Post-emancipation in/security: A working paper

In the first working paper of this series, Patricia Noxolo outlined the research network’s perspective on security as created across different scales and by bottom-up as much as top-down processes. Equally, the project’s recognition of the history of in/security in the Caribbean over a longue durée, and particularly the significance of slavery within this longer history, calls for some engagement with the postemancipation period. With the advent of emancipation, followed by the slower process of changing socio-economic relations within plantation societies, the nineteenth century proved an important testing ground for everyday struggles

Translational Space and Creolising Aesthetics in Three Women’s Novels: the Radical Diasporic (Re)turn

Proposing the notion of translational space, I consider the classroom and the literary text as crucial though differentiated spaces of translation. The idea of translational space borrows from Doreen Massey’s elaboration of space as a “complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation.” I interlink the complexity of Massey’s “web” with an intention by the radical Other to translate, and interrogate how selected Caribbean diasporic texts might be shown to engage a process of translation, and for whom, particularly in light of George Lamming’s pronouncement concerning the West Indian writer, that “[h]e writes always for the foreign reader”. What is the translational impetus of a later generation of writers who Lamming was unable to imagine, namely, women authors of the region? I consider the translational space created by those authors’ challenging of canonical traditions that not only break through publication barriers, but place black women protagonists as central to their writing. The crux of my enquiry is the diasporic imaginary–represented in Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and Velma Pollard’s Karl–an imaginary which, centring black women characters is also concerned with a dialogic representation of the Other. I highlight issues of Creole or Caribbean identity that such an imaginary figures in its aesthetics and I foreground the diaspora as contested space whether public or intimate. Additionally in these texts, the (re)turn, as I consider it, affords a contemporary contextual presencing in dialogue with a violently muted historical past. Arising from this, my larger questions concern the meanings that might be inferred from such a Creole diasporic imaginary and its representation in terms of aesthetics and translational space. I explore the fictional representation of Caribbean lives “on the move” in Cresswell’s terms and their transnational representation. In their gendering of creolisation, diaspora and race, how do the writers translate the spatial interface that their characters negotiate? Whether in memories of Toronto in Pollard’s writing or in the London of Levy’s and Gilroy’s fiction, how do these texts represent space not only as cultural crossings but also as translational space within the new triangle that contests and dislodges notions of identity

Translational Space and Creolising Aesthetics in Three Women’s Novels: the Radical Diasporic (Re)turn

Proposing the notion of translational space, I consider the classroom and the literary text as crucial though differentiated spaces of translation. The idea of translational space borrows from Doreen Massey’s elaboration of space as a “complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation.” I interlink the complexity of Massey’s “web” with an intention by the radical Other to translate, and interrogate how selected Caribbean diasporic texts might be shown to engage a process of translation, and for whom, particularly in light of George Lamming’s pronouncement concerning the West Indian writer, that “[h]e writes always for the foreign reader”. What is the translational impetus of a later generation of writers who Lamming was unable to imagine, namely, women authors of the region? I consider the translational space created by those authors’ challenging of canonical traditions that not only break through publication barriers, but place black women protagonists as central to their writing. The crux of my enquiry is the diasporic imaginary–represented in Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and Velma Pollard’s Karl–an imaginary which, centring black women characters is also concerned with a dialogic representation of the Other. I highlight issues of Creole or Caribbean identity that such an imaginary figures in its aesthetics and I foreground the diaspora as contested space whether public or intimate. Additionally in these texts, the (re)turn, as I consider it, affords a contemporary contextual presencing in dialogue with a violently muted historical past. Arising from this, my larger questions concern the meanings that might be inferred from such a Creole diasporic imaginary and its representation in terms of aesthetics and translational space. I explore the fictional representation of Caribbean lives “on the move” in Cresswell’s terms and their transnational representation. In their gendering of creolisation, diaspora and race, how do the writers translate the spatial interface that their characters negotiate? Whether in memories of Toronto in Pollard’s writing or in the London of Levy’s and Gilroy’s fiction, how do these texts represent space not only as cultural crossings but also as translational space within the new triangle that contests and dislodges notions of identity

Steaming between the Islands: Nineteenth-Century Maritime Networks and the Caribbean Archipelago

Recent scholarship, particularly in “new” imperial studies, has underscored the role of networks in shaping imperial projects. A networked approach offers a useful lens through which to analyse nineteenth-century steamship services, and in this paper I draw on such a perspective to focus on the operations of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC). Importantly the RMSPC, unlike some of the other British Government mail-contract holding lines, operated across an archipelago as well as an ocean. In probing the significance of the RMSPC’s archipelagic context for the maritime network, this paper draws on a theoretical intersection between networked approaches to empire and island studies. I suggest that an examination of the maritime network through an archipelagic lens brings to the fore colonial priorities, imperatives and hierarchies that can appear flattened out through a networked approach alone. I argue for an archipelagic framing of analysis in order to heighten the local and regional significance of this transportation infrastructure, in effect foregrounding the relationship between the maritime service and mobilities in the Caribbean

The Transformative Potential of Imoinda: An Interview with Joan Anim-Addo

No abstract (available)

Breaking the Silence: First-Wave Anglophone African-Caribbean Women Novelists and Dynamics of History, Language and Publication

This thesis identifies and historicises an emergent tradition of Anglophone African-Caribbean women's fiction, analysing the silence(s) broken through publication. I argue that voicelessness relates to dominant traditions of being 'spoken for', characterised by representations of African-Caribbean women as bodies without minds. Exploring meanings of 'Relation' (Glissant, 1997) replicated in first-wave novels, particularly in selected texts by Erna Brodber, Merle Collins, Zee Edgell, Beryl Gilroy and Joan Riley, I develop, in the intersections of feminism(s), Foucauldian theory, hermeneutics and narratology, carnivalised strategies for reading the silence-breaking texts while privileging meanings drawn from within the culture. Part One explores through Black female figures in portraiture, poetry, fiction, and autobiography, the historical constructions of African-Caribbean womanhood, the processes of silencing and the first claiming of authorial voice. Engaging with pre-Emancipation testimonies from enslaved women, I argue the relationship between the distortions of plantation culture and the institutionalising of silence and, focusing on the years between Mary Prince's slave testimony (1833) and Sylvia Wynter's Hills of Hebron (1962), I address questions of the changes allowing publication of the first African-Caribbean woman's post-slavery novel. Part Two focuses on a reading of African-Caribbean texts concerned with a traumatic and silenced past, and investigating meanings of creolisation within the texts, I develop a carnivalised discourse. This discourse deriving from a dialogic, cross cultural tradition is inclusive of women's poetic voices, such as M. Nourbese Philip's, and specifically addresses issues of reading. Particular attention is paid to tailoring feminist literary theory attentive to meanings of 'Relation' and critical silence. Borrowing notions of voice and the construction of gender from Lanser's narratology (1992), I conclude by stressing the vital importance of attending to the theorising internal to the works of African-Caribbean women writers themselves

Place and Mobilites in the Maritime World:The Royal Steam Packet Company in the Caribbean, c. 1838 to 1914

The empirical subject of this thesis is the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC), a British-based steamship company that served the Caribbean from 1842, and extended operations into South America in 1851. I construct a postcolonial historical geography of the RMSPC as it operated in the 'expanded' post-emancipation Caribbean. By analysing the steamship service as a network rather than as a 'tool' of empire, I foreground the mobilities constructed by this Company, and explore how these mobilities impacted upon maritime places in the Caribbean. In so doing, I develop a 'tidalectic' approach to the RMSPC's past, by expanding upon Kamau Brathwaite's concept. I argue that tidalectics, in intersection with the 'new mobilities 'paradigm', contributes to an advance in understandings of maritime history, since together they facilitate mobile examinations of the relationship between sea and shore. To develop analysis of the RMSPC's maritime mobilities, four substantive case studies are presented. The first case study focuses on the RMSPC' s ports-of-call, as mapped by the scheme of routes. The second such chapter considers the steamship itself as place, particularly with reference to social and cultural dynamics. The coaling process is the focus of the third case study, and in the final chapter I add to the analysis the RMSPC's two main tourist routes through the Americas. The thesis proposes that steamship mobilities in many ways escaped and exceeded the original intentions of company directors and managers. As complex networks rather than straightforward imperial 'tools', steamship mobilities were subject to the influence of multiple places. In the case of the RMSPC, Caribbean influences overlooked in previous studies have been reconstructed and offered on the basis of archival research.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Introduction: Perspectives from the Radical Other

No abstract (available)

Session D-2: Don’t overdose the patient: A unit conversion literacy project

General chemistry for non-science majors is often a prerequisite course for students pursuing degree programs in allied health fields, such as nursing. A core nursing skill is medicine management, which includes correctly calculating drug dosage volumes administered by I.V. or injection. Such calculations are nothing more than general chemistry problems involving concentration units and dilution. Our data show, however, that more than 90% of students lack this skill after taking a traditional general chemistry course. This presentation will focus on documenting this curricular gap and how we, as teachers, can address it