Response to Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean Middlebrow

by Ted Sammons, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

Belinda Edmondson, “Introduction: Making the Case for Middlebrow Culture” and “Chapter 5: Organic Imports, or Authenticating Global Culture,” Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (New York: Cornell UP, 2009).

Belinda Edmondson’s previous work—a number of articles, her book Making Men (1999), and her edited collection of essays, Caribbean Romances (1999)—together establish her place in conversations about the character and uses of literary representation among African-descended people in the U.S. and the Caribbean. In Caribbean Middlebrow (2009) we find her moving from literary into cultural studies while keeping focused on exploring how aesthetic practices operate and are operated on in English-speaking Caribbean societies. Continue reading Response to Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean Middlebrow

Report on Haiti’s homeless camps and cholera

From Mark Schuller, seminar participant and York College/CUNY Faculty

 

This study is a fol­low up to the report, “Unsta­ble Foun­da­tions,” results of six weeks of research dur­ing the sum­mer of 2010, which argued that despite the bil­lions in aid pledged to Haiti, most of Haiti’s esti­mated 1.5 mil­lion IDPs lived in sub­stan­dard con­di­tions. For exam­ple, seven months fol­low­ing the earth­quake, 40.5 per­cent of IDP camps did not have access to water, and 30.3 per­cent did not have toi­lets of any kind. This lack of san­i­ta­tion ser­vices became the prime breed­ing grounds for ill­nesses just like cholera, which struck Haiti with great force. As of the end of the year, there were an esti­mated 170,000 cases of the ill­ness and 3600 deaths.

The report can be found here.

Island’s Edge: Readings, Music, Photos, and Dance Celebrating Jamaican Street Culture

From the Housing Works website:

Thursday, March 03, 2011 at 7:00 PM

Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10012 :: 212-334-3324

Map
Directions

Join writer Anicée Gaddis, journalist Knox Robinson and poet Marcel Anthony Logan for an evening of perspectives and creative musings on Jamaican culture today. Photographer Alessandro Simonetti will make a special introduction of his new book Small Kings and
host a slide show of his work. Small Kings documents Passa Passa, a legendary street party in Jamaica, just months before the conflicts in downtown Kingston during May, 2010, shut down the party and made Tivoli Gardens headline news around the world. Entertainment will be provided by the Blackgold dancers with a special guest deejay.

First Spring Session, February 18

Our first Spring seminar session will be on February 18th and we will be reading selections from Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure, Culture and the Middle Class (New York: Cornell UP, 2009).

The selections can be downloaded here (until February 18th) or on the Center for Humanities website for the remainder of the semester.
Selections: Introduction and Chapter 5

We will be meeting in the President’s Large Conference Room (8201.01) from 2-4p.

I look forward to our discussion!

Edouard Glissant (1928-2011)

glissant

Martinican writer, thinker, poet, Edouard Glissant, died Thursday in Paris.

Glissant was a faculty member at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Born in Sainte-Marie, Martinique, on Sept. 21, 1928, Glissant was among the generation of French Caribbean poets who came to prominence in the 1950s and included the late Aime Cesaire.

Glissant published more than 20 books, including collections of poetry and critical analyses.

For more information in English, see this Repeating Islands post.

For the French announcement, see this Libération post.

CSA Annual Conference, 2011

Caribbean Studies Association
36th Annual Conference
May 30 – June 3, 2011
World Trade Center, Curaçao

The theme for the 36th annual CSA conference is “Building a New House: Towards New Caribbean Futures in an Age of Uncertainty.”  Holger Henke, this year’s CSA president, has provided us with the Conceptual Statement for the conference. I have pasted the statement below and attached the PDF version here: CSA conceptual statement. Continue reading CSA Annual Conference, 2011

Metaphors and Creolization: Reading J. Michael Dash’s “Bateaux-Prisons”

by Alessandra Benedicty, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, The City College of New York

In keeping with the intention of this seminar in which we are considering, interrogating and creating new epistemologies about the Caribbean, I’d like to mention that some of the ideas that I am including have come out of conversations that I’ve had with several persons here—Professor Dash, Kaiama L. Glover, Robert Baron, Maja Horn, Rose Réjouis, Robert Baron and Jarrettia Adams. It’s also a great honor to be able to discourse so directly and in such a venue with J. Michael Dash.

Binaries offer scholars, if not a productive tool, at least a point of departure, with which to consider and reconsider one or more epistemological spaces. A binary that I think might inform our discussion in this seminar is that in which creolization appears as one of the terms, and which I think might serve as a point of contact with J. Michael Dash’s work here today. Before going further, I am not bringing this up to be polemical, although what I describe is provocative. I think that Dash’s notion of the “bateau-prison” is exciting precisely because it opens up a space within which the polemics of creolization become less significant. Continue reading Metaphors and Creolization: Reading J. Michael Dash’s “Bateaux-Prisons”

Comments on J. Michael Dash’s “Hemispheric Horizons”

by Kaiama Glover, French, Barnard College

Michael Dash’s article explicitly states its concern with the “anxieties of place and belonging” that lead to a certain “spatial emphasis in postcolonial criticism” and the concomitant reliance on a series of increasingly unhelpful binaries: either a “homogenizing, ahistorical wholeness” or an “emphasis on displacement and diaspora;” either a call for attachment to place à la Peter Hallward or the devaluation of territoriality à la Chris Bongie; either a Césairean affirmation of the local and specific or a Glissantian emphasis on wandering and deterritorialization; etc.

Dash proposes an elegant approach to negotiating these binaries in his thoughtful mobilization of the chronotope of the ship. He offers a convincing articulation of the ship – or bateau-prison – as a metaphorical space that can hold in tension the unique combination of movement and immobility that is the Afro-Atlantic experience. From C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, and Edouard Glissant’s configuration of Toussaint as both imprisoned within and liberated from Fort Joux, to James’ reading of Melville’s “mariners, renegades, and castaways” as the proper heros of Moby Dick, to Césaire’s multiple accounts of “contained openness,” the Caribbean literary tradition is marked profoundly, Dash argues, by iterations of this central marine trope. Dash reads the portraits of various men on boats, as it were, in Caribbean literature as so many exemplars of the “true citizens of the hemisphere” who, via what he dubs their “renegade subjectivity,” issue a challenge to the concept of privileged, hegemonic national or cultural identity. Continue reading Comments on J. Michael Dash’s “Hemispheric Horizons”

Conference on Caribbean Women Writers

The Departments of Foreign Languages, English, and The Center for Women’s Development at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York invite participants for the 1st Annual Conference on Caribbean Women Writers,

“Transforming Silence: Memory, Remembrance, and Resistance in the Narratives of Caribbean Women Writers”

to be held on Thursday, March 31, 2011. The conference will take place at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. Continue reading Conference on Caribbean Women Writers

sx salon: a small axe literary platform

www.smallaxe.net/sxsalon

The Small Axe Project has recently launched sx salon: a small axe literary platform, a new electronic publication dedicated to literary discussions, interviews with Caribbean literary figures, reviews of new publications (creative and scholarly) related to the Caribbean, and short fiction and poetry by emerging and established Caribbean writers. sx salon also houses the Small Axe Literary Competition, launched in 2009.

sx salon represents both a new project and a continuation of the Small Axe Project’s ongoing affirmation of the literary as a critical component of Caribbean cultural production. We envision this space as an open source, easily accessible, online resource for students, teachers and scholars, as well as a forum for academics in the field to consult for announcements related to Caribbean literary studies.

sx salon publishes a new issue every two months and invites year-round submissions of:

  • Literary Discussions that engage issues relevant to Caribbean literary studies: 2,000 – 2,500 words
  • Book Reviews of recent (published no more than two years preceding the date of submission) creative literary works by Caribbean authors or scholarly works related to Caribbean literary studies: 1,000 – 1,200 words
  • Interviews with Caribbean literary figures: 2,000 – 2,500 words
  • Poetry and Short Fiction that engage regional and diasporic Caribbean themes and concerns: up to 2 poems or fiction of up to 4,000 words


Submissions must be accompanied by a short bio approximately 50 words, which should include information about the author’s location (institutional, geographical, etc.), and publications. Manuscripts should not contain any information about the author. Please include name, email address, phone number and, if applicable, institutional affiliation with the accompanying bio

Please visit http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/submissions.php for more detailed guidelines for submissions.

INQUIRIES AND SUBMISSIONS

ALL inquiries and submissions must to be sent electronically to the following addresses:

HAITI IN:SIGHT – A Soulful Benefit for Healing in Haiti

From: Ayiti Resurrect

 

As the one-year anniversary of the earthquake approaches, let’s continue to raise our awareness and keep HAITI IN SIGHT! This benefit will raise money for a grassroots healing project led by the people of Haiti and supported by a community of delegates from the Caribbean and African Diaspora. Join us for an enlightening evening of performances, dancing, and multi-media art — all providing a lens through which the beauty and power of Haiti will be experienced and honored. We will take the opportunity to learn more about the aftermath of this unnatural disaster from our partners on the ground. And we will contribute to the healing and sustainability of Haiti.

December 11, 2010 || 7:00pm – 1:00am
Red Bull Space, 40 Thompson Street (at Watts St.) SoHo, New York
OPEN BAR All Night

Continue reading HAITI IN:SIGHT – A Soulful Benefit for Healing in Haiti