Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica, is a recipient of a 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry. She will be participating in various talks/readings at Yale University during the Prize Festival (12-14 September). Goodison’s participation is detailed below in chronological order. See the Windham-Campbell Prize website for full festival details.

All events below take place on the Yale University campus and are free & open to the public. Continue reading Lorna Goodison at the Windham-Campbell Prize Festival

6:30pm – 8:30pm
29 October 2018
NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012

While conducting research for her book Coolie Woman, Gaiutra Bahadur (Visiting Scholar, A/P/A Institute at NYU) came across Lal Bihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara, the only known literary work written by an indentured laborer in the Anglophone Caribbean. She passed the songbook, written in a combination of Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and Braj Bhasha, to award-winning Indo-Caribbean poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir, and a literary recovery project was born. Join us for a reading from I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press, 2018), which chronicles the “interior lives of indentured men” (Bahadur) on the sugar plantations of British Guiana. Bahadur, who wrote the book’s introduction, and Mohabir, who completed its translation, will be in conversation with Grace Aneiza Ali (NYU Department of Art & Public Policy). Audience members are invited to record their own family histories of indenture and migration with the South Asian American Digital Archive.

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, South Asian American Digital Archive, Rajkumari Cultural Center, Jahajee Sisters, and Guyana Modern.com.

This venue is on the first floor. Restrooms are not all gender, and are accessible via elevator. If you need any accommodations, please email [email protected] at least two weeks before the event date.

Above text adapted from webpage.

6:00pm
9 October 2018
Event Oval, The Diana Center
3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

The Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) and Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism host a reading and conversation between authors Erna Brodber (Nothing’s Mat; The Rainmaker’s Mistake, among others) and Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun) in the newly-expanded series, Critical Caribbean Feminisms. These authors will discuss issues including the Caribbean and its diaspora, method, feminism, and gender in their work. The conversation with be followed by a discussion moderated by Kaiama L. Glover.

Continue reading Critical Caribbean Feminisms: Erna Brodber and Nicole Dennis-Benn

6:30pm – 8:30pm
1 August 2018
The Loisaida Center
710 E. 9th Street
Lower East Side, NY 10009

Nearly a year after Hurricanes Irma and Maria rocked the Caribbean, what lessons can we learn? In the midst of the 2018 hurricane season, what can both affected communities and their allies do to prepare for future climate events and prevent the kind of destruction the hurricanes wrought on the region?

Continue reading Eye of the Storm

7:00pm – 9:00pm
24 May 2018
Verso Books
20 Jay St, Suite 1010
Brooklyn, New York 11201

In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anti colonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean, Wherever he was, Rodney was a lighting rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica’s Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the thirty-eight-year-old Rodney was assassinated.

“Walter Rodney’s The Russian Revolution” collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar Es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D. G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a board range of subjects – the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism–Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion.

Above text adapted from webpage.

6:00pm – 8:00pm
22 May 2018
Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute
120 East 125th Street
New York, NY 10035
RSVP here. Admission is FREE. Suggested donation is $5.

In the spirit of John Berger and Bell Hooks, former Washington Post journalist and current Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson meditates on art as protest and the role of beauty in politically perilous times in A MOUTH IS ALWAYS MUZZLED: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance. Ms. Hopkinson will be in conversation with curator, scholar, and professor Grace Ali about her newly released book. Books will be available for purchase.

Continue reading A Mouth is Always Muzzled | Book Signing & Talk with Natalie Hopkinson

6:00pm – 8:00pm
25 April 2018
Wolff Conference Room – Room D1103
Albert and Vera List Academic Center, The New School

The Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs (SGIPA) presents a public screening of ‘The Past is NOT Our Future’, a new documentary film about Walter Rodney’s university years in Jamaica.

View the Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ytr_oRB3c

Director Matthew Smith will be present. Matthew Smith is Chair of the Department of History & Archaeology, the University of West Indies, Mona Campus and the author of ‘Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation’ (2014), and ‘Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957’ (2009).

Above image and text adapted from webpage.

5:00pm – 5:30pm
19th to 20th April 2018
Columbia University

Frontiers of Debt in the Caribbean and Afro-America brings together scholars, journalists, activists, and artists from across these two regions in order to interrogate their contemporary re-emergence as sites of new forms of capital extraction and opposition to debt regimes. The two-day event is comprised of an art exhibit and a conference.

The art exhibit, entitled Puerto Rico Under Water: Five Artist Perspectives on Debt will be housed in the Gallery at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (420 Hamilton Hall) and will open with a reception at 5pm on April 19.

The conference itself will take place between 10am and 5:30pm on April 20 at the Columbia University Law School (Jerome Green Building, Room 102).

Continue reading Frontiers of Debt in the Caribbean and Afro-America Conference

5:00pm
26 April 2018
Whitney Humanities Center
Yale University

David Scott is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. His work is concerned with the reconceptualization of the way we think the story of the colonial past for the postcolonial present. He is the author of Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014) and Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017). Professor Scott is currently working on a biography of Stuart Hall, as well as a study of slavery, evil, and repair. He is editor of Small Axe, a journal of criticism, and director of the Small Axe Project, which is involved in a number of special initiatives around visual, translation, literary, and historiographical issues.

Above text and image adapted from email.

6:00pm – 9:00pm
19 April 2018
Pfizer Building
630 Flushing Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11206

From April 19 – May 4, 2018, MA Curatorial Practice is pleased to present Isla Imaginaria, an exhibition curated by Natalia Viera Salgado, and featuring works by Sofía Gallisá, Lionel Cruet, Karlo Andrei Ibarra, Christopher Gregory, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Erika P. Rodríguez, and Edra Soto.

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, please contact Natalia Viera Salgado at [email protected].

Continue reading Opening Reception of “Isla imaginaria”

5:30pm
16 April 2018
19 Washington Square North, Events Space
RSVP here

You are cordially invited to celebrate the launch of the English translation of Franz Fanon’s Alienation and Freedom, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young, translated by Steven Corcoran and published by Bloomsbury Press. The first collection of new writings by Frantz Fanon to be published in over 50 years, the book contains two previously unpublished plays, the bulk of Fanon’s psychiatric writings including his editorials for his hospital journal, additional political writings, letters and a complete annotated bibliography of Fanon’s library.

Join the editors for a panel discussion on the significance of this new work by Fanon with Emily Apter (NYU), Ato Quayson (NYU), Bruce Robbins (Columbia University)and Toral Gajarawala (NYU).

Refreshments witll be served. Hosted by Bloomsbury Press and NYU Abu Dhabi.

Above text and image adapted from email.

11:30am – 6:00pm
20th to 21st April 2018
Glucksman Ireland House
New York University
Registration: $10 online or by check

The faculty and students of the Atlantic World Workshop at New York University are delighted to announce our upcoming conference, “(En)gendering the Atlantic World.” Over the last five decades, historians have demonstrated that focusing on gender enables a deeper understanding of the diversity of human experience, ideologies, and epistemologies that shaped the Atlantic World. This conference builds on that work, considering both ideologies and human experience in using gender as a central framework for investigating the intertwined histories of the peoples and polities of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. How did ideologies of gender mold, refine, and/or challenge other structures of power in the Atlantic? What does centering gender provide us with that is otherwise lost, erased, or silenced? What new methodologies and approaches are made available by reading existing archives through the lens of gender?

Continue reading (En)gendering the Atlantic World Conference

6:30pm – 8:30pm
10 April 2018
Room 5409
CUNY Graduate Center

Above text and image from email.

6:00pm – 9:00pm
30 March 2018
SRO Gallery
1144 Dean St., Brooklyn, NY 11216

From March 30 – April 22, 2018, SRO GALLERY is pleased to present “By the Rivers of Babylon,” an exhibition of paintings by the artist and writer Jacqueline Bishop with selections from three separate but overlapping series: “Dudus”; “Landscapes: Jamaica,” and “Babylon & Zion.”

In these three bodies of work, Bishop navigates to find meaning in the conflicted experiences of her birth-land, Jamaica. Bishop states: “As someone who has lived longer outside of my birthplace of Jamaica than I have lived on the island, I am acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider.”

Continue reading Opening Reception of ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ by Jacqueline Bishop

1:00pm – 8:00pm
15 March 2018
Room C198 – Center for the Humanities
CUNY Graduate Center

This conference explores the production of literature and the visual arts by contemporary artists and writers in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and their diasporas. This event explores collaboration and intermingling within the current production of literature and the visual arts in both countries and in the diaspora. It will contribute to an essential, growing intellectual discourse about Hispañola and its diaspora in the United States.

Continue reading Art and Literature in Contemporary Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas