Round-up: 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

"Miami Extensions: 305 Creativity, Alive and Thriving"

(L-R )Jason Fitzroy Jeffrers, Filmmaker, Co Founder of Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival; Maria Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, Author of Rope; Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Author  of Visionware; Dr. Patricia J. Saunders, University of Miami.

There are conferences, and then, there are Conferences. The 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference was one of the best Conferences that I’ve ever attended. The program offerings were diverse, fascinating, and riveting with a remarkable blend  of lectures for critics and creative writers.

"Publishing Workshop for Creative Writers"

Johnny Temple, Publisher, Akashic Books, Brooklyn, New York

I got to meet many of the writers and critics whose work I’ve always admired, but with whom I’ve never broken bread. 

 

  (L-R) Oonya Kempadoo, Author of Tide Running, Ifeona Fulani, Author Seasons of Dust, Nelly Rosario, Author of Song of the Water Saints.

 “Caribbean Women’s Textile/Textual Practices as Archives of Memory and Mourning”
Rachel L. Mordecai, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"Frame Work: Imaging and the Afterlife of Things"
Kevin  Adonis Browne, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Author of High Mas,
The Caribbean Memory Project

 “An Aesthetics of Federation and a Federation of Aesthetics: West Indian Literature and the Project of Regional Unity”

Alison Donnell, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom

The Caribbean Literary Heritage

“Manscapes: Grooming New Jamaican Iconography”
Isis Semaj-Hall, University of the West Indies, Mona

“After the Collaboration: The Kamau Brathwaite Bibliography"
Kelly Baker Josephs, The City University of New York

 

And then, on Friday night, there was the public performance of Zong! by M. NourbeSe Phillips for the Africans lost in the Maafa. Imagine a host of Caribbean writers, all dressed in white, descending on Historic Virginia Key Beach—the Black Beach-- to offer benedictions for the ancestors and you will have some idea of the moment.

M. NourbeSe Phillips, Author of Zong!

One of the highlights of the Conference was the lecture by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College), “The Debris of Caribbean History: Literature. Art, and Archipelagic Plastic,” in which she masterfully wove the ecologic degradation of the Caribbean to the legacy of imperialism and showed how plastic is being used by artists and writers, including Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite as metaphors of colonial trauma.

 “The Debris of Caribbean History: Literature. Art, and Archipelagic Plastic,”

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College)
Repeating Islands 

Give thanks to Pat Saunders & her team for hosting the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference, which brought together academics and writers to discuss issues that are essential to our understanding of Caribbean literature and a framework for moving ahead into the brave new digital world of text production, critiques, and archival.

Patricia J. Saunders, Associate Professor, Department of English

On a personal note, I would like to thank Pat for inviting me to launch Garvey's Ghost at the conference and giving me the space to introduce my work to professional critics, professors, and graduate students. It is a memory I will always cherish. 

Bless up, Pat. You have done a mighty, mighty work