Caribbean Convergence: Interdisciplinary Colloquium
Each year, the Department of English and the Literature Committee invites nationally and internationally renowned scholars to present their work to faculty and students. This year’s line-up was concentrated in a two-day interdisciplinary colloquium: “Early Caribbean Contexts, Transatlantic Studies,” co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities, and the Program in American and Florida Studies.
The colloquium, which took place October 5-6, featured four influential scholars of Caribbean culture. David Scott of Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology and author of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, presented “Tragedy’s Time: Postemancipation Futures Past and Present.” Scott’s thought-provoking reading of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins suggested that, as an anticolonialist text, The Black Jacobins offers a vantage point from which to rethink our ideas about the ways in which “colonial pasts are connected to postcolonial presents and through these presents to possible postcolonial futures.” Scott was followed by Hilary Beckles, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados. Beckles enjoys an international reputation as an historian whose work on Caribbean slave societies challenges traditional historiographies, prompting scholars to move beyond simplistic accounts of transatlantic colonial culture, particularly along race and gender lines. For the colloquium, Beckles offered his assessment of the “Contemporary Politics of Reparations” from his perspective as Barbados’ UN delegate to the Conference on Race held in South Africa in 2002. Complementing Scott’s discussion, Beckles’ talk dramatically illustrated the intersection between theory and practice, demonstrating the need to understand the complex relationship between our pasts, presents, and futures and their discursive representations.
On Friday, Vincent Carretta opened the program with "Bearing Witness in the West Indies: Equiano in the Belly of the Beast." A professor and the associate chair of the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Carretta is best known for his biography of Olaudah Equiano, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, which won the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' Annibel Jenkins prize for biography in 2005. Carretta's presentation focused on questions of subject formation and the literary allusiveness of Equiano's narrative, by looking specifically at the Narrative's fifth chapter to argue its centrality in Equiano's trajectory as a colonial subject moving from despair to defiance. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, followed Carretta's presentation with her reading of New World African theatre and performance in the pre-Civil War period, the subject of a book project entitled New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850.
Focusing on the reshaping of African characters in stage drama-as performed by Black and White actors-Dillon described various processes of appropriation and reappropriation in constituting racialized subjects. In particular her discussion of the anxiety generated by Black actors as political agents brought the colloquium full circle, back to questions raised by David Scott in his discussion of James's reading (and writing) of Toussaint L'Ouverture as tragic hero.
By all accounts the colloquium was a great success: each talk was followed by a lively question and answer session, and on Friday afternoon, Professors Dillon, Carretta, and Scott fielded more questions during a final, wrap-up discussion with the audience. A reception and dinner on Friday night closed the colloquium-but not the critical conversations it sparked.
Photos: Top, left to right--David Scott, Candace Ward, Elizabeth Dillon, and Vincent Carretta; Middle--Hilary Beckles; Bottom, left to right: Erin Moore and Amy Stahl (thanks to Amy for all her work organizing the event!).
photos by B. Seetachitt, prose by Candace Ward