Friday, October 30th 1:30 – 3:00

Session Room: Miss Lou’s Room

1) Michelene Adams, The University of Trinidad and Tobago
The Motion Picture in Caribbean Fiction

Traditionally in Caribbean literature the American motion picture has represented Western values and serves as a metaphor for the capture and control of subjectivity. When the camera is trained on them, Caribbean subjects are usually romanticised, exoticised, stereotyped or relegated to the role of victim. In Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988) and in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Americans appropriate Caribbean culture because they are fascinated by the exotic, but, fundamentally, their aim is to produce filmic treatments that will bring them financial profit. In the second decade of the 21st century, however, when some Caribbean nations are investing relatively heavily in this industry to generate films of our own, is Western cinema being viewed differently? Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie (2011) suggests that it is.

The novel presents an American film set in a jungle but filmed in Trinidad with locals as extras, and in this novelist’s hands, the representation of the Western movie takes a comic rather than a tragic turn. Trinidadians are recruited to portray the quintessential natives in grass skirts whose role is simply to appear as part of the backdrop and to immediately be killed. But two of Lovelace’s natives decide they “not taking that.” Their resistance results in the upstaging of the American director and the reorienting of the thread of the classic Romantic action feature, whose natives have always quietly exited stage left as directed.

In this paper I will examine Brodber’s and Cliff’s treatments of the figure of the motion picture and compare their postcolonial readings of the significance of movie making with that of Lovelace, who brings a buoyancy to the motif that seems in keeping with the current climate of production in Caribbean cinema.

2) Ronald Cummings, Brock University
Queer Marronage and the Politics of Urban Jamaican Space

This paper focuses on Patricia Powell’s novel "A Small Gathering of Bones" and her textual mapping of the spaces of gathering, solidarity and pleasure shared by gay men in urban 1970’s Jamaica. I argue here that Powell’s work, while acknowledging the significance and importance of gay bars and clubs, as communal sites and counterpublics of identification, also directs our attention to an alternative queer maroon geography, one that is difficult to definitively map but which exists alongside the more visible and located spaces of gay life. These queer maroon spaces include transient, contingent sites of gathering and identification such as Nanny-Sharpe’s Park where men come together to engage in anonymous outdoor sex. It is significant that in naming this park, Powell invokes the anti-colonial, historical maroon figures: Nanny of the Maroons and Sam Sharpe. In doing so, she links the politics of claiming space by gay men in late 20th century Jamaica to the practice of marronage which in the context of slavery represented a radical and subversive appropriation of space.

In this paper I use theoretical discussions of queer space such as that offered by Judith Halberstam’s work as well as Michael Dash’s concept of “urban marronage” to explore the complex ways in which Powell’s characters negotiate these urban spaces which Dash describes as  “a new forest of symbols for the urban maroon” (1998, 143).

3) Delia Steverson, University of Alabama
Transnational Feminisms and Caribbean Women Writers

My presentation explores the intersections between transnational feminisms and Caribbean Women's Literature. Although there is no singular definition of transnational feminisms, there are similar aims and goals in which a transnational feminist praxis strives to attain. Scholars understand transnational feminisms as an intersectional set of understandings, tools, and practices that seeks to critique the racialized, classed, and masculinized boundaries produced by hegemonic practices and understanding the resulting global and (neo)colonial inequalities in relation to power. In order to uncover power asymmetries and inequalities, a transnational feminist approach is often interdisciplinary, but rarely pulls from the wealth of information afforded by literature.  By engaging the works of Jamaica Kincaid, specifically A Small Place and Annie John, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory I argue that Caribbean women’s literature is constantly in conversation with the transnational. Caribbean women’s literature is of particular importance because the authors of the works are transnational women migrants.

As a transnational feminist approach is broad, I am less concerned with the economic tenets and focus instead with nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. I explore Caribbean women’s literature in the ways in which the authors are concerned with the following: First, knowledge production and decolonizing the canon, meaning that the authors work to re-imagine alternative historical narratives concerning Caribbean history. Second, patterns of migration and the resulting geometries of power, meaning that the literature reveals patterns of migration and cultural displacement of families. Third, how the authors engage in the act of writing itself, which for them becomes a self-reflexive process where they write from the margins, dislocating the center. The authors use their fiction as a space to explore their own complex issues of identity being Caribbean women migrants.