Black Britain has been a long time in the making, created by many generations of people of African and Caribbean heritage living in Britain throughout the twentieth century. This special Your Local Arena, in partnership with the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, explores how literature and music have played a part in that — from books published in the 1930s, when most of the Caribbean considered itself British, up to the 1990s, when black authors born in the UK were being published, to the music of 2-Tone, where black and white musicians blended blue beat and ska from the 1960s with reggae, soul and punk from the 1970s. This cultural journey, criss-crossing the Atlantic over decades, has led to the rise of what we now celebrate as Black Britain.

Below you will find direct links to each pre-recorded offering of this online programme:

Arena Film: Rudies Come Back or The Rise and Rise of 2-Tone (1980)
Enjoy this early BBC Arena film, Rudies Come Back or The Rise and Rise of 2-Tone, which captures the start of the music genre in its hometown of Coventry in 1980.

Your Local Arena: A Response to Arena and the Rise of Black Britain

Judith Bryan, Anthony Joseph, SI Martin, Mike Phillips, Jacqueline Roy and Nicola Williams respond to the Arena film through their own experiences of and novels about building Black Britain.

New Poetry from Today’s Britain

Read and listen to new poems by today’s rich mix of Black British poets: Malika, Booker, Richard Georges, Keith Jarrett, Hannah Lowe, Maureen Roberts, and Roger Robinson.

London by Lockdown: A Travel Podcast

Listen to the latest episode, “Drawing a Better Map”, which explores the rise of Black Britain and celebrates diverse and brilliant Black British voices. Listen to London by Lockdown on all major podcast platforms.

A Short History of Black British Publishing

“The Roots of Independent Black British Publishing”, by Roxy Harris & Sarah White.

Above adapted from Bocas Lit Fest – Celebrating Black Britain.

Above adapted from email.

 

Date: March 15, 2021
Time: 7:00pm – 8:00pm EST
Location: Virtual

Please RSVP Here

Sanit Bèlè (Sanite Bélair)Women’s Empowerment Series: Featuring Emmanuelle Georges

The Sanit Bèlè (Sanite Bélair) Women’s Empowerment Series was born out of a desire to celebrate and center the visionary work of contemporary Haitian women. Sanit Bèlè was a Haitian freedom fighter and revolutionary, and one of the women soldiers who fought during the Haitian Revolution at the turn of the 19th century.

Join the conversation with Emmanuelle Georges, Certified Life Coach & Podcaster, as they discuss her journey, life work, and what #RevolutionaryWork means to her. Moderated by Wynnie Lamour (CLACS).

Presented by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU and the Haitian Creole Language Institute of New York.

You will find the program Here

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Date: March 27, 2021
Time: 6:00pm- 7:00pm EST
Location: Virtual

Please RSVP Here

Sanit Bèlè (Sanite Bélair)Women’s Empowerment Series

The Sanit Bèlè (Sanite Bélair) Women’s Empowerment Series was born out of a desire to celebrate and center the visionary work of contemporary Haitian women. Sanit Bèlè was a Haitian freedom fighter and revolutionary, and one of the women soldiers who fought during the Haitian Revolution at the turn of the 19th century.

Join them for a special musical performance by Nathalie Cerin, Singer-songwriter, Teaching Artist & Blogger.

Presented by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU and the Haitian Creole Language Institute of New York.

You will find the event program Here

Above adapted from email.

Date: March 12, 2021
Time: 4:00pm – 6:00pm EST
Location: Virtual

Please RSVP Here

Common Threads(ts): Afrodescendiente & Garífuna Leaders and the Response of Violence

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) at NYU presents a panel with distinguished scholars and activists to examine mounting challenges faced by afrodescendiente & Garífuna political and community leaders in various parts of Latin America, and particularly in Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras.

Featuring: Merle Bowen, Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Francia Elena Márquez Mina, Leader of Afro communities and artisanal miners of northern Cauca, Colombia, and Miriam Miranda, OFRANEH, the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras.

Read More Here

Above adapted from email.

 

Deadline: 31 January, 2021 Further details can be found HERE. 2021 CSA Conference Call for Papers – Now Open Identity Politics, Industry, Ecology and the Intelligent Economy in Caribbean Societies Políticas de Identidad, Industria, Ecología y la Economía Inteligente en las Sociedades del Caribe Politiques identitaires, industrie, écologie et l’économie intelligente dans les sociétés caribéennes CSA embraces proposals from all disciplinary perspectives, theoretical standpoints and methodological approaches and welcomes interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary submissions. Individual paper proposals are accepted but CSA strongly recommends proposals for fully constituted panels, fully constituted round tables, and pre-organized workshops. CSA warmly encourage proposals for panels, round tables, and workshops that are multi-lingual and multi-disciplinary. The association welcomes proposals from researchers, academics, policy makers, teachers, students, community activists, cultural managers, writers, artists, creatives and anyone with a keen interest in Caribbean Studies. Contact email: secretariat@caribbeanstudiesassociation.org

Above adapted from email announcement.

Paul Barrett extends a friendly invitation to the book launch for his forthcoming collection on Austin Clarke’s work, ‘Membering Austin Clarke. The book includes a range of essays from scholars, writers, colleagues, and friends commenting, in a range of styles and genres, on his writing and his place in Caribbean and Canadian literatures. Please join him if you’re looking for an event to brighten up your December!

This will be a double launch: Rinaldo Walcott and Paul Barrett will be chatting about ‘Membering Austin Clarke and his reissue of Clarke’s, When He Was Free and Young and Used to Wear Silks. This will be followed by a few readings, some music, photos, and general celebration of Austin’s life and writing.

Date & Time: Friday, December 4th @ 7:00pm
You can register for the event here.

OF ISLANDS AND ARCHIVES:
Celebrating Île en île and World Literature in French

DATE: Mon, November 16th, 6:00 PM (EST).
You can register here to access the Zoom link.

Please join us for a dialogue marking the culmination of two decades of research work building Île en île, a digital humanities archive documenting the cultures with especial focus on the literature of the world’s Francophone islands. A pioneering addition to the French-speaking Internet, Île en île has served to present to a global audience works by authors far removed from a Parisian “center.” Online since 1998, it is an extensive archive with biographies, bibliographies, excerpts of prose and poetry, and an audio and video archive.

Île en île will remain online, but is transitioning in 2020 to become a fixed archive. This is an opportune moment for this group of scholars to address the evolution of scholarly research and pedagogical methods of Francophone Studies, in geography, technology, and with parallel fields of the humanities. Join scholars Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Françoise Lionnet, Thomas C. Spear, and Alex Gil who will address the transformations that have taken place in the last decades in the field of Francophone Studies as well as with the digital resources available to scholars, students, readers, and teachers.

Île en île features authors from French-speaking islands and their diaspora: from the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, and continental French Guiana), from the Indian Ocean (the Comoros – including Mayotte –, Madagascar, Mauritius and La Réunion), and from the South Pacific (New Caledonia and Polynesia).

See participants below:

Continue reading Upcoming Event – Of Islands & Archives: Celebrating Île en île and World Literature in French

The Caribbean Digital VII
Build: October – December 2020
Launch: 4 December 2020 at 1:00-2:00pm (EST) – Register here

This year, the seventh annual Caribbean Digital event will be held virtually, with a synchronous virtual gathering on 4 December, from 1p-2p, and three asynchronous digital community projects:

The Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship is a collaborative curation of digital resources concerning the Caribbean and its diasporas. The project engages the community in compiling entries in an open, shared online dataset. To suggest projects for inclusion in the Directory, you are invited to add links and annotations to the master spreadsheet between October 26 and November 20. 

The Collective Annotation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, will run November 16 to 20. This event offers participants the opportunity to engage Césaire’s work in ways that will generate an original textual artifact. Please sign up here to receive timely information regarding participation in this venture.

The Keyword Collection for Caribbean Studies, initiates a collaborative exploration of words that serve as rich sites for research and pedagogy in Caribbean Studies. This collection is intended to be the beginning of a project that will grow with future Caribbean Digital events.

Please contact the organizers – Kaiama L. Glover, Alex Gil, and Kelly Baker Josephs – at thecaribbeandigital@gmail.com if you have questions and/or wish to participate. All three ventures will be launched synchronously at the Caribbean Digital event on 4 December 2020, 1p-2p, which you can register for here.

The Blue Flamingo Literary Festival’s Evening of Poetry: Voices across the Diaspora, features seven poets from across the African diaspora whose voices are an important contribution to global literature. Their readings will address broad and compelling themes across the landscape of the human experience.

Date & Time: Friday, 20th November 2020 @ 6:00 P.M.
You can register for this event here.

Featured Poets:
Fabian Adekunle Badejo
Marion Bethel
Dr. Christian Campbell
Kendel Hippolyte
Dr. Simone Savannah
Dr. Ian Strachan
Sonia Williams

Hosted by the University of the Bahamas

 

 

Abstracts: due 26 November 2020
Submit: via email to the editor, Jason Allen-Paisant (J.Allen1@leeds.ac.uk).

Call for Papers

This special issue will explore Afro-diasporic performance practices as a major philosophical site for ‘future-thinking’ around Black lives in the contemporary moment. It will shed light on a form of ‘future-thinking’ in the African diaspora that foregrounds the idea of ‘duties to the dead’. This kind of ‘future-thinking’ is commensurate with a relationship to the dead that emphasizes memory’s presentness in embodied realities and presents History as an embodied archive. Continue reading Special Issue – Parallax: Performing Futures in the African Diaspora: Time, Ritual, Ceremony

Please join the Puerto Rico Syllabus this Friday, October 23rd for “Digital Puerto Rican Studies: Social Scholarship, Mapping, and Archives,” a virtual event and discussion sponsored by LASA-Puerto Rico. Register below:

This event represents the launch of the new website for The Puerto Rico Syllabus, a digital resource for critical thinking and teaching about the Puerto Rican Debt Crisis. In addition to discussing the new “decolonial design” and future plans, The #PRSyllabus will also be in conversation with the leaders of three other digital projects that contribute to Puerto Rican Studies and provide resources for broad publics.

Digital Puerto Rican Studies: Social Scholarship, Mapping, and Archives this Fri, Oct 23rd, 6:00 PM (EDT) | This event will take place on Zoom. Register here to access the link to Zoom.

This event spotlights four digital projects that contribute to Puerto Rican Studies and provide resources for broad publics: The Puerto Rico Syllabus, Proyecto historias orales cayeyanas: Vivencias y resistencias, Visualizando El Apoyo Mutuo: Solidaridad en acción, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean-Archivo Histórico de Vieques.

The event will include moderated discussion about each project, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

This event is sponsored by LASA Puerto Rico, with media co-sponsorship by the Puerto Rico Syllabus project led by Dr. Yarimar Bonilla as part of the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Add to the conversation by using #DigitalPRStudies

Continue reading Upcoming Event: Digital Puerto Rican Studies: Social Scholarship, Mapping, & Archives

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Liminal Spaces is an intimate exploration into the migration narratives of fifteen women of Guyanese heritage. It spans diverse inter-generational perspectives – from those who leave Guyana, and those who are left – and seven seminal decades of Guyana’s history – from the 1950s to the present day – bringing the voices of women to the fore. The volume is conceived of as a visual exhibition on the page; a four-part journey navigating the contributors’ essays and artworks, allowing the reader to trace the migration path of Guyanese women from their moment of departure, to their arrival on diasporic soils, to their reunion with Guyana.

Eloquent and visually stunning, Liminal Spaces unpacks the global realities of migration, challenging and disrupting dominant narratives associated with Guyana, its colonial past, and its post-colonial present as a ‘disappearing nation’. Multimodal in approach, the volume combines memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, photography, art and curatorial essays to collectively examine the mutable notion of ‘homeland’, and grapple with ideas of place and accountability.

This volume is a welcome contribution to the scholarly field of international migration, transnationalism, and diaspora, both in its creative methodological approach, and in its subject area – as one of the only studies published on Guyanese diaspora. It will be of great interest to those studying women and migration, and scholars and students of diaspora studies.

Continue reading Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora

The following Caribbean Studies journals published new issues this summer:

Caribbean Quarterly – Volume 66, Issue 2, June 2020
Small Axe – Volume 24, Number 2, July 2020
PREE Caribbean Writing – Issue 5, June 2020
SX Salon – Issue 34, June 2020

Below you will find details of each new issue:

Continue reading Caribbean Studies Journals – Summer 2020 Publications

No registration, tickets, or social media required!

The event will stream on the following days and times (Atlantic GMT-4):

Friday 18 September 4:30pm – 8:45pm

Saturday 19 September 12 noon – 9:00pm

Sunday 20 September 10:30 – 8:30pm

2020 is a milestone year for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest: the tenth year of Trinidad and Tobago’s national literature festival, which has grown into the Anglophone Caribbean’s biggest annual literary celebration.

The 2020 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, running from 18 to 20 September, will go down in history for another reason: it’s the first-ever entirely virtual and online version of the festival, with 80 participating writers and speakers and a programme of free events livestreamed via the Bocas Lit Fest website and on social media.

Many of the 2020 festival events focus on recently published books, some of which will be launched by their authors in this virtual format. Book-lovers can look out for appearances by T&T authors such as Ingrid Persaud, Caroline Mackenzie, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Monique Roffey, and Andre Bagoo, alongside writers from the broader Caribbean, including Jacob Ross, Canisia Lubrin, John Robert Lee, and 2020 OCM Bocas Prize winner Richard Georges.

The opening day of the festival, 18 September, has been dubbed Future Friday, presenting a showcase of emerging and established Caribbean speculative fiction writers, exploring the question of what the disruptive events of 2020 mean for the Caribbean in the coming decades and centuries. Organised in partnership with the newly established Caribbean Futures Institute — an international project bringing together writers and scientists — Future Friday will be headlined by a discussion event with star writers Karen Lord, Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, and Malka Older.

Continue reading NGC Bocas Virtual Lit Fest