayman Islands reflects deeper inquiries into lineage, belonging, and identity. This paper explores the complex dynamics of migration, identity, and belonging in a society where over 130 nationalities coalesce within a small island state (Cayman Islands' 2021 Census of Population and Housing). The paper further interrogates the historical and sociological forces behind the Caymanian/expatriate dichotomy that informs much of the islands' policy and politics. It critically interrogates how migration has influenced social realities, probing the contested ideas of "authentic" Caymanian identity and transnational belonging. Through a literary lens, this study examines the non-fiction of two male Caymanian authors, tracing the trajectory of socio-political change from 2007 to 2024. J.A. Roy Bodden’s The Cayman Islands in Transition (2007) and Christopher Williams’ works, Defining the Caymanian Identity (2016), Between a Past and Present Consciousness (2019), and Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life (2022), serve as critical texts. These authors' writings explore colonial and postcolonial ideologies of migration, identity, and belonging, and the paper argues that while both authors’ non-fiction presents historical and sociological analyses of migration, Bodden’s fictive works, steeped in "righteous indignation," provides a more visceral response to the challenges posed by migration. Both writers highlight the ways in which the Cayman Islands’ social realities, shaped by waves of migration, address the more negative outcomes of this process. The paper conclusively asserts Caymanian literature as a powerful force for highlighting, interrogating, and transforming society, arguing that Bodden and Williams’ works exemplify a resilient cultural response to the often pejorative consequences of migration.

Nicolas Gerardi Rousset (University of Miami)

Abstract: In the early 1990s, Kamau Brathwaite began experimenting with the creative possibilities offered by personal computers. He approached the machine as if it were a musical instrument: typography and symbols became notes, while the white space of the page served as silence. By altering font, size, spacing, and spelling, Brathwaite explored the expressive potential of digital writing while simultaneously theorizing about the practice itself. For example, Letter Sycorax (1993) is a poem-invitation to engage with technology critically. Reimagining the figure of Sycorax, mother of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Brathwaite positions himself as Caliban, writing to his mother about how to use Prospero’s technology in an alternative way. This alternative mode of technological expression was named by Brathwaite as Sycorax Video Style. “A use of computer fontage to visualise his sense of dream & morph & riddim drama — videolectic enactment.”1 Tracing the submarine unity and zooming out the map, away from Jamaica, where Brathwaite was living at the time, we find that he was not alone. All around him, in the same time and space of the Caribbean, other Calibans were also proposing critical uses of writing technologies to subvert the Prospero system. In 1985, Eduardo Kac in Brazil began producing his Videotexto3 experiments. By the 1990s, he was creating holopoetry, immersing the reader inside holographic words. That same year, in Caracas, Yucef Mehri began programming Atari cartridges to write poetry. In 1997, Mehri developed his Poetic Clock with LED lights that displayed a new poem every second, every minute, every hour, highlighting the problematic relationship between time and labor. The Sycorax Accent is a conference centered on Kamau Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video Style and its echoes in the work of Ana María Caballero, Yucef Mehri, and Eduardo Kac, authors who, like Brathwaite, use technological devices as poetic tools to create networks of solidarity and resist hegemonic power.

Barbara Gfoellner (University of Vienna)

Title: Suspending Wor(l)ds: Abyssal Poetics in Caribbean Writing

Abstract: This paper takes Aimé Césaire’s call for “[t]he only thing in the world that’s worth beginning: The  End of the World, no less” (38–39) as its point of departure to engage with recent debates in critical  theory that call for the end to this ‘world’, meaning a world constituted by modernity’s violent holds.  While such debates take on ever more urgency today, Caribbean writers have long drawn attention  to a “history of catastrophe” (Brathwaite 457) that is “subterranean” (460) and weaving into the  present, linked to the “original explosion” of the Middle Passage. The ocean figures as a vital  instrument to challenge linear temporal understandings of History. Building on Caribbean  reflections on the ocean as ambivalent space to both reckon with History and reinvent non oppressive geographies and epistemes, this paper draws out an abyssal poetics—with Glissant’s  notion of the “abyss” as that which attunes to the unknown. I explore how Caribbean poetry—from Kamau Brathwaite to NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Canisia Lubrin—challenges  violent epistemes of modernity by working with opacity, rather than colonial transparency, and  rupture, rather than Enlightenment linearity. I ask how the political is dealt with through a poetics,  in Césaire’s sense of a “poetic knowledge”: a dynamic process of creating, rather than representing,  knowledge and (un)knowing. I thus explore how an abyssal poetics might look like from a  Caribbean studies perspective: in the long wake of modernity, what poetics emerge amidst and  through rupture and the break?  

Sadé Gordon (University of Miami)

Abstract: Caribbean literature has long grappled with the violent entanglements of colonial history, environmental crisis, and spiritual transformation. While land has often been the primary site of resistance and reckoning, this paper examines how contemporary Caribbean writers engage air and water as contested spaces of both extraction and spectral possibility. I argue that Caribbean literature presents airspace and water as militarized zones where colonial technologies( sonar, surveillance, frequency-based mapping) attempt to render the unseen transparent and extractable. Yet, in these same spaces, spiritual and aesthetic forces counteract these logics, offering modes of refusal that do not merely resist, but transform. Drawing on texts like Kei Miller’s August Town, and the ephemeral aesthetics of Caribbean feminist and spiritual traditions, this paper considers how narratives of spectrality, sound, and vibration respond to the ongoing crises of coloniality and environmental destruction. How do figures of African descended spirituality, or ethereal narrators who hover beyond death, refuse colonial mappings of air and water? How do the vibrational aspects of spirit work (sound, song, and ephemerality) offer alternative ways of surviving and transcending the states of emUrgency that define the contemporary Caribbean? By reading these texts alongside theories surrounding colonial airspace, hydrocolonialism, and Black feminist ecologies, I explore how Caribbean writers articulate new ways of surviving crisis.

Michael Grafals (Florida International University)

Title: Samuel Selvon's West Indian Comedic Narrative Voice and Jennine Capó Crucet's Say Hello to My Little Friend

Abstract: Scaachi Koul's glowing review in the The New York Times of second-generation Cuban American writer Jennine Capó Crucet's latest novel, Say Hello To My Little Friend (2024), sets its premise up perfectly: “OK, stop me if you've heard this one before: A young Pitbull impersonator in Miami named Ismael grows obsessed with a killer whale held in captivity named Lolita while he attempts to both remake himself in the image of ‘Tony Montana for the new millennium’ and untangle the mystery of his mother's death more than a decade ago”. Yet even the most perfect pitch will fail to capture the distinctly Cuban American comedic narrative voice that holds the novel and its protagonists (Ismael and Lolita) together. My presentation develops a comparative genealogy of the Cuban American narrative voice in Capo Crucet's novel to the West Indian comedic narrative voice deployed by Samuel Selvon, one of the foundational figures in West Indian literature. My exposition of Selvon's comedic narrative voice is based on his short story cycle, Ways of Sunlight (1957), and his screenplay for the film Pressure (1976, directed by Horace Ové). In both Selvon and Capó Crucet texts, the comedic narrative voice acts to disclose and mediate a community of heterogenous diasporic voices. Selvon's formative role in the development of West Indian diasporic literature helps in the framing of the diasporic and ecological community that forms through the comedic voice in Capó Crucet's novel.

Dasharah Green (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Title: Sacred Grounds: Gardening as a Site for Self Reckoning in Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me To Disguise

Abstract: How does the Caribbean landscape work as a site of reckoning that affirms the power of an aesthetic sensibility in nurturing the self by recognizing an entire lineage of historical ties to land? In our present wake of climate change and fragile infrastructure affecting archival sites and Afro-diasporic lands, it is urgent to consider feminist ecology frameworks of ties to natural land/scapes. Michelle Cliff was a non-canonical white-passing Jamaican born writer. She uses the Caribbean landscape as a setting to explore spatial imagination and foster ecological networks between non/human life through the trope of the garden as self. In the feminist prose collection Claiming an Identity They Taught Me To Disguise, Cliff exercises a nurturing of the physical and metaphorical seeds planted within her writings and garden. Her connection to the garden imagery triggers a reliving of past and ongoing matrilineal trauma and conflict. Thus, complicating how she (dis)connects to the island as she searches for physical, spiritual, and emotional connections to territory and land. The garden, as part of the domestic sphere, is simultaneously a private-public space. The complication arises when others infiltrate (literally and figuratively) the domesticated land Carribean women tend to as a site for nurturing seeds for growth, preservation, and life-making. The concept of nature, as something that can be tended to or controlled, complicates how Cliff internalizes her lack of control within her personal connections to the women in her family. She resists cis-heteronomative expectations of female reproduction as a natural occurrence of the lifecycle as she considers what she leaves with the world, and less who she brings into it – thus, centering gardening as her life-making contribution. Cliff’s work explores the rupturing of the patriarchal lifecycle that relies on the work of women. 

Isabel Guzzardo (Seton Hall University)

Title: Maroon Anti-futurism in Rita Indiana’s La Mucama de Omicunlé

Abstract: This paper explores the concept of “antifuturism” as theorized through Rita Indiana’s speculative  novel La Mucama de Omicunlé, a work that confronts environmental catastrophe, colonial  repetition, and racial capitalism in the Caribbean. Set across multiple centuries but grounded in a  future devastated by climate disaster and biowarfare, the novel centers a queer, trans messiah  figure, Acilde, who must time-travel to the past to uncover the knowledge needed to prevent  ecological collapse. Indiana’s Caribbean apocalypse resists a linear vision of time and instead  enacts a temporal simultaneity where maroon resistance, Indigenous cosmologies, and Afro Caribbean spiritual practices coexist with dystopian futures. By turning to the past—specifically to 17th-century maroons and buccaneers, and early 20th century artistic collectives—Indiana crafts a counter-archive of Caribbean coalition. However,  this paper also examines how whiteness, even in its queer and trans articulations, can replicate  colonial erasure. The novel’s protagonists, Acilde and Argenis, while using Black and  Indigenous knowledges to time travel, often fail to ethically sustain the maroon and indigenous  communities they rely upon. Their actions reinscribe racial violence and historical distortion,  challenging readers to consider who is authorized to imagine the future and through what epistemologies. 

Warren Harding (Binghamton University)

Title: Reading Notes: Practices of Refuge in the Works of Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, and Soleida Ríos

Abstract: Meditating on the geographic resonances of migration, witness, revolution, loss, discovery, and much more, Dionne Brand situates the Door of No Return as a critical sight of collective journeys and meanings in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001). As a series of notes, this work floats on an epistemological space of incompleteness and transformation, especially in reflecting on the ongoing emergencies in living, seeing, feeling, and embodying Black and Caribbean space. This paper takes on Brand’s form of note-taking almost a quarter century later. I ask: how does Brand’s articulation of “notes” provide ground through which we can weather the ongoing shocks of anti-immigrant violence that reverberates between these two diasporas? To what extent do these “notes” take on a gendered meaning for Black and Caribbean writing? Drawing upon the transnational, literary, and cultural genealogies of Black feminist criticism, I engage the interventions by Carole Boyce Davies, Barbara Christian, VèVè Clark, Meredith Gadsby, Régine Jean-Charles, Rosamond King, Kevin Quashie, and Christina Sharpe to situate a gendered reading of Black and Caribbean space. Following, I read Brand alongside works by contemporary creative writers, including Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat and Cuban poet Soleida Ríos, to argue that notes and note-taking as an errant practice of refuge and reflection that allow these women writers to interrogate rupture, creation, and possession as integral experiences of weathering crisis. By attending to the various crossings and recrossings that these women’s writings insist, in weathering through these times of reckoning. Finally, I offer some brief notes to extend this practice as one mode of reflecting on our current moments of reckoning. 

Annabelle Haynes (Hofstra University)

Title: Poetics of Underdevelopment in Erna Brodber’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake

Abstract: In The Rainmaker’s Mistake, Erna Broder creates an expansive imaginative landscape  through spatiotemporal experimentation with island representation which construct poetics of  underdevelopment. Poetics of underdevelopment highlight the continuities between colonialism,  neo-colonialism, and underdevelopment, while recognizing the ways that thinking through  underdevelopment can demystify mainstream development discourse. While promising to  mitigate and prevent disaster, what we call development usually precipitates catastrophe and  produces cycles of disaster capitalism. Development remains the primary operating discourse  within modernity and the dominant framework for analyzing Caribbean issues, even as its  formulations of progress present an existential threat to the region. In her fourth novel, Brodber  constructs a mythical tale of a community who think they are yams and face the challenge of not  growing or changing for over one hundred years. This community eventually settle on the  imaginary Cabarita Island where they attempt to solve the problem of their stunted growth and make the transition from yamhood to personhood. The Cabarita community’s journey maps the  colonial categorization of nature into land, and people into labor, which inaugurates the ongoing  ‘living-in-crisis’ that defines the experience of modernity. Spatiotemporal experimentation with  the representation of the imaginary Cabarita island twins the vexed problems of land and labor,  allowing for unbroken, temporal, and analytical connections between transatlantic slavery,  modernity, and the neo-liberal present. Ultimately, The Rainmaker’s Mistake excavates the  historical silences at the heart of development discourse while mapping the relationship between  modernity and the emergencies created by the Western template of modernization.

Donna Hope (UWI, Mona)

Title: Emergency!: Narrating Alternative Modes of Resilience and Survival in Brysco’s “Where I’m From and Jamal’s “Ballandor”.

Abstract: In the contemporary struggle for economic survival, and social upliftment, the newest generation of dancehall stars craft and disseminate narratives articulating alternative, and sometimes, anti-systemic modes of representation that proffer pathways to empowerment and enrichment.  Arising from the “states of emergency” that colour dancehall’s resistance in the face of poverty and struggle, these modern-day debates are deeply enmeshed in capitalism’s materialistic and consumptive impulses. Accordingly, they paint graphic images of a “Good Life” that mirrors the lifestyles of affluence flitting across cyberspace portals, suggesting acquisition of these lifestyle props by any means necessary. This paper threads together the popular strands of this magic wand debate as it flits across modern-day Dancehall’s stages in urgent tones. Navigating the cries of those who “a suffa roun ere” in the deepening chasm of social and economic deprivation that separates the haves from the have-nots, the work draws from and unpacks the metaphors locked in Brysco’s popular song Where I’m From and Jamal’s s, among others. It highlights how this materialistic fantasy is incarnated and deployed in the male-dominated spaces of Dancehall and thrust outward to collide with the situations of lack that colour the lives of these producers, ultimately creating a fairytale resolution to key social challenges, that may or may not, be fleeting.

Nicola Hunte (UWI, Cave Hill)

Title: Unsettling the Anthropocene in the Cross-Cultural Imaginary of Caribbean Speculative Fiction

Abstract: Discussions around the conceptual significance of the Anthropocene has thrown up, once again, the  devastating legacies produced by the ties between European Enlightenment and imperialism for  human society. One of the most recent genres to address this devastation, and attempt redress, has  been climate (change) fiction. The necessarily ‘what if’ nature of the texts also places them in  dialogue with other forms of speculative narratives, generally dystopic or post-apocalyptic fiction.  Some of the critical responses to these works return to how the Anthropocene emphasizes “the  central role of mankind in geology and ecology” and the impact of human activities on the planet  (Crutzen and Stoermer 17). These readings suggest a peculiar tension that Mahlu Mertens and Stef  Craps explains as an increasing awareness “that we are just one of many species that might go  extinct, and that there will be a time after us, thus complicating the anthropocentrism that has  characterized our culture for centuries” (134). However, this is not, I suggest, an observable tension  in the contemporary speculative works from the Caribbean. Drawing on traditions of  environmental-based awareness, there is a tendency in Caribbean speculative fiction to promote  eco-centric futurities, which outline a form of unsettling human-centred ecologies in favour of  networked relations with the world around us. This unsettling imbricates culture, technology and  the environment in a manner suggestive of Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of human after Man  which seeks to move beyond the underpinning notions of imperialism. This paper therefore  attempts to comparatively discuss selected short fiction and prose from contemporary Caribbean  writers such as Tobias Buckell and Celeste Rita Baker and place them in dialogue with the works of  African/Afro-diasporic writers to highlight a redemptive cross-cultural engagement through and  beyond the pall of the Anthropocene. 

Dannabang Kuwabong (University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras Campus)

Title: Eco-Dreaming as embodied nationalist landscaping: Toward a “topistic” reading of Lasana Sekou's Nativity.

Abstract: This paper engages a topistic reading of Lasana M. Sekou’s Nativity, as an intricate pattern of “nature, native, nation” (Afua Cooper viii), that creates a vernacular landscape, a socio-political environment for the liberation of St. Martin. I speculate that Sekou engages a “topistic” imagination to establish a mythopoeic and ecological cartography of St. Martin that dissolves boundaries between humans and non-humans. I explore the epic dimensions to reveal Sekou’s activist re-membering, re-visioning, re-writing, and righting his peoples’ dis-membered histories and cultures. In this re-visioning, I postulate that Sekou’s defines St. Martin through pan-Caribbean, pan-African and non-human experiences to develop a vernacular landscape ideology that “contains its own memory of events and its own mythic nature, its genius loci, of spirit, of place, which may or may not be visible, but can be apprehended by the human . . . interloper” (Glissant 1996: 88). Nativity takes up Glissant’s (131) call for a new landscape consciousness as a “subject of the most fundamental protest” against the multiple cultural and ecological alienations, and to re-establish a new socioenvironmental and political landscape consciousness. In Nativity, Sekou’s role is a verdadero cantore seeking to unravel what Nixon calls the neo-liberal globalist externalizing logic that creates enclaves of “displacement without moving” (19), and which destroys the life-sustaining features of the population. I conclude that Sekou draws attention to this economic plunder that has stifled any real cultural and economic self-sufficiency, and instead created a dependency syndrome that immobilizes the population’s energies towards national political and economic independence (Nixon 3-13).

Nardia Lipman (University of Miami)

Title: Reimagining EmUrgency and Resistance in Tobias Buckell’s “Spurn Babylon” and “Category  Six” 

Abstract: Responding to the theme of “States of EmUrgency” and Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of  “bruggadung”, I will investigate how Tobias Buckell’s short stories “Spurn Babylon” and  “Category Six” employ speculative storytelling to interrogate both historical and  contemporary “bruggadung”—the sudden and devastating collapses triggered by  environmental disaster, structural inequality, and cultural erasure. Guided by the critical  inquiry of how Caribbean writers engage in “ringing the warning bell” against social and  environmental urgencies, this paper will consider how the stories portray acts of resilience and  reclamation within disaster contexts. In “Spurn Babylon”, Buckell imagines a post-hurricane  US Virgin Islands where a resurrected slave ship called Marcus Garvey becomes a space for  cultural healing and rebuilding. The story engages with the trauma of the Middle Passage and  colonial exploitation, suggesting that reconfiguring the wreckage of the past can offer  possibilities for future mobilities. By focusing on the community’s efforts to reclaim and  rebuild the ship, I will explore how Buckell turns disaster into a chance for transformation. “Category Six” offers a futuristic vision of the Caribbean, contending with intensified  hurricanes and economic instability. Through the protagonist’s ambitious project of  repurposing an abandoned cruise ship into a floating, cooperative nation, Buckell critiques  existing capitalist systems and postcolonial structures whilst envisioning new models of  governance. I will discuss how Buckell’s speculative vision offers alternatives to despair,  instead, highlighting creativity, solidarity, and empowerment within the CARICOM economic  zone. Overall, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Buckell’s speculative fiction illustrates resistance that addresses the ongoing ruptures of the Anthropocene and the enduring legacies  of colonialism. I intend to explore how Buckell’s narratives illuminate the concept  “bruggadung” to signify collapse, transformation, and reclamation. His stories offer rich ways  of thinking about how Caribbean writers respond to urgent issues of our time.

Antonia MacDonald (St. George's University)

Title: “Lavi wèd, mé tjembé fò”: A Kwéyòl Poetics of Resistance in Ocean Stirrings.

Abstract: The phrase “Lavi wèd, mé tjembé fò” is a French creole (kwéyòl) maxim that advocates holding on in spite of how difficult life is. This phrase speaks to tenacity and resilience and captures themes that are at the heart of Collins’ fictionalized autobiography, Ocean Stirrings. In this paper, I am arguing that in Ocean Stirrings, the colonial polity constitutes a kind of bruggadung that marginalizes and diminishes the Grenadian folk. Looking specifically at Merle Collins’ reclamation of a kwéyòl language that was once spoken in Grenada, I explore the various means by which Oseyan’s ‘talking letters’ and Ma’s speech acts are modes of resistance against that bruggadung, particularly as they relate to educational practices in nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial Grenada. I then mount a comparative analysis of Ma’s and Oseyan’s kwéyòl interventions, showing how Collins deliberately positions folk ways of knowing and validating the Grenadian society as undermining the colonial agenda of subservience to English imperialism. Finally, recognizing that there is an implicit celebratory aspect to Brathwaite’s bruggadung, I offer a kwéyòl equivalent -- dézòd -- a word that while it means ‘noise’, can also stand in for ‘disorder’, and ‘disruption’. Dézòd is the noise of the folk as they disrupt the status quo, as they make their voices heard in spaces that seek to silence them. Thus, my answering of bruggadung with dézòd allows me to speak to the various ways in which Merle Collins, in Ocean Stirrings, uses a kwéyòl poetics to amplify the noises of the folk communities, as they ‘hold on’, thrive, rejoice and create.

Savita Maharaj (Brandeis University)

Title: Technologies of Resistance in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman, and Maisy Card’s These Ghosts Are Family 

Abstract: Drawing on Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman (2021), and Maisy Card’s Their Ghosts are Family (2020), I argue that hegemonic paradigms of nationhood and citizenship fail to dictate how Caribbean women seek sovereignty by reimagining and building alternative worlds. These women have created networks of kin to foster communities of choice and carve out physical and imaginative spaces for themselves.1 Mala Ramchandin, from Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, comes to mind as she maneuvers the landscape of her father’s physical and emotional abuse after her mother abandoned her. Mala symbolizes “politicized non-belonging” through her queerness and connections to animality— in which she attempts to free herself from the tyranny of her father through her queer mother’s garden.2In a similar vein, Vera from Maisy Card’s These Ghosts Are Family challenges womanhood and desire by engaging in class fugitivity and challenging inheritance as a middle-class Black Caribbean woman through her sexual relations with Bernard, her garden boy.3 Lastly, Rajiv Mohabir tells a similar narrative of his aji’s “fragmented” identity and how, as a queer Indo-Guyanese man, he attempts to inscribe legibility to her songs and diasporic genealogies while challenging the very scope of pure “Indian-ness.”4 Opposing linear grammars of womanhood gives Mala, Aji, and Vera more generative capacities of possibility, rupturing traditional inheritance modes and finding alternative means of belonging. Thus, by identifying how legacies of liberation are developed in the canon, authors like Mootoo, Mohabir, and Card can build on non-traditional technologies of resistance for the future by dismantling systems of oppression. These “technologies of resistance” root the body as a “technology” for its ability to embed resilience into one’s being. 

Gelien Matthews (UWI, St. Augustine)

Title: “Mary Prince: An Economic Life Beyond Slavery”

Abstract: In the highly stratified servile societies of the Caribbean, numerous codes made it  difficult for enslaved persons to distinguish themselves as generators of personal  income. Yet, an unmistakable feature of Caribbean slavery was the countless number  of enslaved persons who succeeded in making money for their own benefit. Several  historians have interrogated this history through their examination of the provision  ground/Sunday market complex and the hiring and self-hiring of enslaved labourers.  Despite the solidity of their scholarship, gaps exist in the historiography not least of  which is the general anonymity of these servile small-scale business people. This paper,  relying heavily on her 1831 publication along with other contemporary sources as well  as secondary publications, aims at narrowing the gap by focusing on the personal economic pursuits of Mary Prince, a relatively well-known enslaved female from the  Caribbean who lived the last years of her life in London. It traces and analyses Princes’ self-directed money-making enterprises while she was still enslaved in three different  Caribbean colonies from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the  nineteenth. It also follows her difficult but successful pursuit of employment for wages  in England up to 1833. The history of the private economic life of Mary Prince is  compelling. It is a dynamic testament of the determination of enslaved persons to  appropriate at least part of the fruits of their labour for their own benefit.  

Rachel L. Mordecai (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Title: The Caribbean Eco-Feminist Wayfinding of Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Abstract: Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020) opens  with the question above: “What is the scale of breathing?” That phrase and the invocation of  breathing as meditation practice, as politics, and as hermeneutics tie Undrowned to Gumbs’ earlier  volume M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), which explicitly honors the work of M. Jacqui  Alexander. More, both volumes are speculative explorations of contexts (the submarine and the  apocalyptic) allegedly unlivable for humans. The texts function in somewhat different registers:  Gumbs calls Undrowned “a pragmatic course of study” and M Archive a “speculative documentary  work,” while their respective publishers categorize the former as creative nonfiction and the latter  as poetry. Yet there are no hard-and-fast generic boundaries that confine these texts, and what  unites them is an orientation – or, better, a wayfinding methodology. This paper will both look at and  be led by that methodology, examining how Gumbs’ texts cohere around curiosity, speculation, and  love (not a sentiment, but a radically fierce and expansive doing) as the essential bearings for  navigating our era of global ecological and political catastrophe that endangers and renders precarious the lives of Caribbean people along with other urgently vulnerable populations around  the world. Invoking marine mammals as teachers, relatives, and spiritual guides alongside human  interlocutors like Alexander and other Caribbean/Black feminist writers, Gumbs’ books not only  imagine and propose but enact and reflect upon ways of being in, through and beyond the end of  a/the world, ways attuned to the voices and practices of human and other mammalian ancestors whose experiences of apocalypse transmute a past-that-is-not-past into the guidebook for our  present and future horizons of crisis and possibility. 

Adlai Murdoch (Penn State University)

Title: Grafting a Geopolitics of Caribbean Identity out of a State of Nature

Abstract: The Caribbean has long been a region subject to the full panoply of natural disasters. Among meteorological events, the hurricane that struck Martinique on Tuesday 10 October 1780 was the most deadly in history, leaving nearly 10,000 people dead. In 1770, an earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 3rd, causing widespread destruction and a significant number of deaths. On 8 February, 1843, an earthquake estimated at magnitude 8.5 struck between Guadeloupe and Antigua; it was felt as far away as New York, and between 1,500 to 5,000 people were killed. On 18 August 1891, a Category 3 hurricane struck Martinique, the most powerful in over a century; there were over 500 deaths, with towns, crops and plantations destroyed. The twentieth century saw the eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique in 1902, with almost 30,000 deaths. And in 1928 there was the unnamed hurricane of September 12, a Category 4 storm with winds of up to 150 mph that killed approximately a thousand people and destroyed nearly every building on the island, leaving three-fourths of its population homeless. The storm went on to strike Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and Florida, where it killed approximately 2,500 people. In Les Fruits du cyclone (2006), Daniel Maximin proposes what he calls a geopoetics of the Caribbean, tracing the ways in which Caribbean identities have been engendered from geographic and meteorological disasters; the work of poets, storytellers, dancers, and musicians has articulated resistance out of an overall threat of geographic cataclysm. Maximin posits that nature in the Caribbean is not simply décor, but literally becomes a central character in its history. The natural fertility of the islands also portends their latent destruction, and Maximin insists on the concomitant presence of all four cataclysms in the Caribbean – earthquake, volcanic eruption, hurricane, and tidal wave – which together create a particular typology; between the unpredictability of the earthquake and the annual threat of the hurricane, a cyclical vision of time emerges that eventually collides with the stark realities of Caribbean history and geography. The Caribbean’s particular spatial framework reveals a poetics in which the alternating extremes of promise and destruction are driven by a knowledge of the extent to which an unpredictable geography undermines the typical markers and arbiters of progress. Ultimately, Maximin insists that Caribbean creative discourses succeed in engendering a space of invention – of connection, creolization, and transformation -- from acts of exile and forced migration, inflected by the unpredictable cycles of fertility and destruction inscribed by the particularities of Caribbean cataclysms.

Jeannine Murray-Roman (Florida State University)

Title: Thinking by Hand with the Pingwing Macca: Erna Broder's Extended Cognition

Abstract: In her 2014 speculative novel Nothing's Mat, Erna Brodber creates a philosophy for recognizing kinship that is based on Afro-diasporic knowledge, Jamaican histories of emancipation, and the physical structure of plants the characters encounter. Starting from Brodber's interest in using the recursiveness of chaos theory to intervene into chronological linearity, I argue that Brodber's vivid descriptions of the fractal organization of plants propose a metaphor for extended cognition. The extended mind thesis proposes that cognitive processes extend into one's physical and sociocultural environment. In Nothing's Mat, that environment ranges from the intergenerational inheritance of the  Morant Bay Rebellion to the sisal-like pingwing macca plant, dasheen root vegetables, and trees growing in the easement between properties in Saint Ann parish farmland where the novel is set. My analyses center on the London-born narrator's epistemological shifts from her British social science training to her learning with plants, shifts that she experiences as a stoppage in her stomach. The narrator's descriptive awareness of her body's internal function and its breakdowns is the starting point for a methodological change in her approach to historiography: the change in her imaginary and her capacity to integrate plants as storytellers begins with the awareness of her body's insides as information. To answer the call for papers' question of what Caribbean writers are reckoning with today, Brodber sets forth a project that intertwines an interest in and protection of plant life as fundamental to the way we understand our own cognitive processes.  

Tohru Nakamura (UWI, Mona)

Title: “You carry so much feeling in you”: Feelings, Memories, and Political Uncertainty in Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise

Abstract: In Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999), the protagonist, Jean Landing, watches from her veranda as Kingston burns during Jamaica’s 1981 state of emergency under Michael Manley’s socialist regime. She decides to leave Jamaica amid the political unrest, but the decision surprises her, as “[s]he has always been of a slow, patient disposition.” Previous scholarship identifies this characteristic in her decision-making as produced by “an inertia that defines most of her adult life,” yet this reading overlooks a crucial element — her connection to ancestral memories. Throughout the novel, Jean drifts passively between options available to her, seemingly unable to act on her own. However, her ability to hear from her multiracial ancestors through dreams complicates this notion of passivity, offering an alternative perspective on how she navigates Jamaica’s political turmoil in the 1980s. In the novel’s final moments, her deceased father, Roy, appears in a dream and urges her to leave, saying, “You carry so much feeling in you, Jean.” Her “feeling” as a form of an agency that resists binary systems calls for attention. This paper draws on Lionel Trilling’s distinction between “idea” and “ideal/ideology” to examine her emotional depth through the Romantic concept of “negative capability” — the ability to dwell in uncertainty rather than seek certainties and ideals. By embracing her ancestral feelings, Jean remains suspended between political binaries, resisting the rigid ideological divides that fracture Jamaica. Her affective navigation suggests that feeling, rather than ideological conviction, becomes a means of political survival. Within the volatile context of Caribbean political “bruggadung,” Jean’s emotional landscape offers a counterpoint to dominant narratives of agency and resistance. By tracing the political possibilities of negative capability in the Caribbean, this paper reconsiders the role of feeling and ancestral memory in shaping responses to historical crisis.

Arthur Ortiz (University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus)

Abstract: The hauntings of Tante Atie in Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat In the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, the main character’s aunt, Atie, is  haunted by the roles that define her experience as a woman in a patriarchal society. Her identity  and relationships are structured within these roles. She is forced to take it upon herself as a  mother to her niece, Sophie, as a daughter and as a lover. Throughout the story, Atie’s roles  change and evolve in different manners due to the impact of other characters. From Jacques  Derrida’s hauntology and Martin Hägglund’s distinction between two temporal trajectories of  hauntology: no longer and not yet, Atie’s roles are defined and examined through a close reading  of the text. Also, there’s a special focus on the importance of mythology, folklore and storytelling  in a Caribbean and Haitian context, considering Atie’s role as a storyteller and the novel’s use of  voodoo and spirituality to construct the character’s narrative and story. Initially, Atie refuses her  claim to the title as her niece’s mother because she’s aware her niece will eventually return to her  biological mother. This refusal becomes acceptance at the end of the novel when she  acknowledges her job in raising Sophie after receiving compliments from her mother. As a  daughter, she is in charge of taking care of her elderly mother, but she recognizes the heavy toll it  has taken on her life. As a lover, she was abandoned twice. Atie’s role as a storyteller has  remained the only constant role throughout her life. Although Atie has been haunted by the roles she has had to embody, when she learns to read and write she gains liberation from those past  roles. She is a transgressive character that rewrites her own story.  

Anita Baksh (LaGuardia Community College)

Title: “Human and Marine Mammal Kinship in the Literature of Caribbean American writers Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Rajiv Mohabir”

Abstract: A number of writers and theorists have explored the ways in which humans have been physically and psychologically disconnected from land and nature over time through industrialization, colonialism, and capitalism. But less attention has been given to the complex relationship between humans and the sea, particularly oceanic species. Caribbean American writers Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Rajiv Mohabir employ whales as means to explore migration, indentureship, and slavery. Through real life observations of these marine mammals, careful listening to their sounds and vibrations, and research on the history and behaviors of whales, Mohabir and Gumbs create literature that draw connections between whales and colonized peoples; Gumbs even conceptualizes whales as kin to enslaved humans and their descendants. These creative works encourage readers to ask: what lessons can we learn from our marine cousins? What can whales teach us about survival and the ways in which humans move in and through the world? At the core of this research, is the question: why is it urgent that Caribbean American writers focus on marine mammals at this point in time? This presentation analyzes Gumbs’ Undrowned (2021) and Mohabir’s Whale Aria (2023). It argues that by imagining connections between human and oceanic species, these writers present marine mammals as symbols of resilience, survival, and bearer of submerged knowledge systems. 

Suzanne Persard (American University)

Title: “From Chutney to Kitsch: Indo-Caribbean Camp Aesthetics in the Work of Renluka Maharaj”

Abstract: This paper first introduces camp as an Indo-Caribbean aesthetic practice, considering the lineaments of visual cultural production that have historically marked material cultures among the indentured Indian diaspora in the Caribbean. I then turn to the work of Renluka Maharaj to articulate an aesthetics of camp within iterations of her post-indenture visual work. In an archive that includes more than one hundred known images of colonial-era postcards of indentured Indians, the visual archive of indenture itself is a colonial optic predicated upon the violence of visualization (Azoulay 2013, Campt 2017). Reading Maharaj’s technicolor transformations of indentured Indian women within the colonial archive (1838-1917), I advance two considerations: first, the work of Maharaj in the materiality of kitsch that has marked the unruly aesthetics of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora; and second, that her experiments with pigmentation, materials, and repetition interrupt the finality of violence within the indentured archive. The last images of these women–subjects of bonded labor–is not through the eyes of the colonial photographer but through the eyes of the twenty-first-century viewer with Maharaj acting as a conduit. This paper subsequently considers these subversive reconfigurations of indentured Indian women as “unruly visions” (Gopinath 2018), whose opacity is contested within Maharaj’s oeuvre. By playing with forms such as repetition and colorization, Maharaj resists the finality of the images of these women “against the aesthetic regime of modernity” (Bradley 2023). By engaging with an imperial archive of violence through the realm of the aesthetic, I argue that Maharaj considers a theory of Indo-Caribbean camp as an optic through which the technologies of visibility are both contested and refused. 

Lisa Outar (Independent Scholar)

Title: “Visualizing Violette: Feminist Futures in Recent Work of Indo-Guadeloupean Artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary”

Abstract: In this presentation, I position the Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Marie’s recent exhibition “The Book of Violette” within the context of a long tradition of Indo-Caribbean imaginings of feminist futures. The latest iteration of an ongoing visual art project, Sinnapah Mary’s paintings were staged in an exhibit in New York from February to March 2025 and vividly draw on the literary, religious, floral, faunal and folkloric iconography of the Caribbean to produce a dizzying assault on received ideas about femininity, anthropocentrism, and the nature of community belonging and kinship. I will especially trace the ways in which Sinnapah Mary engages with an artistic tradition of surrealism and her playing with autobiographic conventions via the shapeshifting of the figure of Violette across gendered, human, and animal forms. Her invocations of the work of Suzanne Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Édouard Glissant and her referencing of iconic images such as the odalisque and sacred Hindu iconography serve to create what she calls “a new ecosystem” that both protects heritage and memory and builds a new world where landscape and human and non-human life can cohabitate. I argue that Sinnapah Mary’s work can be situated within a new post-indentureship visual vocabulary of deep engagement with history and creation of spaces of liberation. 

Kerry-Ann Abdool (UWI, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago)

Title: “Shamans, Storms and Simi-Dimi in San Souci: Colonial Legacies in Samuel Selvon’s Those Who Eat the Cascadura”

Abstract: Samuel Selvon’s Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972) can be read in diverse ways. In one sense, it is a peasant novel, capturing the experiences of the predominantly Indo-Trinidadian peasantry in the rural space of San Souci. In another sense, it is an unlikely love story where an Englishman, Garry Johnson, falls madly and mutually in love with a peasant Indian woman named Sarojini. Their love however is doomed as Garry is dying from a bullet lodged in his head. It is the village obeahman, Manko, functioning in the role of shaman between the physical and supersensory world, who warns Sarojini of the calamity to come. At the climax of the novel, a storm decimates the village of San Souci as punishment for its moral decay and sinfulness. The shaman, however, is exempt from this punishment and his hut remains standing. Thus, the novel presents simi-dimi and obeah as an epistemological mode that is chaste and ethical, undeserving of retribution, contradicting the usual taboos associated with its practice. This presentation re-reads Selvon’s novel through the lens of contemporary Caribbean scholarship on gender, race, and nationhood and considers the ironic role of obeah as a colonial legacy and as counter-colonial at once.

Jocelyn Stitt (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Title: “Tracing Our Roots: A Guyanese Genealogical Archival Restoration Project”

Abstract: The rights of Caribbean citizens to access historical materials related to their own history are fundamental to decolonization efforts. This project focuses on cataloging and making accessible the archival materials most in demand by Caribbean women: those related to genealogy. The paper describes our efforts and findings from summer 2025 to assist users of the Walter Rodney Memorial library in Guyana. The project works to assist those who seek to learn more about their African ancestors through plantation records and/or their Indo-Caribbean relatives by cataloging materials related to genealogy and creating a searchable catalog. These archival efforts, in partnership with the University of Guyana, government officials, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean, will also allow scholars and Guyanese living in diaspora access to materials needed for research. Records related to women are scarce. “Slavery continues to haunt the present because its stories, particularly those of slave women, have been improperly buried. But an improper burial does not mean that they are irretrievably lost,” Jenny Sharpe observes (2002). This “improper burial” extends to the records of indentured Caribbean women as well (Bahadur 2013). This project seeks to create a feminist digital praxis framework for understanding these absences in the archive, how we can preserve what exists, and how best to serve the users of archival family information.

Tarika Sankar (Brown University)

Title: “Digital Diasporic Consciousness: Indo-Caribbean Social Media Networks”

Abstract: This paper examines contemporary social media content and discourse by Indo-Caribbean online creators to understand the creation of what I term “digital diasporic consciousness.” With the mobilization of online spaces precipitated by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of Instagram accounts such as The Cutlass Magazine and the Indo-Caribbean Canadian Network, which connect Indo-Caribbeans across the diaspora and revitalize discussions of their cultural and linguistic heritage, social media has become a fertile new ground for diasporic Indo-Caribbeans to negotiate identity in relation to race, multiculturalism, South Asianness, and anti-Blackness. With the concept of “digital diasporic consciousness,” I propose that an emerging generation of Indo-Caribbean content creators and activists negotiate the tensions between identity as an ethnic label defined by shared culture and identity as a politicized consciousness of colonial labor exploitation, multiple displacements, and overlapping racial hierarchies. I follow scholars such as Aisha Khan and Vijay Prashad in arguing that prevailing models for understanding diasporic identity over-rely on race and its corollary, “culture”, which risks reproducing conservative politics of racial purity and separatism between Asian and Afro-descended groups. Through my reading of comedic skits, posts archiving Indo-Caribbean history and culture, and discourse generated in comments on Instagram informed by scholarship in new media studies and digital humanities, I examine the affordances and limitations of social media as a space for diasporic identity formation.

Aliyah Khan (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Title: “Post-Plantation Economies of Grief: Memorializing the Indo-Caribbean Patriarch”

Abstract: This paper considers the memoir by Indo-Trinidadian writer Krystal Sital (Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad, 2018) and my own Indo-Guyanese autoethnographic writing to examine what it means for Indo-Caribbean women and families to grieve, or not grieve, an Indo-Caribbean traditional family patriarch, when a patriarch who exercises unquestioned, sometimes violent and oppressive rule over his family and home nonetheless has significant community or religious standing, and is part of the twentieth-century landowning or political ascension to the middle class of Indo-Caribbean people in Trinidad and Guyana. As Hosein and Outar argue, Indo-Caribbean “feminist desires call upon and articulate post-indentureship culture and cosmologies.” Through reading memoir writing by Indo-Caribbean women, I seek to theorize: how do we grieve a death that is complicated by the post-indenture intersections of gender, class, community, and violence, and even by a victim’s guilt-ridden desire for a death? In the brutal gendered and racialized Indo-Caribbean labor post/colonial context that begins with plantation uxoricide and continues with high rates of suicides and domestic and fatal violence against Indo-Caribbean women, what are the post-plantation and post-indenture personal and societal economies of grief over violence against women, and grief for the intimately close perpetrators of violence? How is the Indo-Caribbean aspirational middle-class patriarch to be documented, remembered, and memorialized in and with Indo-Caribbean feminists and communities seeking to escape the limited confines of post-indenture generational trauma narratives?

Kezia Page (Colgate University)

Title: The Watching Chorus: Recitations of Empire and Emergency in Locke and the Literary. 

Abstract: In his 2024-2025 exhibition, “What Have We Here?” at the British Museum, Guyanese British  artist Hew Locke includes impish interventions called The Watchers, who sit and stand above  the exhibit, watching. The exhibition critically engages with the museum’s collections, mainly  through his sustained examination of empire, colonial bad behavior, and imperial thievery. The  Watchers “feature in the exhibition as well as in the permanent galleries and survey visitors from  all angles, acting as the artist describes, in the manner of a Greek chorus, passing comment on  the action” (Cullinan 8). The Watchers who are both meant to be seen and are by name and  positioning surveying/surveilling, are insightful artistic embodiments of a crucial element of  Caribbean society. This paper will read Locke’s Watchers alongside other surveying choruses,  particularly in contemporary Caribbean fictions. The watching chorus, often from the ranks of  the historically surveilled, watch through narration, community commentary, and silence. And,  like Locke’s Watchers, their existence is an intervention witnessing bruggadung and emergency  clothed in the garb of empire, but not standing for empire. What does it mean to consider the  surveiler from this perspective? How might they change our relationship to bruggadung and emergency?

Carlotta Pisano (NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal)

Title: Mythopoetics of Renewal: History, Memory, and Transformation in  Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds 

Abstract: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds (2022) applies mythopoetics as a powerful  narrative strategy to engage with contemporary Caribbean concerns such as historical trauma,  migration, and environmental precarity. Her use of myth relates to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics  of Relation, where Caribbean identity emerges through entangled histories, cultural  multiplicity, and spiritual depth. Rather than functioning as a static archive of the past, myth is  reimagined as a dynamic and relational force, one that opens death and the afterlife as spaces  of connection, transformation, and renewal. Drawing on the classical motif of katabasis, the descent into the underworld, Banwo constructs  liminal spaces where the living and the dead coexist, disrupting linear temporality and  dominant realist traditions. Through ancestral presence, spirit worlds, and oral folklore, the  novel challenges colonial narratives of loss and immobility, reframing survival as an act of  intergenerational memory and creative continuity. This paper offers a close reading of When We Were Birds to argue that the novel signals a  generational shift in Caribbean literary expression, positioning myth not simply as a repository  of tradition but as a living force. It shows how Banwo’s mythopoetic mode enables a  reimagining of Caribbean futures, allowing writers to grapple with the crisis while forging new  relational possibilities.

Rose Poku (University of Pennsylvania)

Title: Black Women Translators: Early Black Feminist Advocates, 1920-1950 

Abstract: This paper argues that Black, West Indian women translators in the first half of the twentieth  century were early advocates of Black feminism, sounding the call for Black women’s dignified  representation, treatment, and equity far before a globally recognized Black feminist movement  emerged later in the century. Through their acts of translation, I argue that Black women not only  disseminated Black literary art to broader audiences, but also generated new forms of Black  cultural creation in their own right that promoted Black women’s justice. My paper works across  several languages (Spanish, English, and French), and it focuses on three sets of Black women  translators in particular. These women are the Paulette, Jeanne, and Andrée Nardal of Martinique,  Una Marson of Jamaica, and Eusebia Cosme of Cuba. Overall, the paper examines the  translations of these women, and it makes the argument that their translations in and of  themselves were Black feminist actions. Working in conversation with Brent Edwards’s  foundational book The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black  Internationalism (2003) where he argues that the practice of diaspora is the practice of  translation, this paper thus understands that the practice of diaspora/translation is also an act of  accessibility. Translation allows for texts to be reachable and available to multiple groups of  people, across linguistic backgrounds. Further, if the practice of translation is a practice of  accessibility, then, it is also a practice of Black feminism. This claim works in conversation with  the scholarship of Lorraine Leu and Christen Smith, who in their 2023 book Black Feminist  Constellations: Dialogue and Translation Across the Americas argue that translation is a crucial  and dialogic Black feminist practice. This paper sees Black women translators of the early  twentieth century as enactors of dialogic relationships between Black thinkers, creatives, and  audiences.  

Elizabeth Polcha (Drexel University)

Title: "Mary Prince's Environmental History"

Abstract: This paper reads Mary Prince’s testimony, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Female Slave,  Related by Herself (1831), as a source for understanding anti-colonial conceptualizations of the  nineteenth-century natural world. As The History attests, from shoveling salt to cutting up mangoes in  the mangrove to breaking coral reefs, Prince worked against her will in the natural world. Prince  interpreted imperialism as a globally oriented system of political domination and resource extraction  that benefitted the metropolitan center of the British empire, through her testimony on the nuanced  environmental impacts of this system on her life as an enslaved person laboring in the Caribbean. In  studying Prince’s text, we can better understand how the interwoven systems of slavery and  colonialism altered the natural world, and that imperialism, as a formalized ideological structure  administered in the colonies as well as in the metropole, always left its imprint on the environment. This paper also looks to Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s theoretical neologism, tidalectics, as an  entryway to comprehending Prince’s conceptualization of the marine landscapes of the islands she  traversed. As Brathwaite’s concept envisions, the cyclical movement of tides that follow the  gravitational pull of the moon’s and earth’s orbit disrupts western imperialist coordinates of space  and time, as well as land and sea. In analyzing Brathwaite and Prince together, this paper argues that  Prince’s History exposes a pathway to geographies outside of the wreckage of colonialism; her words  are a petition for freedom beyond the territorial and spatial confines of slavery. 

Janelle Rodriques (University of Washington, Seattle)

Abstract: In this paper, I examine the figure of the Rastaman in three novels – Roger Mais’ Brother Man (1954), John Hearne’s Land of the Living (1960) and Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus (1964) – as articulations of what I identify as a ‘quarrel with humanity,’ borrowing from Edward Baugh’s quarrel with history and Sylvia Wynter’s ‘embattled humanism.’ In the larger chapter of which this is a part, I attempt to figure out what the dissolution of these Rastamen’s respective subjecthoods tells us about the possibility, if there is any, of living ethically in the impasse created by the institution of Man-as-human upon its/his nonhuman others. I argue that Rastafari’s flexible, adaptive system of belief – its vexed, ambivalent relation to power and freedom – gives it the potential to pose not only a spiritual but also a political challenge to still-extant colonial power systems, and to imaginations of would-be nation. This potential is not met on the page, however, as each narrative struggles to take Rastafari seriously as a politics of being in the world. Nevertheless, the question is asked, and the quarrel documented: we can still read Rasta in these texts seriously, and work towards social theories and practices that revisit these ‘failures’ of subjectivity as a heuristic for reading and reasoning this quarrel with humanity.

Leah Rosenberg (University of Florida)

Title: “After the Thrall: Utopian Futures”

Abstract: In the 1980s, Afro-Caribbean women writers responded to the dramatic shift from Manley’s and Bishop’s efforts to bring justice and political power to the people to the neoliberal policies that a turbocharged tourism and as a corollary brought deep poverty, violence, and suffering among ordinary Caribbean people with sharp and thorough critiques of the tourist industry. Their works such as Cliff’s Abeng (1984), Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), and Marshall’s Daughters (1991) wove those critiques into their protagonists’ lives and national histories, making the combined critique of tourism, Empire, and patriarchy a prominent component of the region’s literary production in that moment. This paper addresses the early 2000s which like the1980s brought enormous expansion to tourist infrastructure with profound consequences. Mega resorts and cruise ship ports, highways, Spanish hotel chains, Chinese investment together destroyed ecosystems, displaced communities, oppressed workers, and severely undermined citizens’ rights and national sovereignty. It argues that these radical transformations inspired a second wave of Caribbean feminist writers -- including Esther Figueroa, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, and Tiphanie Yanique, who transformed the feminist and anti-tourist, national narrative established in the 1980s. They produced a novel mode of critique: a feminist, often playful utopian vision that imagines inclusive, equitable, and sustainable futures for Caribbean people. Their protagonists live meaningful and empowered lives within a tourist-dominated countries, in large part because they cure themselves and their communities from the thrall of tourism. Their shared political and aesthetic project echoes the insights of José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Bill Ashcroft and constitute a significant contribution to Caribbean literature and to the larger postcolonial and queer turn towards utopian aesthetics in the 2000s. Ironically, their playfulness and use of popular genres like the romance may have obscured their significance to critics.

Petal Samuel (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Title: “On Black Cyber-Aesthetics: Black Women’s Technophilia & Afro-Caribbean  Experiments in New Media”

Abstract: Nestled in renowned Bajan poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic ode to his late wife,  Doris Monica Welcome, in The Zea Mexican Diary (1993) are a series of references to Doris’  enthusiastic love for computers. Brathwaite writes: “Yesterday she [Doris] made out my Students  Xam List on the computer – on her belov:ed Kaypro, using a programme she had designed herself.”  Despite her waning strength, Doris plugged away at program design, puzzled over how to resolve  the bugs in the code on her “Kaypro,” an early personal computer model that was popular in the  1980s. Embedded, then, in Brathwaite’s ode to Doris’ life (and in the visual poetics of his work on  loss and catastrophe, rendered in his signature Sycorax video style font) after her passing is a  compelling story of Black women’s technophilia. This paper traces a multimodal archive of stories of Afro-diasporic women’s  experimentation with new media technologies. I argue that these artists deliberately adopt design  strategies that evoke and stage suboptimal technological engagements—signaled by the glitch, the  malfunction, the buggy program, the virus, and even tacky, low-resolution text and visuals—as a  counter-surveillance strategy and an enactment of the poetics of opacity. More, these artists leverage  aesthetics as a way to explore—and to issue warnings about—the role of cyberspace and new media  technologies in ongoing racial, political, and environmental catastrophes. Drawing a throughline  from Kamau Brathwaite’s poetics to landmark innovations in Caribbean animation by Martinican  artist Alain Bidard to the innovative cyberaesthetics of Danielle Brathwaite Shipley’s interactive  fiction, I explore their choices to center Black women’s creative, illicit, and even destructive  experiments with coding as a vehicle for exploring haunting memories of Afro-diasporic loss and  injustice. 

Alexis Samuels (UWI, Mona)

Title: “It is a dangerous thing to be where you not supposed to be”: Reckoning with Spatial Colonial Legacies in Kingston Noir

Abstract: Kingston Noir is a collection of short stories that envisions Jamaica’s capital through dark urban  aesthetics, raising questions about how individuals navigate a society defined by injustice and  moral ambiguity. However, beyond a conventional reading of the work, I argue that the narrative offers a literary cartography of reckoning: Kingston is mapped in material and psychogeographic ways that compel readers, as some characters, to acknowledge that its bruggadung of conflict,  violence, or state intervention is not solely a rupture that invokes temporal immediacy. It is an  echo – an amplification of spatial misunderstanding rooted in plantation logic and imperial  geography, one that demands confrontation. The city’s crises, then, are not limited to political states of unrest but include conceptions of  space that shape segregated urban planning (Uptown versus Downtown), garrison communities,  tourism infrastructure, and inform the ideological boundaries between “civilized” and “lawless” places. Movement, belonging, and visibility are dictated by such locational distinctions that  ultimately determine which individuals are heard or silenced, excluded or included, who  documents or is made into an object. These differences likewise indicate who is justified in  relying on government agents for security or being over-surveilled and neglected by them,  labeled as deviant. The capital, designed and imagined in this sense, is far from neutral and  influences racial, gendered, and economic experiences of the city on the municipal, communal, and personal levels. The result is a postcolonial bang, a collapse that is not simply the  consequence of poverty or crime but of people being structurally misread, of order and chaos  being pre-encoded onto specific areas. The paper, therefore, will consider how the anthology initiates this reckoning through an epistemological disruption, exposing the enduring and veiled divisions that produce the contemporary emUrgencies of Kingston. 

Karen Sanderson Cole (UWI, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago)

Title: “Measuring Courage”- Autobiography as Trauma and Testimony in the Coup d’etat: Raoul  Pantin’s Days of Wrath: The 1990 Coup in Trinidad and Tobago 

Abstract: According to Caribbean literary critic Paula Morgan, “Caribbean artists and cultural  practitioners have a long history of grappling with making meaning out of myriad crises and  soul-sicknesses” (p. 3)1. On December 30 2024, the Government of Trinidad and Tobago  announced its sixth state of emergency since becoming an independent nation in 1962. On  January 13 2025 the state of emergency was extended by three months. This current state of  affairs with its connection to an escalation in violence and crime in the midst of political and  economic uncertainty, powerfully resonates with the conditions of the state of emergency  occasioned in 1990 minus the Muslimeen who paid a pivotal role in what was ultimately a  failed coup. In Days of Wrath, Raoul Pantin, a journalist and former hostage in 1990, provides  an autobiographical account of his six day hostage experience . Part narrative, part political  commentary, part historical juxtaposition of the 1970 and 1990 coup d’etats, Pantin offers for  consideration a look at personal and national trauma, drawing attention to pressure points and  fissures within the society that clearly still reverberate today. This paper examines this text as  literary and historical record of a significant traumatic experience in the nation’s past while  drawing linkages to ongoing dis-ease in the political and economic life of Trinidad and Tobago.

Wilfredo R. Santiago-Hernandez (University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus)

Title: The Cyclonic Inability to Adapt in Xavier Navarro Aquino’s Velorio

Abstract: Caribbean literature has long engaged with the intersection of natural disasters and  colonial legacies, highlighting the region’s historical vulnerabilities while shaping a discourse  that foreshadows the Anthropocene’s emergence as a dominant paradigm. Xavier Navarro  Aquino’s Velorio serves as a poignant example of this tradition, employing the aftermath of  Hurricane Maria to expose the socio-political and ecological entanglements of disaster. The  novel’s polyvocal narrative illuminates the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal, where  hurricanes function as both literal and metaphorical disruptors of the colonial order, echoing  Sharae Deckard’s assertion that storms in postcolonial literature symbolize insurrection and  systemic upheaval. Aquino’s depiction of Puerto Rico’s fragmented recovery highlights the tensions between  resilience, trauma, and an inability to adapt—a motif deeply embedded in Caribbean literary  representations of environmental catastrophe. Through characters burdened by generational  suffering, Velorio articulates the psychosocial dimensions of disaster, situating memory as both a  site of resistance and entrapment. The utopian enclave of Memoria, ostensibly a refuge from  state neglect, becomes a space where historical cycles of marginalization and  compartmentalization repeat, reinforcing Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s concept of the "repeating  island." In doing so, the novel critiques the notion of disaster as an isolated event, instead  framing it as an extension of colonial extraction and abandonment. Ultimately, Velorio exemplifies how Caribbean literature has long anticipated the  Anthropocene’s central concerns—human displacement, environmental precarity, and socio political instability. By rejecting a linear recovery narrative, Aquino’s novel aligns with  Caribbean ecological thought, portraying hurricanes not only as natural phenomena but as  catalysts for reimagining power, history, and collective identity. In doing so, Velorio underscores  the Caribbean’s role as a critical site for understanding the Anthropocene, where the legacies of  colonialism and climate change remain inextricably linked.

Kerry Sinanan (University of Winnipeg)

Title: The History of Mary Prince and webs of resistance in Black Atlantic print culture

Abstract: This paper reads Mary Prince’s History within a web of Black Atlantic diasporan print, including petitions, testimonies and court cases. I emphasise these as genres of Black experiential knowledge and activist-originated epistemologies and ontologies that are a bedrock for Black and Caribbean studies today. I consider this network of print culture in the Black Atlantic as part of what Vincent Brown terms, “the long war against enslavement”, conjoining myriad anti-slavery actions with the power of print. Every statement and story Prince relates in her History can be connected to the words and actions of fellow Black people from Africa, across the Americas and the Black Atlantic, collectively working to overthrow slavery and to insist on Black freedom.

Shivangi Singh (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai, India)

Title: New Waves in West Indian Literature: Eco-Feminism and Myth in Monique  Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) 

Abstract: This paper explores the intertwined relationship between eco-feminism and myth in  Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) — a work that necessitates a  reconsideration of the trajectory of contemporary West Indian literature. Set in the Caribbean,  the plot centers on the mermaid Aycayia, whose complex relationship with the natural world  and human society becomes a prism through which the impacts of colonial legacies, ecological  destruction, and gender violence are examined. Through the broad lens of the Caribbean  narrative, the issues of cultural and post-colonial identity converge with an inventive  recontextualization of mythic topoi. The embodiment of the mermaid archetype, long  associated with femininity and the oceanic environment, allows Roffey to challenge the  patriarchal realms that continue to exploit female agency and ecological resources. This paper will analyze how the author employs magic realism as a narrative tool that enables an effective  interplay between the political landscape of our time in terms of ecological sustainability and the oppression of marginalized groups. The intertwining of mythology within ecological  discourse highlights folklore's ability to transcend time, serving as a means to address historical  injustices while providing pathways toward liberatory and reparative futures. The paper argues  that more than a work of fiction, The Mermaid of Black Conch serves an important function  within the ongoing socio-political crises facing the Caribbean and creates a dialogue that  resonates with both theorists and activists regarding the issues it addresses. Consequently, this  paper aims to contribute to the growing critical scholarship of eco-feminist literary paradigms while reaffirming Roffey's significance within the contemporary West Indian literary tradition.  This focus on theme promotes a nuanced understanding of how various cultural aspects adapt and respond to their socio-political circumstances. 

Geraldine Skeete (UWI, St. Augustine)

Title: Ranger and Conservator: Un-Preserving the Forest

Abstract: This paper addresses Trinidadian Andre Bagoo’s short story “The Forest Ranger” from his  collection The Dreaming (2022) with respect to how it represents “bruggadung” effects on the  natural environment and a forest ranger’s related decisions about his life and work. Non enforcement of parliamentary laws, illegal hunting, government corruption, collusion of an  energy sector corporation and the State, suspected murder, deforestation, closeted  homoeroticism and homosexuality all intersect in this narrative set mainly in South Trinidad.  Actual localities and real names of places and buildings are identified, lending added  authenticity to theme and plot. In the extradiegetic world, “Sustainable management of the  nation’s forests while enhancing the quality of human life” is the heading statement on the  website of the Forestry Division in the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago’s  Ministry of Agriculture, Land & Fisheries. A forest ranger is defined as one who patrols,  guards, manages, protects, and maintains a public forested area as well as enforces regulations.  In the fictionalized Forestry Division, Felix is a forest ranger who, at the story’s dénouement,  becomes the Conservator of Forests. However, it is depicted how both job positions variously  entail limitations, irony, calculated judgements, and a quid pro quo which are all to the  detriment of the forest but are to the benefit of political, personal and business interests. Much  like this protagonist must sacrifice his moral and ethical values and his love of the forest to  save and protect his job, as a husband and father he must conceal his homosexual desires and  acts to safeguard his marriage and family life from being “bruggadunged”. This paradigmatic  link highlights how Nature and sexual nature can be at risk, and how choices made impact the  ‘unsustainable management of one of the nation’s forests in order to enhance the quality of  human life’.

Alexandria Smith (University of Virginia)

Title: Virtuosity or Despair: Dionne Brand’s Poetics of (Dis)orientation 

Abstract: Black and queer scholarship on diaspora has suggested that we understand disorientation, in  material and existential dimensions, as an outcome of Black, Indigenous, and other-than-human  life in the wake of colonial and imperial violence. In the work of Black feminist thinkers of the  Black diaspora, we often find the sensory capacities of both authors and subjects positioned as  the vehicles through which poetic, narrative, and theoretical knowing travels. In this presentation  I propose that disoriented senses are figured in Dionne Brand’s writing as an ongoing response to  imperialism, a mode of disaster that causes devastation ranging from individually embodied to  planetary scales. My approach to poetics as a framework of knowledge is indebted to Édouard Glissant’s  discussions in Poetics of Relation and the intellectual legacies it has engendered. As a poet and  literary scholar, Glissant emphasized that poetics are inextricably connected to relation, a  multifaceted understanding of the ways that people, communities, places, and things are  necessarily in dialogue with one another. Poetics have therefore been taken up as a capacious  approach to the ways of knowing and modes of expression emerging from contexts of  oppression. As Mayra Rivera writes, “poetics aims at expressing in style this [critical] stance  toward knowledge by being attentive to loss and opacity, interruption and silence” (Rivera 3). In this paper I explore the use of Brand’s poetics in the prose texts A Map to the Door of No  Retrun and In Another Place, Not Here to illustrate disoriented senses as an embodied dimension  of coloniality. I trace Brand’s intertextual conversations with other Caribbean and diasporic poet scholars like M. NourbeSe Philip, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Bettina  Judd. Individually and in conversation, these Black feminist poet-scholars meditate on  disoriented senses as neither problem, nor solution, but workable conditions, of Black life in the  world.  

Caroline M. Suares Rodriguez (University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras)

Title: “Disrupted Freedom/Space: Narratives of Home and Confinement in Guantánamo Memoirs” 

Abstract: This paper explores the contrasting reflections about space through the lens of memoirs  written by former Guantánamo detainees, including Guantánamo Diary (2015) by  Mohamedou Ould Slahi and The General: The Ordinary Man Who Challenged Guantánamo (2013) by Ahmed Errachidi. These memoirs articulate a clear opposition between the  openness of home and the controlled environment of the detention facility.  Guantánamo Diary and The General: The Ordinary Man Who Challenged Guantánamo reveal  a spatial crisis at Guantánamo, where enforced displacement and the physical landscape  of the camp is portrayed as an engineered space of control; a space that not only limits  movement but also tries to impose psychological imprisonment that the authors resist as  they remember home. This paper aims to underscore Slahi and Errachidi’s meaning of home, freedom, and the  human connection to space in contexts defined by control and displacement.

Emily Taylor (Presbyterian College)

Title: Translating Velma Pollard: Karl and Cuba’s Casa de las Américas

Abstract: In 1992, Velma Pollard becomes the first Anglophone Caribbean woman writer to win the Casa  de Las América’s prize for novel writing (the prize opens to Anglophone Caribbean writers in  1976) when her novella Karl is selected. The prize guarantees that Casa publishes the Spanish  translation, and because of the brevity, Karl is the only Anglophone novel published by Casa as a  bilingual edition. This paper will analyze the edition and the Spanish translation, to understand  how the novel was interpreted by the Cuban translator and marketed to a Hispanophone  Caribbean and Latin American audience. I’ll also present my findings from the Casa archive,  including book reviews of the translation and mentions of the edition in the press and the Casa  journals. I will consider the importance of the publication of the edition at the beginning of  Cuba’s Special Period, and how this dramatic political and economic upheaval affected Casa and  the literary prize. The presentation will also serve as tribute to Pollard and her foundational  legacy in Caribbean literature and languages in this year of her passing.  

Ide Thompson (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Title: On Dis-Palcement & Anti-Rhythms: Queer Bahamian Writers and the Mytho-poetic

Abstract: On Dis-Palcement & Anti-Rhythms: Queer Bahamian Writers and the Mytho-poetic Elizabeth DeLoughrey in Allegories of the Anthropocene, posits that by using creative media the question can be asked and answered “what kinds of narratives help us navigate … [a]... crisis that is understood as local and planetary, as historical and anticipatory?” (3). The important posit here is — the anticipation of the crisis — the ways in which creativity is tied to not only to having awareness of the problem but the making of tools for its remedy. In the contemporary Caribbean we are faced with a plethora of issues. I argue that our creativity, our dogged ingenuity is central to addressing many of these dire situations. For me as a Queer and Neuro-divergent Bahamian writer-academic, mythos-poetic creations are some of the best ways of reckoning with being outside of the hetero-neuro-normative expectations of Bahamian society. In grappling with my own dis-palcment — physical, social, and emotional — I turn to the creative work of fellow contemporary Bahamians, mostly women and Queer people to expose new ways of moving in defiance. These Anti-Rhythms, as I call them, do not only break and cross genre conventions but more vitally explicate the nuances of contemporary Bahamian Queer myth making. I use the term Anti-Rhythms to gesture to the dis-placing coherencey of the works. In this paper / presentation I will explore how these Anti-Rhythms operate to further the liberation of the disenfranchised through the creation of a decidedly still emerging Bahamian Queer mytho-poetics. 

Yutaka Yoshida (Chuo University, Tokyo)

Title: Beyond “an Infinite Rehearsal”: Shame and the Feminist Revolution in Merle Collins’s Angel 

Abstract: In her interview, Merle Collins introduces her student’s phrase “the infinite rehearsal,” whereby the latter tried to express that what had happened in Haiti could also be prevalent in  the entire Caribbean. Collins interprets that the prefigurative and cyclical aspect of this term  teaches us a lot on Grenada as well. But I would suggest that the connotations of this term are  not only tragic and fateful, especially when we closely look at how shame is used in her own  works. In reviewing her own poem, Collins herself highlights the importance of shame as an  affect through which “we” undertakes collective responsibility. As she surveys the literatures on  the Grenada Revolution, Laurie Lambert also notes shame’s role in revealing what is  memorized and what is forgotten. Nevertheless, it has not been pursued how shame functions as  analytical entity and affect in her novel Angel. This paper suggests that by inscribing the figurations of shame and thus complicating a  sense of time, Angel tries to explicate the agonies that women have undertaken and the national  and Pan-Caribbean traumas of internal conflicts in the Revolution not as a solitary experience  but as a collective memory to be shared. It also argues that shame occasions the reflexive  moments in which protagonists become aware of their historical consciousnesses either in a  linear temporality or in a cyclical time. By doing so, I would like to point out that when the  novel Angel describes the changes and conflicts in and outside the McAllisters, it also deals with  an alternative formation of time despite the storyline that goes along with the Grenada  Revolution and its dissolution. 

Ian Bethel Bennet (University of The Bahamas, Oakes)

Title: Decadence and Destruction: The Crises in the Face of Erasure

Abstract: Erasure looms as destruction threatens the order of being. Roger Mais’ Brother Man and The Children of Sisyphus by Orlando Patterson, novels that were published early in the independence movement provided a scene of chaos and destruction. They were not taken up as they might have been were they published later or earlier given the promise of the moment. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the region and its artists have experienced much devastation from hurricane David in 1979, Andrew in 1992, Irma and Maria in 2018 and Dorian in 2019 swept us up in a wave of chaos and loss. This harsh and realistic depiction of Caribbean realities finds new ground in post-María work from Puerto we get a view of the chaos that was somewhat hidden before. This work, ‘brings together’ public displays of ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’ through video, music and other texts from Bad Bunny, Xavier Navarro Aquino.  These protests like Mais and Patterson’s earlier works show realities hidden under the cloak of paradise. The instability of paradise as a place to inhabit is always unseen. As Jeremy WIlliams (2021) notes Climate Change is Racist. This racism is coupled with structural dynamics not challenged prior to the 2008 Great Recession, as Joseph Stiglitz notes. The daggers of structural adjustment, climate change, and life in debt have savaged many of the promises of the modernist drive for development enveloped in independence. In Puerto Rico, this independence promise would have been the move to Estado Libre Asociado (Commonwealth Status). The work uses these theories of decay and structural violence around the financialisation through globalisation to show how natural and unnatural disasters have and continue to savage the structures of being and community in the old ways of being.     

Travis Weekes (UWI, St. Augustine)

Title: Men, Old Age and Poetry.

Abstract: West Indian poets who write in their eighties share some interesting reflections on aging and human relationships. Walcott published White Egrets and Morning, Paramin when he was well into his eighties. This year Mervyn Morris at 88 years old published a collection entitled Last Reel. At this age, these poets share revealing perspectives on personal experiences, friendships, family and romantic relationships. These poetic reflections speak more clearly perhaps, to sentiments from the inner recesses of the poets’ hearts and offer deeper insights into the psychological responses of men to love, relationships and aging.

Laurence Breiner (Boston University)

Title: “A Poet’s Reckoning: How Kendel  Hippolyte Addresses Urgency. “

Abstract: Kendel Hippolyte has written many poems that overtly address pressing socio-political issues.  This paper is not about the issues themselves, but about Hippolyte’s conceptualizing of a poet’s role in addressing them. The best point of entry is “Advice to a Young Poet” (the most didactic of all his titles) and specifically the challenging imperative asserted in that poem’s epigraph (the only epigraph attached to any of his published poems), which quotes Czselaw Milosz:  “What is poetry which does not save nations or people?” Hippolyte’s poem describes an uncompromising effort response to this imperative. Both the content and the tone of “Advice” invite us to several other poems obviously shaped by his familiarity with literatures of prophecy. His awareness of prophetical literature is apparent in specific references to Biblical prophecy, and to its derivatives in Blake’s prophetical books and in Caribbean texts shaped by Rastafarian belief and language. Examining  a few primary texts (“Poem in a Manger,” “Poetry Faith,” “Harp,” and the Book of  Ezechiel) enables us to  see  how this poet grapples with three salient challenges  endemic to prophecy: 1) the problem of  connecting with an audience (for whom and about whom he writes),  2) the problem of justifying  rhetorical elaboration of truths, and 3) the tactic,  evident in  Ezechiel,  Blake, and Caribbean texts, of exploiting  various media to meet those goals. 

Don Walicek (University of Puerto Rico, Rio Pedras Campus)

Title: Full Freedom Still to Come in Caribbean Diasporic Poetry

Abstract: Discussions in philosophy, cultural studies, and ethnopragmatics signal that the word freedom acts as a focal point for a broad cultural space in which Caribbean people  do not yet enjoy freedom or self-determination. This assertions, which I suggest is compatible with Rinaldo Walcott’s (2021  argument that the actual attainment of freedom for Black people will change the human experience at the planetary level, challenge popular understandings of the term which suggest that “everyone is now free,” as well as assumptions about speech and writing which signal that freedom is easily translated from one language or culture to another.  Scholars of language such as Goddard (2004) and Wierzbicka (2014) help to set the stage for this inquiry, noting that the Anglo-American concept of freedom within modern Western epistemological systems is culture-specific and therefore distinct from similar concepts conveyed by the Latin libertas and other related terms. Political philosophers observe that the Anglo-American concept of freedom is associated with a “negative orientation” of classic English philosophy which established that freedom involves doing what one wants to do without interference from or consideration for others, rather than as a natural state, unqualified right, or the overcoming of bondage for collective well-being. But how has freedom and the related concept of “unfreedom” been described or engaged by critical voices within the Caribbean and its multiple diasporas, in particular poets? This presentation will answer this two-part question by juxtaposing a portrait of (un)freedom within the region alongside the analysis of works of three poets who write in English: Dionne Brand, Raymond Antrobus, and Jason Allen-Paisant, focusing on Inventory (2006), Signs, Music (2024), and Thinking with Trees (2021), respectively. It will present examples of freedom’s representation in these works and how each poet’s engagement with the all-important concept brings readers and language closer to “full freedom” still to come.

Michael Soriano (University of Miami)

Title: “emUrgency, Seclusion, and Serial Emigration in Blake; or, The Huts of America” 

Abstract: This paper examines Martin R. Delany's 1859-1862 serial, Blake; or, The Huts of America, as a formal experiment that mobilizes seriality’s gaps to theorize how radical political collectives emerge from strategic isolation. Rather than treating seriality as merely a publishing format or commercial strategy, I argue that Delany deployed narrative and formal gaps to create the spatial and temporal conditions necessary for transforming superficially connected individuals into revolutionary collectives through processes of strategic isolation and dialectical encounter. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography and Ryan Engley’s psychoanalytic seriality, I demonstrate how the serial gap functions not as an empty temporal interval but as an active site of political organization. Specifically, I challenge existing scholarship that positions seriality as creating “empty, homogenous time” by showing how writers like Delany transform the form’s gapped structure into moments punctuated and charged with revolutionary possibility. Most crucially, I argue that Blake’s eponymous “Huts” function as dialectical spaces where the apparent contradiction between separation and collective formation is hardened into a new form of revolutionary solidarity. This dynamic political collective—formed in underground, secret, secluded, and gapped narrative spaces—emerges out of social, political, and formal constraints. This paper demonstrates how Delany’s formal innovations and experimentations functioned as specific political interventions in debates about collective action, revolutionary organizing, and political transformation.