English 240: Caribbean Literature > Updates


Look here for routine announcements, afterthoughts, reminders, important information I forgot to mention in class, schedule changes, and/or "homework" that I'd like you to do before we next see each other. I'll always try my best to update this page by 8:00 p.m. on days that class meets, but please make a habit of checking this page regularly.

For Anyone Out There Still Listening (The Last Lecture):

Sorry we went long yesterday (who knew you’d have so much to say?), but thanks for giving one another such an appreciative audience.  I hope you were suitably impressed by at least some of what you saw and I hope you’re reasonably proud of what you’ve done—I am. Again: if you still have last-minute revisions to make (or if, say, you saw something yesterday that you’d like to copy or steal), then there’s still time.  But not much.  I’ll be evaluating your work over the weekend—possibly as early as Friday morning—and I’ll send you my comments by e-mail when I’m done.  In the meantime, don’t forget to e-mail me your self-assessment/group assessment, if you haven’t given me one already. 

So it’s usually incumbent upon the professor to offer some last words on the last day of class, and mainly what I want to say is:  thanks again, first of all, for your hard work on Brathwaite’s poems. I hope I can eventually figure out a way to make the site public so that this work can be your legacy to future generations of readers.  But thanks, too, for slogging through my heavy reading list this semester and for thinking so hard and so productively about some of my favorite writers (which are now, I hope, some of your favorite writers, too).  I know our class had its slow days, but I think you’re a bright and enthusiastic bunch of people, both collectively and individually, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to talk with you, hear from you, and appreciate your work.

You should know that even with a killer reading list, we left out a couple of heavy-hitters in the history of Caribbean Lit—most notably the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris—and we certainly didn’t hear from as many women and/or ethnic minorities (i.e., people of Indian, Chinese, and mixed-race descent) as we should have.  If you want to rectify that, then I guess that could be your holiday reading project, and I’d be glad to offer some suggestions to get you started.  But at the very least, I hope that when someone asks you what Caribbean Lit is, you now feel like you won’t be lost for an answer.  That is, I hope this class has left you with a decent sense of who Caribbean writers are, what makes their body of work relatively distinct and coherent, what sorts of issues they’ve been predominantly concerned with, and how their concerns have evolved as cultural and social and historical conditions have changed over the last hundred years or so. 

I also hope you’re left with a fairly complex picture of how Caribbean writers, living and working in a multi-faceted, creole, syncretic culture—the product of centuries’ worth of borrowing, stealing, cross-pollenating, transforming, and fusing—have “broken up” English and re-formed it into something new, something grounded in the language of ordinary people, in a way that many other national literatures in English aren’t.  And I hope you have an appreciation of how these writers have used such language to imagine “the Caribbean” in a way that it didn’t really exist before.

That’s not to say that the history of Caribbean literature has simply been a long march towards the full and triumphant realization of Caribbean identity.  I think one of the things Lovelace shows us in The Dragon Can't Dance, for example, is that even after you think you’ve arrived at some kind of viable selfhood, your journey still isn’t over.  Uh-uh: since Caribbean identity has always been the product of diaspora, for example, it will continue to scatter; it will keep spreading outward, encompassing ever more people, places, and things.  We’ve seen that happen literally, as the Caribbean has migrated into “First World” metropolitan centers (which reminds us, among other things, that the Caribbean isn’t actually as exotic as Hollywood and the tourist industry persists in making it out to be, but rather that it has longstanding historical and cultural links with North America); and we’ve seen it happen figuratively, with the emergence over the past several decades of more women writers and writers of ethnic backgrounds not easily subsumed into a regional identity that has often been conceived of as implicitly Afro-Caribbean.  If earlier generations of Caribbean writers were mainly concerned with forging some sense of unified regional identity, then, maybe they should’ve had their eye on regional diversity as well.  (There are at least two ways to read the slogan “All o’ we is one,” after all:  it can either mean “We’re all the same” or “Each of us is unique.”)

And yet, despite this, in spite of the fact that Caribbean lit has increasingly become both transnationalized and diversified, I think it’s still important for us to insist on its distinctiveness—and on its relative self-sufficiency.  That is, for us North Americans who, as I implied a moment ago, have tended to regard the Caribbean as a familiarly exotic corner of that collection of countries we lump together under the term “Third World”—and for us academics who (in the HSU English department, anyway) have constructed Caribbean Lit as one more branch of some vague entity called “World Literature”—it’s good to remember that while we are undoubtedly enriched for having read and studied Caribbean Lit, nevertheless it doesn’t exist primarily for us, for our pleasure, or for our consumption.  It doesn’t need us to acknowledge it, to label it, or to give it the Nobel Prize seal of approval.  Like Sylvia, like Pariag, like Aldrick, Caribbean Lit has earned the right to live for itself. 

That’s my spiel.  Best of success on the rest of your finals, and I hope to see you again next semester and beyond.

P.S.: since many of you wound up tracking Brathwaite's references to James Baldwin and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the course of your work on the "Digital Arrivants" project, you should read columnist and cultural critic JoAnn Wypijewski's "A Guide to Dark Times: Why It's Essential to Read James Baldwin Now" (The Nation 9 February 2015)--not only because she discusses Baldwin's take on Stowe ("Uncle Tom's Cabin fails, in his reading, the way so much well-meaning protest does. It is so busy crying 'This is horrible!' that it does not trouble to inquire into what makes those who have executed that horror, and who maintained, benefited from and accommodated to it, do the things they do"), but because her argument for the continuing relevance of Baldwin in our day and age is as fiery as Baldwin's own writing. 

For Tuesday, December 15th (Day 31):

See you at 12:40 for more unveilings and the Last Lecture. If you need to consult with me or get any clarifications on my comments on the first draft of your "Digital Arrivants" pages, I'm available on Friday and Monday--but you'll have to request an appointment in advance.

Don't forget that I'd also like each of you to hand in a brief written assessment about this project. This is mainly meant to be a self-assessment--an accounting of what you did, both visibly and behind the scenes, with regard to your group's final product. It can also be an occasion for commenting on other members' contributions and your group's overall working dynamics.

I'll e-mail if I have anything more to add before Tuesday. In the meantime: stay healthy and focused, and do well on your finals.

Final Links:

  • The Shadow Queen: Barbados cuts the last ties to Big England
  • Here's a just-published profile of Winston Bailey, "The Shadow," one of the founders of soca, who is still going strong and releasing new music for Carnival 2016
  • Christmas Parang (and Parang Soca)

For Thursday, December 10th (Day 30):

Jamal, Kayt, and Sina will show us (and tell us about) what they did with "Tom." And then we'll have a working session where the rest of you will prepare to do likewise. Bring laptops. And if others in your group want/need editing access before then, let me know.

Calypso Extra #1: promos for this year's new socas and calypsos (on YouTube and Soundcloud, mainly) have been appearing lately at the rate of about six per day. I've been ignoring most of them. But here's one that caught my eye--by Kurt Allen, 2010 Calypso Monarch and one of the more interesting figures in calypso of the past two decades (and one of the few widely popular younger calypsonians to keep the "political commentary" tradition alive):

 

Calypso Extra(s) #2: Old-time calypso isn't entirely forgotten. Here's a cover by C.W. Stoneking (Australian uber-hipster retro-blues singer) of Houdini's "Brave Son of America":

And one by legendary composer/arranger/songwriter/producer Van Dyke Parks of Tiger's "Money Is King" (which I blogged about when it came out back in 2012):

 

For Tuesday, December 8th (Day 29):

All calypso anthology links are now fixed (I think): you can hear "Tie-Tongue Mopsy" (an early Lord Kitchener tune) and the Mighty Spoiler's loopy "Magistrate Try Himself" at last. And you can get to Stalin's "Black Man Music" & "Wait Dorothy Wait" (one of my all-time favorite Stalin tunes), Explainer's "Miss Palmer," and Rose's "Solomon" from the Table of Contents page. I've also made most of those annoying question-mark diamonds go away.

Over the weekend: I'll have a gander at the draft "Digital Arrivants" pages and aim to have some feedback for you.

Meanwhile, you should continue working, individually, on the calypso that your group is going to say interesting things about. (In fact, maybe you could even write up something about that calypso and post it to Moodle. Hmm...) Two basic clusters or categories of questions: 1) how does your calypso stand out, and 2) how does it "fit in"? Details:

  • What do you think is notable, remarkable, important, innovative, unique, or just plain cool about this calypso
    • historically or socially,
    • thematically,
    • formally (form includes things like meter, rhyme and other sound effects, line length, enjambment, stanzaic structure, etc.), and/or
    • technically (technique includes performance aspects such as tone, phrasing, enunciation, syncopation, etc.)? 
  • What, by contrast, does your calypso have in common with others (i.e., others written around the same time, others on the same topic or theme, others by the same calypsonian)? If applicable: how does it recall earlier calypsos or anticipate later ones?

Announcements:
1) Don't forget the Humboldt State Calypso Band concert on Saturday night at 8 p.m. in Van Duzer auditorium. $3 with student I.D. Need inspiration? Here you go:

  • Three versions of Lord Kitchener's "Pan in A Minor," performed by Renegades, UNT 2:00 Steel Band, and Kitch himself
  • Another lovely paean to pan by Kitch, "Steel Band Music," as covered by Andy Narell and Lord Relator
  • And while you're at it, another of Kitch's more famous (and funny) calypsos, "Love in the Cemetery," from the same album (here's the original)
    • (Here's the website for that album, University of Calypso, with links to notes and lyrics for the songs)

2) Links:

  • Dept. of Marlon James: five (!) recent interviews
  • Dept. of Global Climate Justice: rising sea levels will affect coastal areas and island nations more than anyone. St. Lucian poet Kendel Hippolyte teamed with calypsonian David Rudder and others to issue a consciousness-raising song, timed to coincide with the Paris climate conference, called "1.5 to Stay Alive." (Here's the companion film.)

3) And finally, Dept. of Corrections: on the syllabus, I erroneously listed our final exam period--when most of you will give the rest of us a guided tour of your work on the "Digital Arrivants" project--as Wednesday, December 16th. It is in fact Tuesday, December 15th, 12:40-2:30.

For Thursday, December 3d (Day 28):

Sorry again for the eleventh-hour cancellation. I hope you were able to put the time to good use, getting your draft "Digital Arrivants" pages ready for viewing and feedback. If you didn't spend enough time with the calypso anthology during the week off, then make it up over the next few days. Learn the history. Get the calypsos in your head. I'll have some sort of show-and-tell ready for Thursday.

For Tuesday, December 1st (Day 27):

Okay, business items first:

  • Your first order of business is to get as complete a draft as possible of your "Digital Arrivants" page ready to view by December 1. Your designated editor should already have the level of administrative access s/he needs; anyone else who would like to be added to the site as a "contributor" (contributors can add and edit their own "items" and see all the others, but they can't see or edit the "exhibit" or its internal pages) should e-mail me with a request. Editors: if you run into a puzzle you can't solve, you can e-mail me, too. And don't forget the Digital Arrivants Moodle forum, where you can share tech tips and good info. In my first post, I listed some websites that may be good sources of "extra-illustrations."
  • The calypso anthology has been updated (except for one or two pages that still have no sound) and is accessible here and from the front page of the class website. Use the same login and password that you use for the Course Reader. Read and listen to as much of it as you can--but please note that you really need to use a computer, as the site is not mobile-friendly. As for the introductory readings: you needn't read all three of them, but you should definitely supplement the short piece by Donald Hill with either the chapter by Keith Warner or the encylopedia entry by Louis Regis.) I won't ask you to post anything to Moodle before Tuesday's class, but it's likely that there will a be a post due on Wednesday evening, December 3, and with any luck I'll devise some more specific instructions for you before then. Keep your eyes peeled for updates.

And now, The Last (Dragon) Dance: We talked about Lovelace’s book as the story of the Hill’s collective attempt to find grounds for an identity that’s more than just a mask of rebellion.  And maybe that attempt is realized most successfully in Aldrick and Pariag’s epiphanies near the end of the book.  But what does it mean, I asked at the tail end of last Thursday’s class, that those two men—one of them at the heart of the neighborhood and the other relegated to its fringes—have their breakthroughs separately, and that they continue to squander their opportunities to actually connect?

And when Aldrick and Pariag both abandon the “all o’ we” project in order to seek personal fulfillment and individual creativity, does that signal an abandonment of the notion of community—even in a common celebration like carnival—or a transcendence of it?  Is this book recommending a rejection of collective identity, or simply mapping its limits, positing its untenability, documenting its demise?  “We have no self,” cries Aldrick on 202 (188)—so is he claiming that “we” will never have a self, and that the important thing is for the “I” to start claiming one?  Calypso, steelpan, carnival—all these vital forms of popular culture—are clearly signs of Afro-Caribbean survival.  But after a point, maybe, we have to wonder whether mere survival is enough, especially once the rebel spirit that animated it gets domesticated, fetishized, and commodified.  The characters in this book draw strength from carnival culture, for which the novel shows obvious respect and affection.  But ultimately, it seems, these same characters have to move beyond the culture in order to re-imagine it; they have to take strength from its empowering aspects but liberate themselves from its constraints.  They have to paint “new signs.”  Does that mean it’s time for artists (like Aldrick) to abandon the project of national or regional identity towards which Caribbean writers have been striving for so long—since Tom Redcam’s generation, at least? Do Sylvia and/or Philo offer any clearer answers? You work it out...

Have a safe, happy, and productive holiday week. See you in the home stretch.

For Thursday, November 19th (Day 26):

Fixes:

  • The link to Lovelace's short story "Joebell and America" has been repaired, if you want to read it
  • And the Moodle support staff assure me that you should now be able to post to the Digital Arrivants Moodle forum

For Thursday: another day dancing with the dragon. More details--including some things to think about, in light of your work today--later.

Links:

  • The Facebook page of Earl Lovelace's son Che Lovelace, an accomplished visual artist (Google him for interviews, feature stories, samples of his work, etc.)

For Tuesday, November 17th (25):

I've opened an empty Moodle forum for Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance. (I'm still working on updating the links on the "Lovelace" page in the online Course Reader.) I may get inspired to post some reading questions over the weekend; I may not. Don't wait for me.

And speaking of Moodle: as I mentioned in class, I've also opened a forum for posting questions and sharing information about Omeka and/or the final project, which I will alternately refer to as "Digital Arrivants" and "Extra-Illustrated Arrivants." Get crackin' on that project, eh? I'll let you know when I've upgraded "Contributors" to "Administrators" (and/or when everyone is at least able to see all work in progress on the site).

Links Department:

  • When "Daffodils," the Wordsworth poem that so vexed Lucy, turned 200 a while back, the Cumbria (Lake District, Northern England) Tourist Board gave it an extremely hoky, tongue-in-cheek update for the hip-hop generation.
  • And here's a an old Repeating Islands post about Cameron Macdonald's Shadow Mothers, which analyzes the world of nannies and the "ethnic logic" that animates it.

For Thursday, November 12th (Day 24):

Another day with Lucy. Let's think about not just how Mariah "got to be that way," but how Lucy did, too (specifically, maybe, how being from the Caribbean made her what she is--which includes, I suppose, angry); about Lucy's analysis of Mariah and her relationship with Mariah; about why she's angry at her mother; about her understanding of sexuality and gender politics; about her name; about feeling "owned"; about getting distance on your past; and about the book's end: Lucy's blurry beginning as a writer & self-inventor.

The spec sheet for the "Digital Arrivants" project is now online. (It's also linked from the front page of the course website.) You may now shout your hosannas and hallelujahs.

For Tuesday, November 10th (Day 23):

Thanks for staying with me through our marathon Arrivants session today. If you're still dizzy with exhaustion, then my Arrivants Post-Mortem e-lecture may help your head stop spinning.

We begin Lucy on Tuesday, with reading responses due Monday. I've opened a discussion forum, but you'll have to furnish your own prompts this time.

Here's the calypso (by Lord Melody) of which Lucy sings a snippet on the bottom of p. 155:

 

If you attended a Wiki-editing workshop, then please let me know if and when you either a) create a Wikipedia page for your author or 2) make significant improvements or additions to his or her existing page. ("Significant" is a relative term, of course. But I'm your Uncle Mike in this instance. So impress me: your edits should be substantive--i.e., they should add important content, and they should be properly sourced.)

For Thursday, November 5th (Day 22):

Having heard the drum's announcement (the creator Sky-God has awoken, and is rising) and followed the trail of the "Path-Finders" as far as the brink of the forest, we'll finish our discussion of Masks with a quick look at the poems in Section VI, "Arrival." (Please re-read that mini-trilogy.)

And then we'll return, with the speaker, to the "Islands." (As with Masks, you might want to review Rohlehr's overview of Islands in the Course Reader.)

Links:

  • Dept. of Clarification: as I mentioned in class, the atumpan is different type of "talking drum" than the Senegalese tama, with which some of you might be familiar. (In Ghana, that drum is known as the don or dondo.) The atumpan is a cousin of the don, but it usually doesn't have quite the same tonal range. It's also larger, and is often played in pairs. (Here--thanks to Kayt for the links--is a demonstration and another link.) And here, meanwhile, is the gong-gong, a/k/a the "double bell" (identified "GO" in the photo), which is a sort of cowbell used by town criers.
  • Dept. of Dexterity: the opposite of sinister is of course dexter (which is where we get the words dexterous and dexterity).
  • Dept. of Marlon James: an interview in Vogue.
  • Dept. of Indian Diaspora in T&T: NPR looks at chutney soca

For Tuesday, November 3d (Day 21):

I'll do a little summing up of "the story so far," either in class or online, and then we'll ponder the position of the "land- / less path- / less harbour- / less spade" at the end of Rights of Passage before we move on to Masks, which opens with a ceremonial libation, followed by the drum's heraldic announcement, which summons the Path-Finders, the ancestors. (Please review Rohlehr's overview of Masks in the Course Reader. The short version: this volume re-traces in more detail the ancient migrations of the Akan peoples and the rise and fall of the Ashanti Empire that we heard about, sketchily and obliquely, in the "Prelude" to Rights.)

I have opened a second Moodle forum on The Arrivants. In hopes of ensuring that we have a critical mass of people who are prepared to do some intensive in-class work on each of the two remaining volumes of the trilogy, I'm placing some additional conditions on this round of responses. If your last name begins with anything between A and Mar-, pick a poem or sequence of poems from Masks to write on, using Option 1 or 2a of my "Navigating The Arrivants" handout. If your last name begins with anything between Med- and W, then choose a poem or sequence of poems from Islands. Pick poems that you find attactive or intriguing or puzzling, obviously, but also try to pick ones that seem especially rich or pivotal or significant with respect to the volume in which they appear (or with respect to the trilogy as a whole). And let's see you really do some close reading and hard thinking. Suggestions:

  • Masks: The Making of the Drum/Atumpan, The Forest, The Golden Stool, Sunsum/Tano/Awakening
  • Islands: Jah/Ananse, Shepherd, Caliban, Eating the Dead/Negus, Vèvè/Jou'vert

For orientation and framework, review Gordon Rohlehr's introductory survey of what's going on in each of these volumes. And refer to the glossary in the back of the book. Beyond that: try to research things you don't know.

Finally: honor the ancestors this weekend, and don't forget to set your clocks back.

For Thursday, October 29th (Day 20):

Upon reflection, I think I won't roll out my complicated in-class activity--at least not yet--in part because, judging by the Moodle forum, I'm not confident that enough people are prepared to do any intensive work with the entire trilogy. So let's stick with "Rights of Passage" for today, and try to focus on...oh, perhaps as many as half a dozen poems (or groups of poems). If you wrote about one of these poems and/or if you belong to the group who has been assigned to work on it for the Digital Arrivants project, then expect to be called upon to help us figure out what to ask about it, what to say about it, how to make sense of it.

I suggest we consider "Tom," "All God's Chillun," and "Didn't He Ramble" as a kind of mini-trilogy. After that:

  • "Folkways"
  • "The Twist/Wings of a Dove"
  • "Calypso"
  • "The Emigrants"
  • "Postlude/Home" & "Epilogue"

Let’s “locate” each poem structurally, first of all: which “book” or section of "Rites" is it in (i.e., what’s the section’s title), and what is the poem’s immediate context (i.e., what’s going on before [and after] it)?

Then: What can we say about the speaker of the poem?  (There’s not one consistent speaker of all the poems in the trilogy—though some speakers, "Tom," for example, do return/recur.)  What do you imagine as this speaker’s “situation”?  Where is he; what’s prompting him to speak; what’s he speaking about?

Next: How would you relate the contents of this poem to the grand narrative arc of "Rites," as you see it?  Do you hear echos or connections to other poems in this volume of the trilogy?

Notes/Links:

  • It's the "San" or "Khoisan" language group of southern Africa that I was trying to come up with in class today--although Xhosa, a Bantu language, also features "clicks."
  • Lots out there on the web about mudwall construction in Mali, both modern and ancient. The most famous edifice is probably the Great Mosque of Djenné:

For Tuesday, October 27th (Day 19):

The Arrivants. See the Brathwaite page of the online Course Reader for an introduction by Gordon Rohlehr which may help you make more sense of Brathwaite's trilogy. And download these detailed reading guidelines, especially if you intend you post something to the forum.

Because so many of you are in danger of missing your Reading Response target, and because I'm now envisioning spending two weeks on this text, I've decided to create two opportunities for you to write on The Arrivants. The first due date is next Monday evening, October 26th; the second will be the following Monday, November 3rd. Again: please use the reading guidelines referenced above in crafting your responses.

For Thursday, October 22d (Day 18):

I've repaired the "Monkey" song links on the Walcott page of the Course Reader; please give a listen. While you're at it, check some of the other allusions (Anansi, Legba, etc.), too. Oh, and don't forget: my introductory Walcott lecture.

The absurd, monkeys and mimicry, identity and naming, whiteness, the apparition and her message, the ambiguity of the moonlight, the Souris-Tigre-Lestrade trio, colonial mentality, Basil, the meaning of the Epilogue...these are some of the subjects our writers raised today (and which are fair game for discussion Thursday). Go see for yourself what these good people wrote about said subjects on Moodle.

Linkage:

  • Geoffrey Holder, a towering figure in the history of Triniadian dance and drama. (In 1954, Holder danced the role of "Baron Samedi" in the Broadway Musical House of Flowers. In 1973, he reprised the role--campily--in the James Bond film Live and Let Die.)
  • Those two newspaper pieces I was quoting from--about Marlon James, exile, and the West Indian writer: Jamaica Observer | Staebrok News

For Tuesday, October 20th (Day 17):

Well, Omeka ain't quite what I hoped it would be--but I'm a pessimist by nature, so maybe, once we start working with it, we'll discover its hidden potential. I'll be playing around with it in spare moments over the weekend. Once I have a better sense of the mechanics of the project, I'll write a more detailed set of guidelines. In the meantime, here are the research teams and their associated passages for annotation, if you want to begin working:

  • Kayt, Jamal, Sina: pp. 12-16
  • Nick, Miriam, Shelby: pp. 17-21
  • Lily, Ariana, Naom: pp.i 22-25 + 30-34
  • Joe, Annie: pp. 35-40
  • Julian, Isabella, Dave: pp. 41-45
  • Amber, Lauren, Alexis: pp. 48-50 + 60-61
  • Kimberly, Cole, Jazmin: pp. 50-56
  • Marcos, Paul: pp. 77-85

Tuesday, we'll start Dream on Monkey Mountain (and other required reading in the online Course Reader)--with reading responses due Monday evening. I've converted my introductory remarks about Walcott into an e-lecture.

The literary world is all abuzz over Marlon James, who is officially Flavor of the Week and Man of the Hour. To wit:

From the Times:

Mr. James said he hoped the award would draw attention to the flourishing literary scene in his home country. “There’s this whole universe of really spunky creativity that’s happening,” he said. “I hope it brings more attention to what’s coming out of Jamaica and the Caribbean.”

Well, alrighty, then. Let's pay attention.

 

For Thursday, October 15th (Day 16):

Your short research papers are due--and we meet in Library 121. (Please don't be late.)

Links on the Walcott page of the online course reader are now current and the Moodle forum is open. I'll work on putting details about the "Digital Arrivants" project online.

Lots of interesting stuff on Repeating Islands the past couple of days:

For Tuesday, October 13th (Day 15):

Somehow or other, I will have something resembling an assignment sheet for the "Online Annotated Arrivants" final project, and I will walk you through those guidelines in an attempt to lay out my vision the project, with a special focus on the sorts of research and logistical challenges it may involve. It would probably be helpful if you had your copy of The Arrivants with you.

Just to be clear: on Tuesday, we will be meeting in our classroom, as usual. But on Thursday, October 15th, we'll move to Library 121, where Carly Marino will give us an introduction to Omeka, the web platform we'll be using to build this project. Let me quote from an earlier update:

You can speed things up by signing up for a free Omeka account right now, ahead of time, at Omeka.net (Ignore "Plus," "Silver," "Gold," etc.--those all cost money. Choose the "free Basic Plan with 500 MB of storage." Your account can be integrated into the university's "instance" of Omeka later on, and that will give you access to more storage space and plug-ins.) Then you can explore and play around on your own, in your spare time, between now and the 15th, so that the technology won't be totally new to you when Carly demonstrates it for us. You can get an idea of what's possible with Omeka by browsing their showcase.

Looking ahead: on Tuesday, October 20th, we begin Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain, and over the next week I will open a Moodle forum and work on updating links in the online course reader.

Feel free to drop in to my Monday office hours with last-minute questions about the Research-Paper-in-a-Box. (For now, let me issue a general clarification: when I say "electronic," that's mostly a fancy term for "web," though it also encompasses other recorded and electronic media like radio and TV.) Please be advised, however, that I need to cancel my Wednesday office hours this week.

A little Columbus Day gift: the Mighty Shadow's 1989 soca, "Columbus Lied." ("He said he discovered new lands / And he thought that I wouldn't know / He discovered a lot of Indians / Who discovered the lands before.")

For Thursday, October 8th (Day 14):

By popular demand: "Sick and Tired" Day. Rest up. If you're ill, then do something good for what ails you. Work on your Research Paper in a Box. (If you need a consult, remember that I will hold office hours, as usual, on Wednesday and Monday from 11:30 to 1:00-ish. Feel free to drop in.) Read ahead to Dream on Monkey Mountain (the play of that name and the Introduction, not the entire collection).

For Tuesday, October 6th (Day 13):

Thanks for your reports, Groups 1 through 3 (and for tolerating my annoying tendency to hijack those reports). Groups 4 and 5 will have another moment on Tuesday to gather their thoughts before we hear their ends of our ongoing conversation about Ralph Singh and the prospects for Caribbean identity.

I may have a few remarks about Sylvia Wynter's "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together" (in the online Course Reader, on the "Naipaul" page)--so if you haven't had a look at that, do so.

And I'll take questions about the "Research Paper in a Box." Speaking of which: I want to present you with an extra credit opportunity linked to that assignment. By now, you should have done enough preliminary research on all seven writers to decide which one you want to work on. (I'll be taking a survey of the room on Tuesday.) So far, the only audience for that work will be me. But you could easily go public with it, by editing (with the aim of improving and/or expanding) your writer's Wikipedia page or, if s/he doesn't already have a Wikipedia page, by creating one. So:

  • Attend and complete one of the HSU Library's upcoming Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon workshops (Tuesday, October 6th from 5:00 to 7:00 or Tuesday, November 3rd from 5:00 to 7:00) for a boost of 1/3 of a grade. (I.e., if you earn a legitimate "B" on the paper, merely completing the workshop will raise that grade to a "B+.") You must register for the workshop ahead of time by following one of the above links. AND you must sign up for a Wikipedia account before attending the workshop by going to Wikipedia main page and following the "Create Account" link in the upper righthand corner.
  • After you've completed the workshop, you may earn a further 1/3-of-a-grade boost by creating a Wikipedia page for your author or by making significant improvements or additions to his or her existing page. You can get an overview of Wikipedia editing here.

And speaking of Library workshops: I will be working over the next couple of weeks to give some shape and direction to the "Hyper-Annotated Arrivants" final project that we discussed Thursday. But one thing I already know this project will involve--for some or all of us--is a facility with Omeka, a non-profit, open-source web publishing platform designed for creating digital online exhibits and collections. Reference Librarian Carly Marino has kindly agreed to give us an introduction to Omeka during our class on Thursday, October 15th. (We'll meet in Library 121 that day.)

But you can speed things up by signing up for a free Omeka account right now, ahead of time, at Omeka.net. (Ignore "Plus," "Silver," "Gold," etc.--those all cost money. Choose the "free Basic Plan with 500 MB of storage." Your account can be integrated into the university's "instance" of Omeka later on, and that will give you access to more storage space and plug-ins.) Then you can explore and play around on your own in your spare time between now and the 15th, so that the technology won't be totally new to you when Carly demonstrates it for us. You can get an idea of what's possible with Omeka by browsing their showcase.

Linky:

  • British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Jamaica earlier this week. Here's an editorial from the London Guardian about reparations for slavery that recalls (for me, anyway) the historical amnesia-by-design that we glimpsed in In the Castle of My Skin. Of course, The Mimic Men's Ralph Singh would probably scoff at the idea of reparations, insisting, gloomily, that the machinery is just broken beyond repair. . . .

For Thursday, October 1st (Day 12):

Get started thinking about-slash-working on the Research Paper In a Box.

On Thursday, you'll have 5 minutes or so to regroup, review/compare notes, and decide on a game plan; then we'll hear reports from the groups who were working in class on Wednesday, using passages from Naipaul's 1962 travel narrative The Middle Passage to try to illuminate various aspects of The Mimic Men (and vice versa). (If you missed class today, you can view all five Middle Passage excerpts here--and even if you were in class, you may still want to have a look them, if only to get a sense of how your discussion may have overlapped with other folks'.)

Continue individually, over the next two days, the work that you began collectively today. If you need to finish the book, finish the book. If you've already finished the book, go back to it and delve in again. Don't lose steam!

You may have noticed that there's a little breathing room built into the calendar over the next couple of weeks. This would be an opportune time to get started on Walcott and Brathwaite--whose Arrivants trilogy is especially challenging (which means you'll want to set aside extra time to read it slowly and repeatedly, and to make use of secondary materials to guide you along).

Dept. of Intertextuality:

  • It may interest you to read about James Anthony Froude, a historical figure who makes a fictional appearance in Isabella on pp. 91-3 of The Mimic Men. Froude was a writer and historian who in his later years was an "imperialist pamphleteer," as Singh dubs him. In 1888 he published The English in the West Indies, a travel narrative brimming with the worst sorts of racist chauvinism, so egregious that it prompted a book-length rebuttal, Froudacity, from Afro-Trinidadian intellectual John Jacob Thomas. In The Mimic Men Froude comes off as the faintly ridiculous figure that he probably was, and yet Naipaul famously--cryptically--quoted Froude for the epigraph to his own book on the West Indies, The Middle Passage: "There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own." Yale Classics professor Emily Greenwood tries to make sense of this in "Mimicry and Classical Allusion in V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men," a chapter from her book Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2009).

For Tuesday, September 29th (Day 10):

We begin The Mimic Men. I'll have a somewhat ambitious in-class project for you. (I'll also open a Moodle forum over the weekend and update links in the online Course Reader. The "Research Paper In a Box" spec sheet is now online.)

A postscript:  I want to riff on a conclusion we reached towards the end of Thursday’s class by endorsing what Marcos wrote in his discussion forum post (well, actually, I want to endorse what Kayt, Lauren, and Sina wrote, too, and I exhort you to go see for yourselves), namely: for Cliff, reclaiming her hidden “African” origins is necessary—but not sufficient.  Because in the end, what she discovers is that her identity is fragmentary, and the fragments are always shifting, contingent, situational.  What we saw in the London café incident, for instance, is that race is always (as Hall puts it) “in articulation with other categories.”  But in a way, Cliff knew that even before she started.  “If I Could Write” starts with a sort of “originary scene”: a seemingly pure, innocent, Edenic moment from back before the whole business of identity got corrupted.  But when, on p. 28, Cliff quotes the nostalgic slogan of the conservative government’s new tourist campaign (“Come back to the way things used to be”), we can’t help seeing that her depiction of that pre-adolescent idyll was also built around clichéd imagery of the tropics, pastoral and erotic—clichés that she explodes in the very next paragraph, where we learn that the waterfall wasn’t natural at all but artificial, part of the colonial economy of sugar (whose tawdry history, like that of plantations in the American South, has now been whitewashed for the tourist industry).  “[E]very little piece of reality exists in relation to another piece,” she says, drily, at the top of p. 11.

Where V. S. Naipaul—or his creation, Ralph Singh—comes down on this vexed question of Caribbean identity is something we’ll look at next week.  I may have some preliminary remarks, either in class on Tuesday or here in the ether.  So stay tuned.

Links:

For Thursday, September 24th (Day 10):

Department of Clarification: I can't remember any more whether I really meant for the non-fiction pieces by Cliff and Hall to provide an opportunity for writing. But regardless of my original intentions, I've opened a Moodle forum and posted a few questions, just the same. (I'll do the same for Naipaul's The Mimic Men in a few more days.) Posts are due Wednesday night. Whether or not you opt to write about them, Cliff and Hall are required reading, so do prepare them conscientiously, in any case.

Department of Links: The New Yorker magazine writes a postscript to the stories of violence plaguing Brooklyn Carnival (this time with some historical context). Austin Clarke's memoir of 1940s Barbados Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack reviewed. More on Marlon James (by Katherine Schwab, in The Atlantic).

For Tuesday, September 22d (Day 9):

A final day In the Castle of My Skin.

In Chapter 3, we saw how the schoolboys gratefully fell back on the paradoxical idea that by making themselves slaves to Empire, they were free—but that was only after flirting with a fantasy of open rebellion (and after scaring themselves with the realization that most of the forms of authority they answer to might be completely bogus).  In Chapters 4 and 5, we saw that there are stirrings of political awakening among the adults, too, and it seems pretty clear that the supposedly timeless rhythms of village life will not continue as it was, is now, and ever shall be. Even the ancients (i.e., Ma and Pa) sense the rumblings of change, while the village men are watching the clock, nervously waiting for revolution time.  The shoemaker “can’t imagine” that anything could ever happen here, and like everyone else, he heaves a huge sigh of relief when trouble blows over.  Yet he’s a self-educated man, a potential radical, a Garveyite, and he knows that all empires end and that big, earth-shattering changes are bound to come eventually.  (Gotta get ready or we’ll be left behind, he says.) Stay tuned, eh?

And then we briefly examined the boys' philosophical musings in Chapter 6. Do they, too, have some breakthroughs, some moments of cognitive clarity? Let's come back to their discussions and try to determine what it is they're trying to work out, both there and in the boundary-breaking postscript to their day at the beach in Chapter 7. And we'll proceed from there...at our old, accustomed, brisk pace. Some questions for the remainder of the book:

How does the village react when the sh*t finally does hit the fan? What do you make of Pa's dream-vision? What do you have to say about G's experience in high school? What are we supposed to think of the new, post-Creighton order? (What do the villagers--including G and Pa--think of it?) And finally: what is G's attitude towards his birthplace at the end of the book, on the eve of his departure? (Would it be wrong to imagine G voicing some of the things we read in Lamming's "The Occasion for Speaking"?)

Program Note: I have updated links on the Michelle Cliff / Stuart Hall page in the online Course Reader--but not the V.S. Naipaul page (yet). It would be wise to get a jump on all of that reading, however.

Linkage:

  • Hear one of the all-time great calypsonians, The Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco), on the inanities of colonial education: "Dan Is the Man (In the Van)." (The tune was originally recorded in 1963, a year after Trinidad's independence. The YouTube version dates from several years later.)
  • Here, meanwhile, is "Fire Down There," from which G's mother quotes a snippet on p. 272, in an American version recorded by The Charmer (Eugene Louis Wolcott) in the early 1950s.
  • Not sure what occasioned this piece, but the Philadelphia Tribune just gave props to three giants of West Indian lit: Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Claude McKay.

For Thursday, September 17th (Day 8):

We did a pretty decent job of opening up Lamming's novel today. If you haven't finished it, then finish it; meanwhile, I'll try to take what we did today and impose a bit more order upon it. You might focus, provisionally, at least, on some of the major areas of discussion we outlined in class:

  1. the shift between personal and communal perspectives/points of view (and, for that matter, between the personal and the communal, period), and between naivete and experience
  2. the various manifestations (and/or mechanisms) of "colonial mentality" on display in this book: the language of the overseers, the idea of "Little England" and the celebration of "Empire Day," education and the erasure of history, etc.
  3. the power structures in which the villagers are implicated, by which they're "enthralled," and/or which they are slowly, tentatively, questioning or challenging or subverting (this may include what Naomi referred to as "the eye of another": not just self-consciousness, but surveillance, oversight, self-regulation, and "horizontal oppression")
  4. distractions/illusions (including "The Shadow King"?)/spectacles/"bread and circuses"
  5. change and stasis, acceptance/quietism/(willed) ignorance vs. questioning/insight/awareness/consciousness

Let's continue chapter-by-chapter for now, for the most part, and see if we can at least get through the first seven (four of exposition and three of "action")--and hopefully more!

Links:

For Tuesday, September 15th (Day 7):

The lonely Londoners may not be going back to the Caribbean any time soon, but we are, courtesy of Sam Selvon's good friend George Lamming. (It may interest you to know, however, that In the Castle of My Skin was written largely in London.)

I will open a Lamming discussion forum on Moodle within the next day or so, and I'll post a few reading questions there. Once I do: speak your piece; make some (electronic) noise. Reading responses are due Monday evening.

I will also be working over the next few days to update the links on the "Lamming" page of the online Course Reader. Please have a look, and read the excerpted version of Lamming's essay "The Occasion for Speaking."

If you'd like a little background on the historical events against which this novel is set, try Wikipedia (for the neutral version) or Solidarity US or the Socialist History Society (for less disinterested views). There is an excellent collection of "political" calypsos from the 1930s which comment on the pervasive economic inequality, labor unrest, and anti-colonial agitation of the era; it's called Calypsos from Trinidad: Politics, Intrigue, & Violence in the 1930s. Here's an informative review, and here's a representative selection:

 

Other links:

For Thursday, September 10th (Day 6):

OK, lessee ... I just don't have time to cook up a quick lecture on the development of Creole as a language of literature in the West Indies. But I've got one about the West Indian literary " boom" in the can. So here it is.

Lonely Londoners calypsos: if you want to hear the original of Tanty's favorite calypso, Lion's Fan Me Saga Boy," which the steel band is playing at Harris's fête, it's on YouTube. (A "saga boy" is a basically a sharp dresser--like a "Zoot Suiter" in the 1940s U.S.--although the term also carries some overtones of "streetwise playboy." The lyrics are pretty racy; you can read them--and the ensuing discussion--about halfway down this thread at Mudcat.org.) A few other representative calypsos from 1950s London (these ones are specifically about aspects of being Black in Britain, which, I hasten to point out, is hardly the only topic on which British-based calypsonians composed):

You can find many more such tunes on the Interwebs, and on a six-volume (so far) series of CDs that takes its name from Kitch's tune: London Is the Place For Me, on Honest Jon's Records, a label partly run by Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz fame).

What else? Oh: for your reference, here is a PDF of the "yes, but" topics we identified today, along with our balladic Table of Contents.

But that's not all. First, more LL links:

And then, some miscellaneous links:

And finally, a scan of the jacket for the first American edition of The Lonely Londoners:

Lonely Londoners

For Tuesday, September 8th (Day 5):

Monday: Honor Labor! (And/or envy the lucky dogs who get to go to Labor Day carnival in Brooklyn.)

Otherwise: Your first priority is to get Selvon's The Lonely Londoners under your belt. The Moodle forum will be up soon, with a post from yours truly containing some reading/discussion questions for your perusal. Posts are due Monday night. Also: take advantage of the long weekend to make a substantial dent in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, which is a comparatively tough read.

Check back in a day or two in case I get a notion to post another mini-lecture and/or some more updates. (Coincidentally, it's probably going to take me about that long to fix the broken links and add others to the "Selvon" page of the Course Reader. Very little of this will be required, but most of it is highly recommended. I'm discovering there's just too, too much to hep you to, so each time you check back between now and Tuesday, you may find that the contents of the page have changed yet again.) For now, here's a taste of calypso:

In the 1930s, when calypsos first began to be recorded in great numbers (the top Trinidadian calypsonians came to New York annually to record the year’s hit carnival songs for the Decca Record label), scandal—both public and domestic—was one of the most popular song topics.  As you might guess from reading Minty Alley, life in the close quarters of the “barrack-yard” was especially conducive to such tales of scandal.

Here’s Trinidadian literary scholar Gordon Rohlehr, from his Calypso & Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad:

. . . [O]ne lacked privacy, space or silence in the barrack-yard. Life was a perpetual public drama, in which the thin and incomplete partition separating rooms, made one privy to the secrets, the sex life, the eating habits and peculiarities of one’s neighbor and gave him or her a similar familiarity with yours. This environment was the breeding ground of the “ballad” calypso [featuring] . . . narratives about the everyday lives of ordinary Trinidadians.

Calypsonians were now confronted with the challenge to create fictions from observed domestic situations, current events read of in the newspapers, and rumours. . . .

. . . [D]espite the Slum Clearance Ordinance of 1935, barrack-yards continued to exist and to provide calypsonians with themes, well into the 1950s . . . The protagonist of the typical “barrack-yard calypso” is a “macho,” a peeping Tom, a gossip or simply a reporter of incidents which he always claims to have personally witnessed. . . .

In the process of fictionalizing domestic lower-class situations, calypsonians brought into focus the confrontation of males and females, in a context where both were battling for economic survival. . . . (214-216)

One of the earliest and most popular examples of the genre, “Why Mih Neighbor Vex With Me,” was written and performed (though never recorded) in 1927 by the legendary calypsonian “Railway” Douglas.  By the late 1930s, there was Tiger’s “Next Door Neighbour,” Joe Coggins’s “Me and Mih Neighbor Don’t Agree,” and The Lion’s “Malicious Neighbors,” all recorded for Decca Records.

Here is King Radio’s “Neighbor,” from 1936:

 

For Thursday, September 3d (Day 4):

Thanks for tolerating a relatively free-form (but good, nevertheless!) discussion today. We'll see how much we can squeeze into a slightly more structured conversation--about, say...how Minty Alley's sexual politics complicate its examination of class and color in early 20th-century Trinidad (among other subjects)--on Thursday.

Those additional notes I threatened:

James and his cohort—the so-called Beacon group (you can read more them in the introduction to Minty Alley:  Alfred Mendes, Albert Gomes, Ralph deBoissiere, and others)—were, like the Creole writers a couple of decades earlier, interested in developing and promoting an indigenous Caribbean literature rooted in the experience of the black majority population.  But at least a couple of things distinguished them from their predecessors: 1) their attitude towards their chosen subjects, and 2) the times in which they were writing, which were marked by urbanisation, the rise of a black working- and middle-class, and the emergence of black political movements, both domestic and international.  The Beacon group were also very much aware of, and very much impressed by, the success of the 1920s American cultural and artistic movement that had come to be known as the “Harlem Renaissance” (a movement in which several West Indian émigrés, such as Claude McKay, took part). Finally, they were deeply influenced—as were many writers of the day—by the worldwide calls for the development of a “proletarian literature” issued in the wake of the communist revolution in Russia in 1917.  In other words, the political convictions of the multi-racial Beacon group meant that they were interested in radical social change, and both the example of the Harlem Renaissance and the principles of the Proletarian Lit movement told them that one way they could effect such change was by realistically and sympathetically documenting the lives of “the people”—the poor, the dispossessed, the working classes.  (The editorial announcing a Beacon short story contest in 1932 urged entrants to “utilize the speech forms of the people and to make their social situation and their everyday conflicts the subject of the narrative.”)  Although they themselves weren’t from such backgrounds, these anti-colonial, politically committed young writers felt a deep sense of intellectual and moral responsibility towards the less privileged—it was more than just armchair solidarity. 

I gave you a snippet of H.G. DeLisser because he occupies a kind of middle ground, both in terms of time (around 1914—the same era in which such American "naturalist" writers as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris were active) and the attitude he adopted towards his chosen subject.  DeLisser was a white middle-class newspaper editor (of the Kingston, Jamaica Gleaner) who showed neither a patronising curiosity nor a deep principled commitment towards the lower classes, but rather...let’s say a sympathetic interest in their plight.  DeLisser was actually the first Caribbean author to write a novel about lower-class urban life (never mind one with a black female protagonist), and therefore his work stands as important forerunner of the “barrackyard” genre later developed by James and his pals. 

While DeLisser was not a socially engaged radical, his first novel unflinchingly depicted the struggle of women like Jane, who were at that time migrating to the city in great numbers and facing the multiple hardships of racism, sexism, and capitalism.  As Allison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welch emphasize, his novel also imbued people previously deemed unworthy of notice with a certain kind of respect, representing them as literary subjects, reproducing their vernacular speech, and showing a working-class black woman as capable of a range of complex thought and emotion.  That was a pretty radical gesture for its day. We can talk about Jane’s Career eventually if you want, especially in comparison to Minty Alley (and perhaps with particular respect to Maisie and the question of how, as a woman, one can escape dependency on men). But mainly I wanted you to know about it.

For Tuesday, September 1st (Day 3):

I've posted reading questions for Minty Alley to the first Moodle discussion forum. If you choose to write on this book (go on: jump right in!), then try your best to post your response to the forum by 8:00 p.m. Monday, so that other people stand a fighting chance of reading it before class. If you choose to sit this one out, then you should take special care to read what other folks post.

I want to exhort you again to check out my page of General Reference Resources on the Caribbean. Please have a look (among other things, there are resources related to the topics I was lecturing on in class today)--and also check out the James resources in the online Course Reader, especially the photos and film of 1930s Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Speaking of today's lecture: thanks for paying attention through such a long presentation. I may have and additional 10 minutes' worth of introductory remarks about James on Tuesday, but in the meantime, here's what I had left to say today, by way of conclusion (and segue):

We left off with Tropica, whose poem "Nana" was full of regretful nostalgia for the old days when black women uncomplainingly brought up white babies in the plantation house. And I was suggesting that Tropica seems to want it both ways--i.e, she wants acknowledge the importance and the centrality of black culture in the Caribbean, but to "contain" it in an unthreatening form, the form it took before black people began moving to the cities in great numbers, where some of them, perhaps, acted in ways that genteel white folks found to be loud and unruly and threatening.

On the whole, then, the first notable effort (by white Creoles) to create a uniquely, self-consciously “Caribbean Literature” was a bit flawed:

  • To begin with, much of what Redcam & co. wrote wasn’t terribly good; it was often lifeless & sentimental, awkward & imitative, plodding & klunky.
  • In the second place, it was often ideologically problematic. That is, when it wasn’t outright sympathetic to colonialist & racist ideology (which quite a bit of it was), it was often unconsciously so, or ambivalently so--or else (like Tropica) it was tainted by nostalgia and/or by a weird sort of voyeurism.

So when black writers, artists, and intellectuals finally began to come into the limelight, as they did in the 1920s and 30s (with the rise of a black middle-class and black political movements, which I'll talk a little about next week), then Caribbean literary history became increasingly linked to movements by black & "colored" majorities for self-determination, decolonization, and cultural pride. After that, it was no longer clear what place white Creoles played in scheme of things, and the work of Tropica & Tom Redcam’s generation was soon dismissed or only grudgingly acknowledged, not just because it was naïve and derivative and so on, but also because of the skin color and class privilege of its creators, who were essentially hoist by their own petard. If, as they had implicitly posited, "authentic" West Indian culture was black, then why should it be filtered through white writers, who by their own logic were not authentic? That logic came to haunt not just Tropica and Tom Redcam et al., but also later figures like Jean Rhys--a writer of infinitely greater talent than they, but one not universally recognized as a "Caribbean" writer.

Still, the "All-Jamaica" generation constitutes an important prelude: when figures like C.L.R. James came along (he and his collaborators were also trying to build a pan-Caribbean cultural consciousness, and their sympathies really were with common folk), the ground had already been broken. That is, whatever their flaws, those white creole writers had opened up several of the themes and motifs that would later come to characterize the grand sweep of Caribbean literary history in the 20th century. You’ll see in James, for instance, an interest in vernacular language and in the culture of "the masses"; and it may be worth comparing his treatment of that subject matter to that of his literary predecessors.

Dept. of Link Miscellany:

  • Here's a possible companion piece to Tom Redcam's "My Beautiful Home": "My Native Land, My Home," written by the Jamaican poet Claude McKay. As a young writer McKay, an Afro-Caribbean who later emigrated to New York and became a notable figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was persuaded (by his white patron, amateur folklorist Walter Jekyll) to produce two volumes of "dialect poetry." (More on McKay here and here.) In view of Jekyll's folkloric interests, McKay's poem is perhaps not entirely free of the nostalgia for bygone days and for the "simple folk" of Jamaica's hinterlands that marks Redcam's and Tropica's work.
  • Want to see the original of Tropica's Island of Sunshine? Here you go. (And here.) And here's an article placing Tropica in the context of early Caribbean feminism: Leah Rosenberg's "The New Woman and 'The Dusky Strand': The Place of Feminism and Women's Literature in Early Jamaican Nationalism."
  • Maxwell Philip's Emmanuel Appadocca? Right here.
  • And you say you're dying to read still more early Creole literature? Here's a bunch, courtesy of the University of Florida:

Penultimately, a footnote to something I alluded to on the first day of class: according to Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (speaking about his PBS series "Black in Latin America"): "... there were 11.2 million Africans that we can count who survived the Middle Passage and landed in the New World, and of that 11.2 million, only 450,000 came to the United States...All the rest went south of Miami as it were."

And finally: this weekend, August 29th through 31st (a "Bank Holiday" in the UK), it's London's Notting Hill Carnival, one of the biggest West Indian carnival celebrations in the world. (Another, Brooklyn's West Indian-American Day Celebration, takes place over Labor Day weekend in New York.) Here's a litle historical perspective on Notting Hill Carnival. And here's a story about an honor for two of the women usually regarded as the founders of West Indian carnival in England, Claudia Jones and Rhaune Laslett-O’Brien, both of whom were members of the generation of immigrants portrayed in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, which we'll read later this semester.

For Thursday, August 27th (Day 2):

I'll be lecturing on Thursday, but we'll begin discussing James's book next Tuesday. You'll need to have it finished by next Monday night, especially if you choose to write on it. (I will post reading questions to the Moodle discussion forum soon. I forgot to pass out those long-winded guidelines about Reading Responses, but I'll give you a hard copy Thursday. In the meantime, I've put it online.)

Web Miscellany:

  • There's a fair amount of stuff out there on the web these days about John Agard's "Listen Mr Oxford don"; the poem is widely taught in Britain, where it's part of nationwide college placement tests. If you're interested in watching another, possibly even better, performance of it, try The Poetry Station. (Raw video here.)
  • While you're surfing, why not ride a wave to Repeating Islands?
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