Category: Caribbean Epistemologies Archive

Fourth Session: J. Michael Dash

The fourth session of the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar will be:

Friday, December 10, 4-6pm, Room 5111

 Our guest will be: J. Michael Dash, Professor of French at New York University. He is the author of Literature and Ideology in Haiti, Haiti and the United States, The Other America, and Culture and Customs of Haiti, and has translated a number of Edouard Glissant’s works, including The Ripening, Caribbean Discourse, and Monsieur Toussaint.

 We will be discussing Professor Dash’s paper:

“Hemispheric Horizons: Confinement, Mobility and the “bateaux-prisons” of the French Caribbean Imaginary”

Our discussants for the paper will be Professor Alessandra Benedicty, City College, and Professor Kaiama Glover, Barnard College. 

Note: This paper will be available via the link above through the end of December, but it will remain on the Center For Humanities’ website for the duration of the seminar.

Comments on Richard Turits’s draft

by Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

These comments preceded the discussion of Richard Turits’s paper, “New World of Color: Slavery, Freedom, and the Making of Race in Dominican History,” at the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar meeting on 23 November 2010.

As Mintz states throughout his work, Caribbean cultures should be viewed by their particular histories and include analyses of power (Mintz 1995). Without the specificities of history, one’s understanding of current processes operating in the Caribbean is highly incomplete. This paper places the Dominican Republic at the center of the history of the Caribbean and the Americas as a microcosm and a precursor of similar processes operating in those spaces. It is a much-needed addition to the existing scholarship that has tended to privilege the narratives of the Anglophone Caribbean, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Continue reading Comments on Richard Turits’s draft

The Caribbean Epistemologies Symposium, April 15, CUNY Graduate Center, NY

 

The Caribbean Epistemologies seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center will be holding a one-day symposium on April 15, 2011.  We invite submissions of paper presentations from seminar registrants and CUNY faculty and graduate students working on projects related to Caribbean Studies.  Continue reading The Caribbean Epistemologies Symposium, April 15, CUNY Graduate Center, NY

Comments on David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity (Chapter 3)

by Marcela Echeverri, History, College of Staten Island

The following were discussion points for the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar meeting on 29 October 2010.

 

In Chapter 3 of Conscripts of Modernity David Scott tells us he wants to find a strategic point of criticism from which to write “a new history of the postcolonial present” (p. 119). For this he proposes to displace what he finds are prevalent romantic narrative tropes for tragedy. What does it mean to displace a romantic trope? “To move away from the humanist assumption of a pre-constituted will to resist or will to freedom that studies of slavery and slave revolt are obliged to affirm or illustrate” (p. 122). More specifically, Scott suggests that we should go beyond the prevailing emphasis on cultural autonomy, the predominant focus on Africa and resistance, or the very normative expectations of resistance or overcoming. Continue reading Comments on David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity (Chapter 3)

Notes on Scott and Walcott

by Kelly Baker Josephs, English, York College

The following were discussion points for the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar meeting on 29 October 2010.
Readings: “Chapter 3: Conscripts of Modernity” by David Scott and “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” by Derek Walcott

1) Connections. In considering connections between the two texts, it is especially difficult in this case to avoid instituting the common relationship of theory to be laid upon creative.  But, I chose to follow what some may feel is perhaps a more objectionable connective route, that of the similarity in criticisms often levied upon both James and Walcott, which Scott notes (in relation to James) in order to do away with: “elitism and Eurocentrism” (101). While Scott provides solid reasons to turn away from these criticisms at this critical moment, I am not so sure that I am ready to do so. Not so much because I feel that the pertinent question (or problem-space) of the present is “about the autonomous moral value of Africa in the New World,” but more so because I frequently rely on these two writers for critical ideas that help me to think through Caribbean questions (Scott 105). For me (and for others who similarly rely on James’ and Walcott’s writings), there is a danger disregarding such criticisms as “beside the point” because silence denotes tacit agreement. Yes, the two writers can easily be labeled elite and Eurocentric – take, for instance, both James’ and Walcott’s frequent turns, in various writings, to Athens as model for the Caribbean – but there is much in their work that is useful in theorizing the contemporary Caribbean and one must pay at least enough mind to the bathwater if only to distinguish it from the baby. Continue reading Notes on Scott and Walcott

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)