THE JAMAICAN 1950S A SYMPOSIUM
ABOUT
PARTICIPANTS
SCHEDULE
EXPERIENCE
Hazel V. Carby, Ph.D., Birmingham University, England, 1984, is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and globalization. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). Recent publications include: the introduction to the “Race” section of CCCS Working Papers in Cultural Studies: Volume 2 (London: Routledge 2007); “US/UK Special Relationship: The Culture of Torture in Abu Ghraib and Lynching Photographs,” NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art no. 20 (2007); “Postcolonial Translations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30/2 December 2006; “Becoming a Modern Racialized Subject: ‘detours through our pasts to produce ourselves anew,’” Cultural Studies (2008) and “Lost (and Found?) in Translation,” Small Axe 2009. Her forthcoming book, Imperial Intimacies, will be published in September 2019 (Verso). Hazel Carby is a dual citizen of the U.K. and the U.S.A.
Charles V. Carnegie 's work has focused on identity categories and issues of nationalism and transnationalism. He is the author of Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (Rutgers University Press, 2002), co-editor with Samuel Martinez of “Crossing Borders of Language and Culture,” a theme issue of Small Axe (No. 19, 2006), and editor of Afro-Caribbean Villages in Historical Perspective (African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, 1987). He is currently working on two research projects: the first of which, “The Making and Unmaking of Jamaican Civil Society: The Problem of the Social,” centers on the beginnings of social science research in the Caribbean in the 1940s & 50s and local NGO-led community development efforts during these late-colonial decades. The other project, “Kingston Space, Kingston Time,” looks at the cultural politics of contemporary Kingston, Jamaica, and prospects for community renewal.
Matthew Chin is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham University. He obtained his PhD in Anthropology and Social Work from the University of Michigan. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Queer Creolizations: Decolonizing Caribbean History, a historical ethnographic study of the transnational politics of same sex desire in late twentieth century Jamaica.
In Ronald Cummings research and teaching he explores the intersections of literature, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. His current book project Queer Marronage and Caribbean Writing examines the work of Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Shani Mootoo and Patricia Powell, and their representations of the figure of the Maroon—the runaway slave—in narratives which explore questions of sexual citizenship, gender and identity politics in the contemporary Caribbean. He has also published articles on queer theory and Caribbean writing and on representations of gender and sexuality in Jamaican popular culture.
Donette Francis directs the American Studies Program at the University of Miami, where she is Associate Professor of English and founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective. She is co-founder of the Jamaican Cultural Political Modern Project, a collective that rethinks Jamaica’s historiography, and has edited proceedings from the symposia The Jamaican 1960s and The Jamaican 1970sin Small Axe. Dr. Francis is the author of Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature. She is currently working on two book projects: Illegibilities: Caribbean Cosmopolitanisms and the Problem of Form, an intellectual history of the Anglophone Caribbean’s transnational literary culture, 1940-1970; and Creole Miami: Black Arts in the Magic City, a sociocultural history of black arts practice in Miami from 1980s to present.
Tao Leigh Goffe is a Assistant Professor at Cornell University of Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Her research, which is preoccupied with how the history of abolition, indenture, and decolonization frame the transpacific and transatlantic entanglements of African and Asian diasporas, has been published in Small Axe and Anthurium. Specializing in the enmeshed vernaculars that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization, she is currently working on two books. The first book Undisciplined Intimacies examines the intersections of visual, sonic, food, and ghost cultures. The second book, Pon De Replay: Gender, Sexuality, and DJ Cultures, is a manifesto on black feminist praxis, technology, and nightclub culture.
Doreen Gordon (Ph.D. Manchester, 2009) is a lecturer in Anthropology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She was formerly a research fellow in the Human Economy Program, University of Pretoria, South Africa. She received he Ph.D in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester for ethnographic work on race and class in Brazil. Doreen has carried out research in Tanzania, South Africa, Brazil, and Jamaica.
Obika Gray is Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. He is author of Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972 and Demeaned But Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica.
Peter James Hudson is Associate Professor of African American studies and hisory at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago, 2017). His essays and reviews have appeared in venues including Black Agenda Report, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Radical History Review, Race & Class: A Journal on Racism, Globalisation, and Empire, Haitï Liberté, the CLR James Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Review of Books.
Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica, O'Neil Lawrence graduated from the University of the West Indies (Mona) with an M.Phil. in Cultural Studies and a BA in English Literature and Sociology. He also has a Diploma in Visual Communication from the Edna Manley College. His exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica include the critically acclaimed Seven Women Artists (2015) and Masculinities (2015). An artist who has exhibited in Jamaica and internationally since 2004, his first solo show Son of a Champion was staged at the Mutual Gallery, Kingston in 2012. He was the essayist for Pictures from Paradise (2012) and he received the Society for Caribbean Studies’ Bridget Jones Award (2014). His research interests include race, gender and sexuality in Caribbean and African Diasporal art and visual culture; memory, identity and hidden archives; photography as a medium and a social vehicle; Caribbean and general art history, curatorial practice and museums.
Rupert Lewis is a Professor Emeritus of Political Thought in the Department of Government, University of the West Indies, Jamaica campus. He recently published a biography, Marcus Garvey (2018). He is author of Walter Rodney's Intellectual and Political Thought (1998), and has edited books on George Padmore (psued), the Trinidadian-born Pan-Africanist and Richard Hart, the Jamaican Marxist. He is a member of the Council of the Institute of Jamaica, the Reparations Council of Jamaica, and was Chairman of the Friends of Liberty Hall: the Legacy of Marcus Garvey (1998-2018), a multimedia and cultural complex in Kingston, Jamaica.
Keisha Lindsay is an associate professor in the Departments of Gender & Women's Studies and Political Science. She is the recipient of a doctorate in political theory from the University of Chicago and a master's degree in gender and development studies from the University of the West Indies, Mona. Her research explores how people in the African diaspora articulate their gendered and radicalized identifications via a range of popular scholarly conversations. Her first book, In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools explores the simultaneously anti-racist and patriarchal policies at work in the nationwide effort to establish separate schools for black boys. While intersectionality is traditionally defined as feminist, Professor Lindsay's research demonstrates how and why black men and other social groups' intersectional informed claims about their experiences of oppression can be used to support multiple political agendas.
Tracy Robinson is a senior lecturer and Deputy Dean (Graduate Studies and Research) at the Faculty of Law, the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus, Jamaica. Robinson is a co-founder and co-coordinator of the Faculty of Law UWI Rights Advocacy Project (U-RAP). She served as a commissioner on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) as well as the body’s president (2014-2015).
David Scott is the president of Small Axe Inc., the director of the Small Axe Project, and editor of Small Axe. He teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), and Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014), and co-editor of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (2007). He is currently at work on two book projects: one, a study of the moral imperative of reparations for New World slavery; and the other, a biography of the life and work of Stuart Hall.
Deborah A. Thomasis the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaicaand Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica, and is co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Her new book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Thomas co-directed and co-produced the documentary films Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens, and Four Days in May, and the experimental short film, Four Days in West Kingston. She is also the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which opened at the Penn Museum in November 2017. Thomas is the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.
Linnette Vassell is a Community Development and Gender Specialist who has combined activist work in the communities and women’s movements with academic work on women’s organizational experience and governance in Jamaica and the Caribbean. In this context she has done extensive capacity development and training at the community level as well as within regional bodies such as the OECS in organizational building from a gender and development Perspective. She combines this work with research on gender issues and was responsible for undertaking the Country Gender Assessments (CGAs) for St. Kitts and Nevis and for St. Vincent and the Grenadines as part of a Caribbean Team from 2013-2015 and developing the gender strategy and action plan of the UNDP in 2016. She is currently active on a EU sponsored project to strengthen patients’ rights in Maternal, Neonatal and Infant Health which WROC is implementing in collaboration with the Department of Community Health and Psychiatry of the University of the West Indies.
ABOUT
PARTICIPANTS
SCHEDULE
EXPERIENCE