I Can Speak For You

This novella is about a queer Caribbean- American young woman named Nessa struggling with her relationship with her mother. A death occurs that leads Nessa to discover her mother may not be who she previously thought she was. This coming of age story confronts the delayed state of self actualization that occurs when Caribbean culture meets queer identity

The seeds of revolt: George Lamming and "The Tempest"

Considers Lamming's reading of "The Tempest" in his "The Pleasures of Exile", and pays particular attention to the genealogy of Lamming's thought in the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean

On the Failure to Transform: The Tragedy of State-led Revolution in the Postcolonial Caribbean

This thesis project is a theoretical contribution to the field of Caribbean studies. It suggests that the state-led revolutions of the Caribbean in the twentieth century present as a tragedy because such revolutions--like the Grenada revolution--catastrophically collided with the system-limitations of the state. Thus, these revolutions present as a failure to transform society from the outset. However, the Caribbean scholarship still appears to include the state in prescriptive solutions towards transformation, therefore, a spirit of optimism around the state persists. Thus, this thesis throughly critiques past and contemporary Caribbean scholarship on the postcolonial state in an attempt to exorcise this spirit and move past the notion of the state as a locus of potential transformation for the region. In the critique, it is concluded that the scholarship has failed to grasp the state and twentieth century state-led revolutions in the Caribbean, noting that key to the maintenance of this statist spirit of optimism is their analytical separation between 'politics' and 'economics.' The thesis proceeds to present an alternative view of the state through Marx's critique of political economy and the dialectical reconstruction of the concrete in thought. In this critical mode of thought, I present the state and its relation to capital as immanently connected. The state is concluded to be fundamentally incapable of social transformation due to its genesis in the commodity form which determines specific system-limitations to its actions. It also suggests that the collision into these system-limits is the experience of the Caribbean. The failure to transform in the twentieth century Caribbean is the tragedy of state-led revolution manifest

Toward a new poetics of space in Derek Walcott’s Midsummer

Caribbean self-formation is a project in constructing a new poetics that situates itself against imposed and fixed ideas about culture, language, and personhood. For places like the Caribbean, history is indexed by linguistic and bodily fragmentations, ecological upheavals and transformations, and diasporic wanderings to and from the islands. Literature can then be thought of as an aesthetic project in making sense of the present and visualizing alternatives for the future. Walcott’s Midsummer opens up a space in which to consider the relationship between human beings, landscapes, and culture. Derek Walcott’s Midsummer captures the cadences of life and time in the tropics: the time between a moment, a season, a life, or an era. This particular sequence of fifty-four poems records a full year, the period between one summer and the next. The liminal space of the in-between in Midsummer lends itself to reversals of time, the poems traverse back and forth between the then and now, taking time to linger and take pause in memory and imagination, but also in moments of lived experience. The aperture created between the past and future frees us to think about the multiple, uncertain temporalities of the present, and the position of the poet between two cultures mimes the central ambivalence of midsummer. In these poetic musings, Walcott considers his own positionality vis-à-vis the Caribbean and its colonial past, Europe, high literary culture, and poetry itself. It explores the extent to which place produces literature or that literature produces place and culture, leaving open a productive possibility of rearticulating the conceptual framework for the idea of culture.Englis

Encoding and decoding plantation society : wistful memories of Stuart Hall and Norman Girvan

Abstract in Portuguese by Deborah Hickling included.Two giants of Caribbean thought have recently departed: Stuart Hall (1932 - 2014), cultural scholar, and Norman Girvan (1941 - 2014), economist. Hall held professorial posts at the University of Birmingham and the Open University in the UK, and retained close links with Jamaica. He studied ethnicity, issues of Caribbean diaspora, critical examinations of Marxism, media and communications, and the ideas of the New Left and post-modernism. Girvan, a professor at the University of the West Indies, was a strong critic of the dependence of the Caribbean and other post-colonial nations on economic and technological structures and thinking locked into a colonial paradigm. He also worked in regional and international bodies to achieve closer regional alignment in the Caribbean and strategies for regional economic transformation. This tribute explores the contributions of both scholars to the fields of cultural studies and political economy, and particularly celebrates their significance to the Caribbean and Latin American region.peer-reviewe

A summary of the endemic beetle genera of the West Indies (Insecta: Coleoptera); bioindicators of the evolutionary richness of this Neotropical archipelago

The Caribbean Islands (or the West Indies) are recognized as one of the leading global biodiversity hot spots. This is based on data on species, genus, and family diversity for vascular plants and non-marine vertebrates. This paper presents data on genus level endemicity for the most speciose (but less well publicised) group of terrestrial animals: the beetles, with 205 genera (in 25 families) now recognized as being endemic (restricted) to the West Indies. The predominant families with endemic genera are Cerambycidae (41), Chrysomelidae (28), Curculionidae (26), and Staphylinidae (25). This high level of beetle generic endemicity can be extrapolated to suggest that a total of about 700 genera of all insects could be endemic to the West Indies. This far surpasses the total of 269 endemic genera of all plants and non-marine vertebrates, and reinforces the biodiversity richness of the insect fauna of the West Indies.Las islas del Caribe (o Indias Occidentales) son reconocidas como uno de los principales hotspots de la biodiversidad global. Esto se basa en datos sobre la diversidad de especies, géneros y familias de plantas vasculares y vertebrados no-marinos. Este trabajo presenta datos sobre la endemicidad a nivel genérico para el más especioso (pero menos popularizado) grupo de animales terrestres: los escarabajos, con 205 géneros (en 25 familias) reconocidos al presente como endémicos (restringidos) a las Indias Occidentales. Las familias predominantes en géneros endémicos son Cerambycidae (41), Chrysomelidae (28), Curculionidae (26) y Staphylinidae (25). Este alto nivel de endemicidad genérica en los escarabajos puede extrapolarse a sugerir que alrededor de 700 géneros pudieran ser endémicos entre todos los insectos de las Indias Occidentales. Esto sobrepasa ampliamente el total de 269 géneros endémicos de plantas y vertebrados no-marinos y refuerza la riqueza en biodiversidad de la fauna de insectos en las Indias Occidentales

Afro-Caribbean Immigrant Faculty Experiences in the American Academy: Voices of an Invisible Black Population

Afro-Caribbean immigrants have been an integral part of the history and shaping of the United States since the early 1900s. This current study explores the experiences of five Afro-Caribbean faculty members at traditionally White institutions of higher education. Despite the historical presence and influence of Afro-Caribbean communities and the efforts within education systems to address the needs of Afro-Caribbean constituents, Afro-Caribbean faculty members continue to be rendered indiscernible in higher education and to be frequently and erroneously perceived as African–Americans. The study examines the lived experiences of these individuals in the hegemonic White spaces they occupy at their institutions with both White and Black populations. Through their narratives, issues of stereotyping, microaggression, and isolation are addressed. The participants also offer solutions to address these issues by university administrators, department heads, faculty development professionals, diversity officers, policy makers, and other stakeholders. The voices in this study shed light on an overlooked, misunderstood, and under-researched population within our faculty ranks in the American Academy

COMPARATIVE ASPECTS OF AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY AND THE CONTINENTAL-ANALYTIC DIVIDE

Critical engagement involving philosophers trained in continental and analytic traditions often takes its purpose to be a reconciliation of tensions arising from differences in style, or method. Critical engagement in Africana philosophy, however, is rarely focused on method, style, or orientation because philosophic research in this field, regardless of orientation, has had to accommodate its empirical grounding in disciplines outside of philosophy. I focus primarily on the comparative dimensions of three important strands of this research: (1) a history of ideas, (2) a problem-orientation, and (3) a sub-area specialization, to indicate why a need to reconcile tensions between continental and analytic orientations has very little currency in Africana philosophy. Socio-economic problems faced by African-descended people require multiple perspectives to accommodate the wide variety of diasporic social contexts for a given proposal. I employ a selection of cases to illustrate how Africana philosophy benefits from an interplay of many intersecting factors and that, as an interdisciplinary area of research with a commitment to the incorporation of multiple perspectives, it fosters cross-pollination and hybridization of continental andanalytic traditions