Society for Caribbean Studies
33rd Annual Conference
Wednesday 1st - Friday 3rd July, 2009
Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE),
University of Hull
Programme
Wednesday 1st July
Room:
Ground Floor Lecture Theatre
WISE
Basement Lecture Theatre
WISE
Registration from noon – tea and coffee available on arrival
1.00
Welcome
1.15
The Business Roots of Caribbean Slavery
3.30
Tea and coffee break
4.00
The Caribbean Short Story
5.30
Break
6.00 – 7.30
Bridget Jones Award Presentation at the Guildhall:
Alternative Sexualities in the
Caribbean
Carolyn Allen ‘Break the Waters of the Deep…Set the Echoes Free’
In her career as a theatre director, writer, performer and scholar, Carolyn Allen has
made a substantial contribution to the Caribbean arts well beyond the shores of her
native Jamaica. Her presentation will discuss a multi-media collage of testimony and
imaginative interpretation of the experience of capture and crossing. This work seeks
to transform academic research into moving performance and to offer a model for
socially responsible and theatre practice.
7.30
Dinner at the Guildhall
Thursday 2nd July
Room:
Ground Floor Lecture Theatre
Basement Lecture Theatre
9.30
Power, Sickness and Health in
Plantation Societies
Religion
11.00
Tea and coffee break
11.20
Caribbean and Atlantic Geographies
1.00
Lunch
2.00
Discipline, Punishment and the Law
in the Caribbean
3.30
Tea and coffee break
3.50
Politics, Resistance and Society
during Slavery
5.30
Break
6.30
Rum punch reception at WISE, sponsored by the Hull Chamber of
Commerce, and announcement of the winner of the 2009 David
Nicholls Memorial Prize
7.30
Conference Dinner at the Guildhall
Caribbean Literature
Cultural Practices and Modes of
Representation
Decolonisation and Postcolonial
Nations
Friday 3rd July
Room:
Ground Floor Lecture Theatre
Basement Lecture Theatre
10.00
Sexuality, Morality and Family
Cultures of Resistance
11.30
Tea and coffee break
11.45
Annual General Meeting – all welcome
12.30
Lunch
1.30
New Approaches to Emancipation
3.00
Conference ends
Notes:
1. A quiet room for study (the ‘Seminar Room’) is available on the second floor of the
Wilberforce Institute throughout the duration of the conference.
(continued overleaf)
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2. Recommended hotels are within 10-15 minutes walking distance of the conference
venues: the Wilberforce Institute (day-time) and the Guildhall (evening). Should
delegates require a taxi, the suggested taxi service can be called on 01482 606060.
3. Tea and coffee will be available on arrival, but no lunch is provided for delegates on
Wednesday. There are many local cafes and pubs in the vicinity (the Museums’
Quarter) at which delegates will be able to purchase snacks/lunch.
4. A cash bar will be available for the purchase of drinks on the Wednesday dinner;
wines and mineral water are included in the conference dinner on the Thursday
evening. Both evening meals will be held in the Guildhall – two minutes’ walk from
the Wilberforce Institute.
5. Internet access – four computers are available for delegates to use throughout the
conference. These are located on the ground floor of the Wilberforce Institute in the
‘IT Suite’. To log-on, delegates will need to use the following details:
Username:
Password:
user1
university of hull
[university<space>of<space>hull]
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Wednesday 1st July
1.15
The Business Roots of Caribbean Slavery (Chair: David Howard)
Nick Draper (UCL), ‘London merchants and Caribbean slavery after the abolition
of the slave-trade’
Albane Forestier (LSE), ‘Debt litigation in a plantation society: Nevis and St Kitts
at the end of the eighteenth century’
Sheryllynne Haggerty (University of Nottingham), ‘Problems with business
networks in the Jamaica slave trade’
Simon Smith (WISE), ‘The trade of Richard Poor, Quaker merchant of Barbados’
4.00:
The Caribbean Short Story (Chair: Lorna Burns)
Sandra Courtman (University of Sheffield), ‘Caribbean short stories and the
relationship between genre and culture’
Lucy Evans (University of Leeds), ‘”Ingeniously Diverting?”: Strategies of
digression in E. A. Markham’s interlinked stories’
Abigail Ward (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Tracing significant footsteps: Ismith
Khan’
Alternative Sexualities in the Caribbean and its Diaspora (Chair: Henrice
Altink)
Grainne O’connell (University of Sussex), ‘”Without” the nation and “within” the
diaspora: queering the relationship between the Anglophone Caribbean
and its diasporas’
Ronald Cummings (University of Leeds), ‘Marronage and queer Caribbean
subjectivities: Transgressive bodies and (trans)national Imaginaries’
Thursday 2nd July
9.30:
Power, Sickness and Health in Plantation Societies (Chair: Diana Paton)
Kit Candlin (University of Sydney), ‘Poison, paranoia, and slavery’
Randy Browne (University of North Carolina), ‘“This bad business on the estate”:
obeah, violence, and authority in the British Caribbean in the early
nineteenth century’
Shalini Khan (Queen’s University, Canada), ‘Slave medicine in the preemancipation Caribbean’
Religion (Chair: Ruth Minott Egglestone)
Amitava Chowdhury (Queen’s University, Canada), ‘Reciprocity and formational
identity: Indian indentured labor diaspora in the Caribbean in a comparative
perspective’
Ennis B. Edmonds (Kenyon College, Ohio), ‘Local meets global: A case study of
religious change in Jamaica’
Angelica Laura Lucia Wehrli (University of Berne), ‘The rising demand for AfroCuban religion in Cuba’
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Thursday 2nd July (continued)
11.20:
Caribbean and Atlantic Geographies: Place and Space (Chair: Christer Petley)
Anyaa Anim-addo (Royal Holloway), ‘”Capital, people and texts”: The Royal Mail
Steam Packet Company in the post-emancipation Caribbean’
Melanie Gidel (University of Paris, X Nanterre), ‘The city and its margins: A
comparative study of Volga-Plage (Martinique, FWI) and Sea Lots (Trinidad
and Tobago)’
Bonnie Thomas (University of Western Australia), ‘Place and space in selected
works of Gisele Pineau’
Caribbean Literature (Chair: Sandra Courtman)
Rose Mary Allen (University of the Netherlands Antilles), ‘Beyond enslavement:
social life after freedom in Curaçao and the process of remembering’
Diana Pardo (University of Central Oklahoma), ‘The evolution of negritude in
Spanish-speaking Caribbean literature’
Kei Miller (University of Glasgow), ‘Troubled Genealogy: Considering The
Caribbean Epistolary Novel’
2.00:
Discipline, Punishment and the Law in the Caribbean (Chair: Christer Petley)
Helen McKee and Diana Paton (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), ‘Punishment,
the slave courts, and ‘amelioration’ in Jamaica’
Maarit Forde (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), ‘Policing religion in colonial
Trinidad’
Clare Newstead (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Exporting insecurity: Deportation
and the geopolitics of the ‘criminal’ body’
Cultural Practices and Modes Representation (Chair: Kate Quinn)
Elspeth Kydd (University of the West of England), ‘Caribbean autobiography,
domestic photography and the family photo album’
Karen Wilkes (University of East London), ‘Representations of Jamaica’
Abdoulaye Gaye (University of Bordeaux), ‘”Trading places”: Social equality and
the minimal consciousness of symbolic domination in the dancehall’
3.50:
Politics, Resistance and Society during Slavery (Chair: Henrice Altink)
Jamie Rosenthal (University of California, San Diego), ‘Eliza Fenwick, radicalism,
and the contradictions of race, gender, and class in the Caribbean
plantation system’
Gordon Gill (Oberlin College, Ohio), ‘Strategies of slave resistance in the
hydrologic plantation society of British Guiana’
Gelien Matthews (University of the West Indies), ‘Maroon treaties in Jamaica and
Surinam’
Decolonisation and Postcolonial Nations (Chair: Clare Newstead)
Antony Bounds (University of Warwick), ‘”Left to sink or swim”: The West Indies
federation and the realities of an imperial legacy’
Hilbourne Watson (Bucknell University), ‘The Anglo-American Cold War project,
working-class struggles and self-determination in the British Caribbean’
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Friday 3rd July
10.00:
Sexuality, Morality and Family (Chair: Rochelle Rowe)
Barbara Bush (Sheffield Hallam University), ‘Edith Clarke’s Jamaica: The West
Indian Social Survey and Colonial Social Science Research Council, 1944
– 1958’
Neel Ahuja (University of North Carolina), ‘The Panama Canal and the fallen city’
Henrice Altink (University of York, UK), ‘”Me shame you know”: The ideal and
reality of young, lower-class black women’s sexuality in post-emancipation
Jamaica’
Cultures of Resistance (Chair: Sandra Courtman)
Lorna Burns (University of Glasgow), ‘Becoming Bertha: Virtual difference and
postcolonial resistance in Wide Sargasso Sea’
Joanne Chassot (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), ‘Fragmentation as
condition and Possibility: History, narrative and resistance in Michelle Cliff’s
work’
1.30:
New Approaches to Emancipation (Chair: David Howard)
Kate Hodgson (University of Hull), ‘New approaches to emancipation: Haiti and
the nineteenth-century abolitionist debate’
Christer Petley (University of Southampton), ‘Slave negotiation and imperial
governance at the point of emancipation: a reappraisal of the Jamaican
slave uprising’
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