All of our lectures are live streamed and are open to anyone to join us online, Fellows and Non-Fellows.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
Caribbean Literature in English – Writing Back and Writing Forward
Booking has now closed. You can join us online on our YouTube Channel here:
Organised by Professor John Hines and Dr Linda Grant
The main focus of this conference will be on ‘writing back’, or how Caribbean literature engages with ideas of European literary canonicity: participating in, contesting, overturning and resisting. The programme ranges broadly to include both established and more innovative and contemporary texts, and explores issues of postcolonialism, hybridity, reception, language and orality, gender, nationhood and identity. The closing panel discussion will consider ‘writing forward’ and the futures of literature from, and set in, the Caribbean.
Focusing closely on books written in English from or about the Caribbean, at this event we will be continuing a much-needed contemporary dialogue between literature, politics, people and place. As well as exploring how past Caribbean writers have negotiated their position within ‘English’ literature, we will also be looking at how contemporary Caribbean writing has a vibrant place in what is being published and read today and in the future.
Marlon James: Booker Prize 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings; Monique Roffey: Costa Book of the Year Award 2020 with The Mermaid of Black Conch – Caribbean writing is no longer a marginal interest but is a vibrant and relatively youthful contributor to the British and US literary scene. Join us at this event to hear directly from a panel of experts and writers about how Caribbean literature shakes up the old conventions, and how it’s forging a new community of inclusive readers and writers.
Conference Programme:
09.15: Registration opens
10.00: Welcome and Introduction – with The Acting High Commissioner of Jamaica, Mrs. Patrice Laird-Grant & Professor Matthew Smith, Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL
10.05: Caribbean literature and its engagement with canonicity – Dr Isis Semaj-Hall, University of the West Indies
10.45: Representations of the Caribbean in Jane Austen – Professor John Hines, University of Cardiff, and Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries
11.30: Break – with tea and coffee provided by SAL
12.00: Derek Walcott’s Omeros and the rewriting of classical epic – Dr Linda Grant, Society of Antiquaries
12.45: Lunch break (Lunch provided)
14.00:Women and literature of the Caribbean: Creativity and Community – Jherane Patmore, Rebel Women Lit, Jamaica
14.45: The oral tradition and ‘talking back’ to a British Metropole –Dr Cassander Smith, University of Alabama
15.30: Break
16.15: Panel discussion: Writing forward and the futures of writing from, and set in, the Caribbean
Including Dr Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch, Winner of the Costa Book of the Year award 2020, shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize 2020, and longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
17.00: Break
17.15: Keynote speaker: Malika Booker, prize-winning poet and theatre-maker. She was the inaugural Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010, Chair of the Forward Prize in 2016 and Chair of Judges of the international Manchester Poetry Prize in 2019. She has been awarded a prestigious Society of Authors Cholmondley Award for her contribution to poetry.
18.00: Drinks Reception including Rum Punch with compliments of the Jamaican High Commission
Meet our speakers:
Isis Semaj-Hall specializes in Caribbean literatures in English and regional nation languages, as well as African diasporic popular culture. Semaj-Hall’s research focuses on constructions of the self, decolonizing gender, Jamaican music, and the digital and has been published in such scholarly journals as Caribbean Quarterly, Jamaica Journal, Cultural Dynamics, and sx salon. She is currently working on two projects: a monograph, titled On the B-Side: Dub, Disruptions, and the Decolonial in Contemporary Caribbean Texts, that analyzes contemporary Caribbean literature through the music production techniques that were created and popularized by dub, and an edited collection of oral histories on the silences in Jamaican music. She podcasts For Posterity, maintains a blog called write pon di riddim, and is a co-founding editor of PREE: Caribbean Writing.
John Hines is Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University and a specialist on relations between Britain and Scandinavia before and during the Viking period. John also has broader interests in literature including Jane Austen and the prequels, sequels and translations of her novels on TV and in film.
Linda Grant has research interests in poetry, classical reception and translation in the broadest sense. She has written on how to think methodologically about textual receptions and literary dialogues across time and geographies, on gender and genre (including epic), and the textual representation of bodies and voices. She is currently working on a book on Shakespeare’s Bodies.
Jherane Patmore is the owner and founder of Rebel Women Lit. She started this literary community in 2018 as a book club and has since grown it into a bookstore, community library, podcast and it is home to the Spoken & Seen Festival & Caribbean Readers’ Award.
Cassander Smith teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early African American, American, and Caribbean literature. Both her teaching and research focus on representations of black Africans in early Atlantic literature, emphasizing the racial/cultural ideologies that helped shape English encounters with the early Americas and helped shape the literature produced about those encounters. Her current works in progress include a monograph, tentatively titled Race, Class, Emancipation and a Politics of Respectability in Early Atlantic Literature, which examines the ways in which issues of race and class merge in the emancipation rhetoric of an early modern black Atlantic.
Monique Roffey’s research has been mostly based in the Caribbean. She is interested in outsiders, otherness and exile. Her novels have examined whiteness and the white colonial in the post independence era (The White Woman on the Green Bicycle), the changing environment in the Caribbean (Archipelago), and an historic coup d’etat in Trinidad (House of Ashes). The Mermaid of Black Conch is a feminist rewriting of an old Caribbean myth; it examines female jealousy and interracial love.
Malika Booker, our Keynote Speaker, has research interests in Black British Contemporary Poetry, Women Contemporary poets, Caribbean and African American Contemporary Poetry, Autobiographical and Confessional Poetry, Poetry of Witness, Poetry and Performance, and Teaching Creative Writing in Schools.
And chairing the day, Matthew Smith, whose research is pan-Caribbean in scope with special interest in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica. Among his current research projects is a study of the representations and legacies of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, and a social history of Jamaican popular music since the 1950s.
This event will be both in person at Burlington House and online. Please select the appropriate ticket below.
If you have any questions, please contact us on [email protected]