Author: Kelly Baker Josephs

Second Seminar Meeting

The second session for Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar will be on Friday, Oct 29th, 2-4pm in Room 8301 at the Graduate Center.

The readings for this meeting are (links to readings will be removed after 10/29):

Reading 1: “Chapter 3” from David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity
Reading 2: “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” by Derek Walcott

Also suggested: The “Appendix” to C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins and “Lectures on the Black Jacobins” by C.L.R. James.

Lunch will be served.

Save the Date: Nov 23, Tuesday, 2-4PM, Room 7314: speaker Richard Turits, Professor of History at University of Michigan and author of Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime and Modernity in Dominican History

First Seminar Session

Judging by the turnout for our introductory Seminar session (and by the scholars who could not make the first meeting but registered for the Seminar), there is quite a lot of interest in Caribbean Studies at CUNY and surrounding institutions. There is a demand for this type of intellectual space from faculty and graduate students across various disciplines. 

After some discussion, we chose the following readings for our next meetings:

  • “Conscripts of Modernity” David Scott (Chapter 3 in Conscripts of Modernity [Duke UP, 2004])
  • “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” Derek Walcott (The Nobel Lecture)

Registered Seminar participants may download the readings from the Center for Humanities’ website.  We look forward to a stimulating discussion of these texts on October 29, from 2-4p in room 8301 at the Graduate Center.

Still in set-up mode

Hello. Thanks for visiting, but I’m still setting up.  Please do come back in the near future to see what’s happening with the “Caribbean Epistemologies” seminar described below.

 

CARIBBEAN EPISTEMOLOGIES

Faculty co-chairs: Herman Bennett, Kelly Baker Josephs
Graduate Student co-chairs: Nicole Burrowes, Ryan Mann-Hamilton
How, in the post-colonial present, do we conceptualize the societies in the Caribbean? While explicitly a formulation about meaning in the post-colonial present, this question has a deep history concerning how writers, scholars and artists conceive of the Caribbean. The Caribbean, of course, is a subjective category for its inhabitants and interlocutors, representing distinct and at times contested categories of analysis. By bringing these meanings and their genealogies into relief and into conversation with one another, the organizers of the seminar point to a generative opportunity for advancing work on the Caribbean in general but in particular at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Invited participants for the fall include: Stephan Palmie, (Anthropology and of Social Sciences, U of Chicago) and Richard Turits (Latin American and Caribbean studies program, U of Michigan).

 

Seminar meets several times a semester, primarily on Fridays; for a detailed schedule of meeting times and guests, please visit the CUNY Center for the Humanities website (which may also still be in set-up mode for the Fall)