Program

Dharani Persaud, "Imaginary Journeys: Fabulating Provenance through Materiality in Caribbean Personal Records" 

This paper explores the intersections of materiality and care in personal records through a detailed examination of a record belonging to my ajee (paternal grandmother). Situated within a broader context of Caribbean history and indentureship, this paper uses concepts of care and value alongside feminist methodology to consider alternate ways of examining and stewarding records that exist outside of traditional institutional archives. The paper also considers how the material attributes of this record reveal different layers of care and value as provenancial evidence throughout its life journey. It takes up the concept of provenancial fabulation to examine a record’s life cycle and relational history by working with, not against, gaps in custodial knowledge. Ultimately this paper proposes a new framework of post-indentureship provenancial fabulation which centers on materiality, care, and feminist perspectives to consider the multifaceted histories existing in personal records that are products of colonised contexts. 

Dr. Nadejda I. Webb, "Beyond a Haunting: Indenture, Language, and Representation"

Beyond a Haunting: Indenture, Language, and Representation (BaH) queries the relationship between histories of indenture and belonging to understand how descendants of indenture are grappling with this positionality. Our current research question, What can small data tell us about the quotidian impacts of limited scale representation in the aftermath of trauma and erasure?, anchors our investigation of how descendants are “writing/striking back to/at empire.” In particular, BaH is currently analyzing data pulled from popular Indenture Histories Instagram page Cutlass Magazine (CM). Founded in August 2020 by Trinidadian Vinay Harrichan in response to a need for “the Indo-Caribbean community and descendants of Indian indentureship to have a space to convene around our culture and history,” CM catalogs cultural artifacts that have emerged out of indenture. We are analyzing comments in creolized English from descendants from countries including Guyana, Trinidad, Mauritius and Jamaica living both home and abroad in response to newly circulated images of indenture. Our presentation will center the process we have used to intentially include this “edge case” in this data science project. Because pre-trained LLMs do not capture the nuances of subcultures, particular perspectives, opinions, and language aren’t typically reflected in large-scale LLMs available to the general public and used by corporations. While these users’ use of creolized English signals a repudiation of imperial legacies and the erasure of their ancestors, an attention to creolized English within this data set can potentially contests the racialized norms of the “ typical user.” 

Jazdil Poupart-Feliciano and  Isabelle Hernandez Repollet, "Urgente, necesario y posible": the work of Micelio Abolicionista in Puerto Rico

Micelio Abolicionista is an anticolonial collective of survivors in Puerto Rico that believe in co-creating in community the social conditions necessary to address interpersonal and systemic harm from an antipunitivist perspective, centering care and mutual support. We compile and dream up materials and facilitate spaces for healing and political education with formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, survivors of violence, LGBTQIA+ people, educators, social workers, and learners of all ages and contexts. We also share and practice tools to navigate conflict, building safety and wellbeing outside of the carceral state and its 'death-making institutions' (Mariame Kaba).

In this talk, two Puerto Rican graduate students who collaborate with Micelio Abolicionista will describe and reflect on the collective’s abolitionist efforts in the context of US colonial occupation. Paying special attention to the role of popular education and participatory methodologies for building collective power, the talk will highlight how those most impacted by the archipelago’s colonial/carceral systems think about and heal from these harms while dreaming of and building a Borikén free from prisons, policing and imperial oppression. The presenters will also extend an invitation to audience members to share thoughts and resources in support of Micelio Abolicionista’s most recent endeavor: an interdisciplinary participatory research initiative to map out the impacts of incarceration in Puerto Rico.

Dr. Elizabeth Shaffer, "Generative Frictions: Reconceptualizing the Archives as Wake Work"

Archives, rooted in Western theory and colonial logics, privilege and perpetuate settler colonial systems and narratives, including the construction of Black Caribbean lives and histories. Although archival scholarship and discourse increasingly signal moves to anti-/de-colonial efforts and addressing the role of colonialism broadly, frictions continue to simmer in praxis, research and education as the entrenched Eurocentric nature of the archival landscape retains the power to configure the narrative and dominate the language of recordkeeping and archives. Scholars such as Trouillot (1995), Mbembe (2002), and Stoler (2010) bring attention to the structural and production power of colonial and state archives apparatus. The shaping of Black bodies, Black death and Black existence through and with colonial archives continues to be troubled by thinkers such as Hartman (2008), Sharpe (2016), and McKittrick (2021), calling attention to the violence of and silences within the archives’ assemblages. This paper sets out a developing course of research that engages scholarship that troubles the construction of Blackness and Black being from the absences, erasures and violence of the colonial archives. Engaging Sharpe’s discourse of wake work, and her call to make “the wake and wake work our analytic” and drawing on textual and non-textual archival records and memory practices in the Caribbean and diaspora, this work critically engages archival theory and praxis and responds to Sharpe’s call to “imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery”. 

Moderated by Jimena Perez

Bri Matusovsky, "Multi-Species Haunting: The Monkey Problem of St. Kitts"

The green monkeys (Chlorocebus Sabaeus) are considered invasive pests on the island of St. Kitts, introduced as a by-product of trans-Atlantic slave trade, and now differently valued in scientific research, tourism, and conservationism. The increasing frequency of encounters between humans and monkeys, and related food insecurity experienced by both humans and monkeys, combine to create what is known locally on St. Kitts as “the monkey problem.”

St. Kitts is a primarily Black Caribbean country, with small minorities of affluent white and East Indian residents who control a significant amount of its wealth and resources. Green monkeys disrupt the farming projects of largely Black Kittitian peasant farmers by foraging for crops. For farmers, the need for intervention, such as culling or sterilizing monkeys, is urgent.

I argue that the monkey problem is experienced as a site of animal horror. This horror consists of a coalescing of specters of colonial violence, the afterlives of slavery (Thomas 2023), fantasies of scientific objectivity, intertwined histories of speciesism and racism, and struggles for interpersonal (and inter-species) consent and refusal. Inspired by Caribbeanist authors who unsettle historical and ethnographic accounts by emphasizing the poetic (Benitez-Rojo 1996, Gilroy 1993, Glissant 1990), my research takes a creative and humanistic engagement in making sense of human-animal entanglements and post-colonial discontents that are experienced beyond the realm of objective fact, in the registers of the spectral, affective, and more-than-human (Good 2019). I reflect on ethnographic findings from 13 months of research conducted at St. Kitts primarily on farms, laboratories, and other sites of human-monkey encounter. In this paper, I theorize about the haunting element of multi-species conflict. 

Christin Washington, "Terra Nullius, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Caribbean with Myths and Missing Data" 

This paper examines how Afro-Caribbean women who produce and sustain African-syncretic epistemologies and who transit the Americas from the 20th century to the present are imperceptible to popular culture and geospatial systems yet infrastructural to modernity. I turn to moral-political regimes (Christian hegemony, Scientific Revolution, etc.) that spearheaded the pre-20th century global phenomena of enslavement, colonialism, and climate change to explain how these systems tied spatial and environmental logics to racial and gendered logics. As such, this paper connects geographical misrepresentations of space to social misrepresentations of women; Caribbean locales as absent on geographical grids to Afro-Caribbean women as “unmappable within the cosmological grid of the transcendental subject.” (Moten 2013, 739) I ask the following: How do colonial myths of the Other in alleged ‘zones of nonbeing’ and modern data visualizations (or lack thereof) of Caribbean spaces stoke fear and falsehoods that determine present and future structural realities of African-diasporic experience? And how are the accurate accounting of spatial data and faithful recounting of African-syncretic epistemologies tied to the restoration of Afro-Caribbean women’s humanity and the reparations for environmental racism in the Caribbean? Using spatial analysis, I examine the fragmented or absent data structures (i.e. null values) within the climate-impact measurement tool Electricity Maps and the web mapping program Google Maps. I juxtapose these maps with Firelei Báez’ palimpsest artwork that depict racialized and gendered mythical beings atop colonial maps to analyze the endurance of African-syncretic mythopoeia (soucouyant, ol’ higue, la ciguapa, etc.) and their overtaking of colonial myths. 

Gabriel Carrión, "Cancer and Contamination: The Body as a Metaphor of Colonial Violence in La Pecera (2023) By Glorimar Marrero"

"This paper examines how Glorimar Marrero’s film, La Pecera, critically engages with the intertwining of capitalism and coloniality in Puerto Rico, and how these forces shape both, human bodies and ecosystems. La Pecera centers on a Puerto Rican woman who returns to her home, Vieques, an island devastated by decades of U.S. military exercises. The film depicts the aftermath of bombing practices that have contaminated local land and sea, foregrounding the link between environmental destruction and serious illnesses such as cancer. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that includes ecological metabolism, ecofeminism, and aesthetic praxis, this study argues that La Pecera uses the female body as a metaphor for the cumulative violence exerted by colonial occupation and capitalist expansion. By depicting illness—particularly cancer—as both personal crisis and collective trauma, Marrero spotlights how environmental toxicity not only degrades bodies but also symbolizes the broader colonization of nature. I propose that La Pecera deconstructs hegemonic discourses on militarization, pollution, and disease while suggesting pathways to decolonize both bodies and ecosystems. Crucially, the film articulates an alternative politics of care and resistance rooted in the recognition of interdependence among health, territory, and identity. Ultimately, La Pecera invites viewers to reconsider our relationship with nature and to envision forms of resistance capable of subverting capitalist and anthropocentric logics, thereby offering a decolonial reading of the body and the national landscape alike."

J'Anna-Mare Lue, "Engineered Climate Risk: Using Flood Exposure Risk in Jamaica to Build a Case for Reparative Engineering"

Engineering is “the act of creating artifacts, processes, or systems that advance technology and address human needs using principles of the sciences, mathematics, computing, and operations.” (NAE, 2019) Civil and environmental engineers are specifically responsible for critical civil infrastructures, such as water, energy, transportation, waste, and more recently climate change adaptation. However, engineering's technocentric and apolitical culture exacerbates structural violence experienced by marginalized communities, especially through the design and implementation of built infrastructure. Engineering devoid of concern for repair and justice fortifies a violent world order rooted in genocide, transatlantic slavery, and colonialism.

Climate adaptation infrastructure that does not acknowledge that climate change vulnerability is “a result both of coloniality in the past and of neocolonial restructuring” (Sheller, 2020) does not effectively minimize vulnerability/ This paper argues that (1) climate coloniality leads vulnerable populations such as people living in the Caribbean to bear disproportionate climate change effects despite negligibly contributing (2) engineers who are tasked with designing and implementing climate adaptation reinforce the world built on the foundations of the plantation through epistemic and infrastructure violence.

The paper uses the case of frequently flooded roadways in Jamaica to highlight the plantation roads that have been paved over, concretizing plantation logic into the “post-colonial” era. The proximity of people, roadway infrastructure, and riverways to plantations in Jamaica will be analyzed using ArcGIS to highlight the importance of considering historical context and climate justice and repair in engineering solutions. 

Anna Palmer, "Temporal Imaginaries of Late Petro-State Politics in Guyana"

Many capitalist countries built their economies by exploiting fossil fuel resources. But what happens when countries in the “Global South” discover oil late amid a global transition away from fossil fuels? Development scholars debate whether underdeveloped nations must follow a stagist model of economic growth or whether resource wealth risks entrenching dependency through the “resource curse.” At the same time, scholarship on climate change temporalities highlights how governments must reconcile development ambitions with planetary crisis, anticipating how fossil-fueled growth will shape inter-scalar climate dynamics now and in the future.

Turning to Guyana, which discovered oil in 2015, this study theorizes late petro-state politics, examining how state actors and civil society navigate conflicts over development timelines and climate responsibility. I show how Guyanese government elites justify accelerated extraction by invoking compressed timelines and the impermanence of oil profits, framing oil as a fleeting opportunity to “leapfrog” into modernity. As this urgency facilitates regulatory rollbacks and deepens extractivism, the state simultaneously defers climate responsibility, citing its historical underdevelopment and using its rainforests to offset emissions. Meanwhile, legal advocates challenge this deferral by mobilizing inter-scalar climate obligations and intergenerational commitments, deploying legal and discursive strategies to delay extraction and reassert the state’s accountability for the full emissions cycle. As the climate crisis worsens, this study underscores the need to examine how shifting temporalities shape both state decision-making and resistance to fossil fuel dependency. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on resource politics and climate obstruction in the Global South.

Moderated by Adriana Gonzales

Dr. Steffon Campbell, "Simulating Selfhood: Generative AI, Ethnography, and Caribbean Identity"

This research explores the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to conduct comparative analyses of Caribbean identities between AI-generated cultural narratives and the lived experiences of Caribbean people. By employing an ethnographic approach, I began by creating prompts to generate an AI autoethnography as a means of reflecting on my Caribbean culture, history, and identity. I then placed these digital narratives in dialogue with testimonies and cultural expressions from individuals across the region.

This comparative method revealed both the potential and limitations of generative AI in representing the complex realities of Caribbean life. On the one hand, AI tools offer innovative ways to uncover and discover sociohistorical patterns, amplify underrepresented narratives, and inspire critical self-reflection through the simulation of cultural storytelling. On the other hand, this study has identified risks, such as the oversimplification of cultures, the algorithmic reinforcement of existing biases, and the potential for technological interpretations to diverge from authentic lived experiences.

By positioning GenAI alongside ethnographic accounts, this research critically engages with questions of sovereignty, representation, and technological agency in Caribbean studies. It contributes to ongoing conversations about self-determined futures by exploring whether GenAI can be ethically and effectively integrated into cultural analysis while also cautioning against the erasure of personal histories and collective memory.

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa, "Firelei Báez’s Black Feminist Practice in Counter-Cartography"

How does contemporary Dominican-Haitian artist Firelei Báez's work, with its focus on the body and cartography, endeavor to repair socio-spatial constructions and radically imagine Caribbean futures? 

Báez’s art ranges from small works on paper to paintings and installations. She appropriates colonial-era documents to intervene in officialized forms of Western knowledge, challenging the perception of the Caribbean as a site of ahistorical pleasure. Báez superimposes Black femme bodies onto archival pages of maps, scientific drawings, and portraits to confront the epistemic violence and silences embedded in the colonial archive. These hybrid, bodily forms index Caribbean myths, histories, and cultural and spiritual figures that oral traditions have preserved. By foregrounding Black histories of resistance, Báez encourages her audience to question Western conceptions of truth, history, and geographic boundaries. This paper explores how Báez’s memory-work, focusing on the body and cartography, maps pathways for redress and Caribbean futures.

Surfacing Black resistance narratives both confronts their historical erasure and reveals how colonial legacies and anti-Blackness structure contemporary tensions at the Haitian-Dominican border. I argue that Báez, addressing these colonial hauntings through fiction, mythology, and spiritual practice, achieves the first step towards redress. I situate her approach within an Afrofuturist framework, noting her engagement with novelist Octavia Butler and the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya. This analysis operates in conjunction with Black feminist geographers Katherine McKittrick and Tiffany Lethabo King, allowing me to investigate how Báez mobilizes the body as an alternative geography, a site of redress, and the space with which to radically imagine futures.

José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia, "On Alimentary Violence: Blackness and Consumption in the Work of Carlos Martiel"

In this paper, I will explore two works by queer Black Cuban performance artist Carlos Martiel, "Posesión" (2023) and "Jungle" (2024). I ask of these works, how has consumption been a trope that Black artists have used to expose the commodification of their bodies under plantation ecologies? And how have alimentary cultures served to contest the limits of the human and imagine relationality otherwise? While I sit with the possibility that performance has the creative potential to imagine alternative forms of relationality unbound from the tethers of structural anti-Black violence, I also situate these same aesthetic tools within the context of egregious forms of material and discursive violence. I question the ways in which the politics of spectatorship can or cannot be resignified when a Black artist stages acts of consumption, turning to the problematics of reception and reproduction. Shifting between theory and performance, structure and subjectivity, writing and visuality, I explore various theoretical discussions of consumption and Blackness from food cultures and exotic fruits to tropical jungles and personhood. Rather than offer facile solutions, Martiel’s work often exposes violence with no resolution in sight. Against the grain of conceptual art’s ephemerality, his performances rely on the materiality and historicity of blood, flesh, and body; his wounds materialize what Hortense Spillers has termed a “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” where the cultural markings of a violent society are made painfully visible on the Black body (Spillers 1987, 67). At stake are notions of the human, as well as the possibility or foreclosure of ethical relationality in the twenty-first century from a Black Caribbean imagination. 

Dr. Nathaniel Télémaque, "Black Geographies of Kings Hill Dominica: Framing Ideas of Heritage, Home and Belonging"

This visual essay examines geographic and practice-based approaches I adopted to explore ideas of home, heritage and belonging in Kings Hill Dominica. As a London-born and raised member of Dominica’s diaspora, who had never visited the island before a month-long period of autoethnographic practice-based fieldwork conducted in April 2024, this body of creative work shares critical and reflective annotations made in response to snapshots I made during this fieldwork session. This visual essay shares a series of super 8 short film stills 35mm and 120mm photographs. The production of these visual materials was complemented by geographic utilisations of autoethnography, soundscape recordings and fieldnote observations attending to Dominica’s natural and urban landscapes. By sharing super 8 film stills, analogue photographs, two autoethnographic vignettes and annotations, this contribution to cultural geographies in practice demonstrates how cultural geographers and visual art practitioners may adopt slower and more gradual approaches to making practice-based research with people and places, as opposed to quickly and extractively producing practice-based research works about people and places. 

Moderated by Mark Williams Jr.

Burnt Milk centres around Una (voiced by Tamara Lawrance), an isolated Jamaican woman living in 1985 suburban London, working as a nurse on a maternity ward. As Una takes a moment of solace to make her traditional condensed milk pudding, 'Burnt Milk', she is flooded with spiritual imagery that takes her back to Jamaica.

Cultural offering by Roman "Ito" Carrillo and friends. "Bomba is a hundreds-of-years-old Puerto Rican musical tradition with influences from three major cultures: Taino Indian, Spanish, and African. It is characterized by the unique exchange between a dancer and the lead drummer (prímo or subidor), the call and response of the songs, and by the instruments: barilles (barrel drums), maracas (shakers), and cuas (sticks). An art form which inspires self-confidence, Bomba also unites families and communities." Learn more about Roman here. 

Melissa Beckford, "Resistance as Culture: ‘Blockroading’ as a Cultural Performance Feature in the Jamaican Society" (Presenting via Zoom)

This research investigates the phenomenon called ‘blockroading’ in Jamaica, but widely referred to as protests or demonstrations the world over. The aim of the research is to investigate the main causes of the occurrence, the profile of the people who are normally driven to use this method of resistance as well as to locate the phenomenon squarely as a cultural feature of resistance of the Jamaican society. The research proves that there are characteristics of blockroading that are distinctive to Jamaican society, thereby making the act different from other protests and demonstrations. Blockroading is primarily a call for action from the powers that be, but it has moved beyond that to become an enactment, a performance of the common people. An over-arching post-colonial lens is visible in this research that is grounded in historical and archival studies, but also undertakes observation and an extensive survey. The research does not attempt to make specific comparisons of protests across the world; rather it uses examples of protests in other parts of the world as an explanation of the race, gender and colonial politics that marginalizes and excludes the ‘others’ usually involved in this activity, even within a post-colonial context.  The research also explores the parallels in the socio-political contexts before and after the independence period in Jamaica, with a view to understanding the continuance of the practice. The methodology is grounded in the spaces of the urban and rural poor of Jamaica and proves that the phenomenon called ‘blockroading’ in Jamaican society has become an entrenched construct of resistance as a result of our historical experiences. Such is its frequency and structure that it has become a distinct, identifiable element of culture, much like other acknowledged cultural practices in Jamaica. 

Dr. Jacqueline Lyon, "La Suciedad Persiste: Sense and Time in the Villano Antillano's Latino Urbano"

Villano Antillano, today's most prominent transgender performer in the genres of reggaetón and Latino Urbano, openly challenges state policies and popular cultural trends that seek to “clean up” reggaetón through whitened, neoliberal, performances. Her work engages with what Deborah Vargas (2014) calls lo sucio, intertwined discourses of queer failure and abjection. Villano Antillano embodies the sticky, rancid, and frictive “sensate dimensions” of suciedad to challenge neoliberal and post-colonial calls to defer justice. This paper examines how Villano Antillano reworks gender politics within reggaetón and Latino Urbano to link Puerto Rico’s ongoing colonization to a critique of colonial gender formations. In particular, it discusses suciedad as a means of resisting trans death and erasure in the artist’s first self-directed video, Vocales (2022).  

Dr. Thabisile Griffin, "Marvelously Incomplete: Black Indigenous Commoning in the 18th Century Atlantic World"

This paper explores the historical refusal of the Garinagu, within the context of British colonial enclosure in 18 th century St. Vincent. The Garinagu, racialized as the “Black Caribs” towards the end of the century, were and are comprised of a genealogical and cultural mix of both African, Arawak and “Carib” lineage. Their genesis as a Black indigenous population took root in the mid to late 17 th century, as St. Vincent offered maroon respite following rebellions on slave ships, as well as to those fleeing the terrors of plantation slavery in the nearby island of Barbados. The Black Caribs would successfully defend and thwart any large scale attempt at colonial settlement in St. Vincent by the British and French, up until the last decade of the 18th century.

My research reframes the Black Caribs as defenders of the commons, the theory that bestows all land in the community and organizes labor for the common benefit of all. Commoners have historically been positioned as enemies of privatization, enclosure and dispossession. This paper examines Black indigenous refusal against enclosure in the 18 th century, both materially and immaterially, through the rejection of attempts at criminalization, property lines, and racial demarcation. The negation of category, fundamentally meant a strategy of necessary “incomprehensible incompleteness,” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s assertion of social existence that radically defies logics of individuation, capital and dispossession. Understanding the Garinagu as both commoners and incomplete, places them within a larger Black radical tradition that evades state logics of place and identity.

Nila Seelan, "Madrassi Racial Ontologies, Blackness, And Hybridities in Caribbean Literature"

In the past century or so, Indo-Caribbean literature has flourished, with multiple perspectives on the indentured experience from multiple nations and backgrounds being portrayed in the Caribbean literary milieu.

Particularly in Anglo-Caribbean literature, certain experiences have been highlighted more than others. The majority of narratives center the North Indian migrant laborer – typically, a man – who made up the majority of indentured servants to the (Anglo) Caribbean. 

However, novels such as Nagamootoo’s ‘Hendree’s Cure’ and Dabydeen’s ‘Counting House’, as well as Indo-Franco-Caribbean literature, have positioned the ‘Madrasi’ or ‘Malbar’, Tamil laborers brought to the Caribbean. In both history and Literature, the ‘Madrasi’ has occupied a unique space in the diverse racial dynamics of the Caribbean, being alienated from the majority North Indian Hindu community, and living intimacy with Afro-Caribbean communities. 

This presentation attempts to critically engage with Caribbean literature that looks at the Tamil experience in the Caribbean, one that is a distinct and vital one to understanding race in both the Caribbean and South Asia. By furthering understanding of Tamil experiences, and their unique relations to ‘Indianness’ and Blackness, we can attempt to problematize the universality of kala pani narratives and challenge the diasporic hegemony of North Indo-Caribbeans, as well as the linguistic hegemony of English language literature in the academy. 

Moreover, it gives us insight to further our understanding of Caribbean identities, hybridities, problematizing and adding necessary and deliberate complexities to (post)colonial racial-ethnic solidarities, sovereignties, and self-determinations."

Matthew Alexander Randolph, “Here We are Received With Love”: African American Emigration and the Haitian Unification of 1822

In 1822, Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer annexed the Spanish side of Ayiti for a twenty-year period of unified administration (1822-1844). Roughly three years later, from 1824-1825, a wave of African Americans migrated to the island, particularly the peninsula of Samaná in the northeast of the modern-day Dominican Republic. For Boyer, this initiative was informed by a desire to provide asylum and prosperity to free Black people in North America, who he saw as victims of a “false liberty” compared to that of Haitian citizens. Indeed, once settled in Samaná, one migrant from Philadelphia reflects on how “here we are received with love”, encouraging fellow Pennsylvanians to join him in the Caribbean.

At the same time, the newly expanded first Black republic also needed to strengthen its economy and develop annexed territories, so this diasporic recruitment was more than a simple philanthropic gesture. African Americans were expected to contribute to stewarding the lands and waterways of the island, leveraging their skilled labor, especially their maritime trades in the case of those who would make their way to Samaná Bay. This presentation unravels the complex motivations of the Haitian government behind this proto-Pan-African project; thinking critically about the formal and informal institutions and efforts that made it possible, I also center how the migrants themselves - both before and after departure (and in solidarity and collaboration with Haitian people) - understood and navigated this “second passage” to Caribbean shores in the wake of the Middle Passage.

Moderated by Ana Blanco

Amandla Thomas-Johnson, "Repairing Union Island after Beryl" (Via Zoom)

In July, I visited Union Island, the part of St Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean that Hurricane Beryl hardest hit. Beryl, the earliest Category 5 storm on record, destroyed or damaged 90% of the island's buildings at the end of June. When I arrived, a thousand people — nearly half of Union's population — had left, including members of my family. I saw empty spots where houses had blown away. The lush hills, stripped, had turned to brown stubble littered with debris. At my grandparents’ home, beside blown-out windows, I held waterlogged photographs. I watched family memories drip with ink, dripping in sunlight that came through where the roof once was — into puddles.This personal essay asks what happens when a place still reeling from the effects of colonialism and displacement becomes ground zero for the climate crisis. I use my personal and family narrative and draw from literature (Derek Walcott and Dionne Brand) to suggest that cultural loss is more acutely felt in those communities that emerged from enslavement just four or five generations ago. The essay further argues that notions of reparatory justice do not fully address this loss of intangible cultural heritage.

Dr. Keston Perry, "Beyond disaster's door: taking communal repair and resistance seriously"

This paper presents a dilemma: what if we abandon the seemingly inextricable intimacies our Caribbean has with colonialism, act upon our histories of resistance, and imagine communal self-determination as the basis of reparation? Recognizing the ongoingness of disaster, from native slaughter, plantation slavery, colonization/decolonization, structural adjustment, and climate change, the paper charts a potential route beyond disaster's door. It suggests that we take inspiration from our Indigenous and African ancestors and present-day relatives' collective resistance, and our mutuality with nature and each other as a basis for a transformative program on communal repair. It questions the infatuation of Caribbean reparations proposals and reparationists with a specific liberal view of the past that ignores a radical history of defiance and refusal of capitalism writ large. At the same time, Caribbean reparationists claim their interest is in correcting for plantation slavery's racist crimes, colonialism's (ongoing) plunder and (attempted) Native genocide while maintaining an affinity to the colonial rules of the game exemplified by the liberal state. The paper demonstrates that by giving attention to our historical and present-day forms of resistance, liberatory acts and communal practices in relation to environmental disasters especially hurricanes may offer more transformative route out of oppression and into a self-determined reparative future. Taking communal repair and self-determination seriously is more than a simple gesture to the so-called grassroots that emerges in our politricks but acknowledges our collective survival relies on reimagining our social organization and sovereignty beyond the liberal state, disaster capital, or donning the master's tools.

Sedney Suarez Gordon, "Lou mi fi Taak, Creole languages as a form of the future, Édouard Glissant and the construction of Caribbean futures, some initial answers for the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina"

In the now famous essay, Éloge de la Créolité, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant describe the work of the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant as a quivering of a voice, the oxygen of a perspective, written for the future generations. Time, the Future, and the manifold possibilities of futures are central topics of Glissant approach and questioning of the Caribbean philosophical experience. Here, first I examine how the philosophical endeavor of Édouard Glissant, in his late work Treatise on The Whole-World, understand and utilize Creole languages to imagine new futures that upend and transform the colonial experience of subjugation for the Caribbean and the world by extension, shortly, how Creole emerges as a form of the future. Secondly, I propose interdisciplinary ways of reading contemporary construction of futures in the Caribbean through Glissant reflections. As an example, I begin to establish a relation, situated in a continuous anticolonial effort, between the imagined futures by the Creole Afro-decent Raizal community that inhabits the Caribbean archipelago of San Andrés Providence and Santa Catalina, Colombia, with the ideas of futures presented by Glissant. 

Colin Walker Wingate, "Ruses of Sovereign Selves: Failure’s Lesson"

Dwelling in the textual space of 1960’s post-Independence Caribbean, this paper investigates how ‘failure’ is depicted in Sylvia Wynter’s 1984 novel The Hills of Hebron and its central character, Prophet Moses. Unpacking ‘failure’ as that which limns narratives of emancipation in the Anglophone Caribbean, this paper proceeds from the sense that Wynter allows us to see failure as something that occurs in the moment a subaltern subject makes claim to the scheme of modernity. I turn to Prophet Moses, the leader of Revivalist community called the ‘New Believers’ organized around the worship of  a Black god, to show how Wynter casts failure as an instructive position that allows us to (re)assess investments in redress. Where redress offers a self-affirming story of the constitution of a people, Wynter’s work produces a critical creolized narrative of a people’s contingent be-ing sustained in self-shattering. Following her, this paper reframes ‘failure’ in Anglophone Caribbean projects as what marks the attempt to close the aporia between subaltern and citizen. Informed by what Aaron Kamugisha calls (reflecting on the Grenada Revolution) “a tale of incomprehensible decline” or Wynter describes as “the path for the West Indian from acquiescent bondage to the painful beginning of freedom,” I thus position ‘failure’ as a foil to redress: a ‘revisionary lesson’ that disrupts and revises the conceptual ease of terms such as ‘freedom,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and ‘agency’ as they are deployed to suture Black people to the position of Human.

Moderated by Isaiah Blake

This talk traces recent hurricane relief and rebuilding efforts in the Caribbean to demonstrate how disaster recovery has become a highly contested and political terrain. I reflect on my ongoing work in the eastern Caribbean, and a growing regional body of critical disaster scholarship, to demonstrate how disaster recovery efforts intersect with issues around race and coloniality. I situate regional discourses on climate change and climate justice within a broader politico-cultural context that foregrounds the current climate crisis as an extension of a colonial past that continues to shape the region’s subordinate position in an uneven world system. A situation that illustrates how the Caribbean’s disproportionate vulnerability to the adverse effects of a changing climate cannot be separated from the historical conditions and logics that brought about the contemporary world and Western modernity. I close by offering insights into island ‘survivalism’ within a context of growing global climate uncertainty and ongoing post/colonial struggles. In resituating mainstream discourses on the Anthropocene from the purview of the Caribbean, I hope to raise critical questions regarding the political, historical, and onto-epistemic assumptions/logics that undergird contemporary debates around the global climate crisis and its attendant solutions.