Legacies of Gordon Rohlehr TT PAULA MORGAN
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Landscaping Hispaniola Moreau De Saint-Méry's
New West Indian Guide Vol. 85, no. 3-4 (2011), pp. 169-190 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101703 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0028-9930 MARIA CRISTINA FUMAGALLI LANDSCAPING HISPANIOLA MOREAU DE SAINT-MÉRY’S BORDER POLITICS A few days after the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010, Sonia Marmolejos, a young Dominican woman who was in the Darío Contreras Hospital of Santo Domingo with her newborn daughter, decided to breastfeed three Haitian children who had been admitted there after the disaster. They were wounded, hungry, and dehydrated, so Sonia Marmolejos acted on impulse and she did not expect to receive any special recognition for her generous gesture. The government of the Dominican Republic capitalized on this story, defined Sonia Marmolejos as a heroine, and used her actions as a metaphor to illustrate the charitable response of the country toward neighboring Haiti. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the island of Hispaniola and a history of colonialism which, however, has conjugated itself in very differ- ent ways. Officially under Spanish rule since 1493, the island was mostly left unpopulated for three-quarters of a century. In 1625 the French started to occupy parts of it (mainly in the north) and until the official recognition of the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1777, they constantly pushed for- ward their unofficial borders, while the Spanish carried out punitive raids to eradicate the French presence. On the Spanish side, the economy was mainly livestock-based but the French developed an impressive network of planta- tions which relied on the constant import of enslaved labor from Africa. -
Calypso, Education and Community in Trinidad and Tobago: from the 1940S to 2011 1
Tout Moun Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies http://journals.sta.uwi.edu/toutmoun/index.asp © The University of the West Indies, Department of Literary Cultural & Communication Studies Calypso, Education and Community in Trinidad and Tobago: From the 1940s to 2011 1 Calypso, Education and Community in Trinidad and Tobago from the 1940s to 2011 GORDON ROHLEHR I Introduction This essay has grown out of an address delivered on Wednesday January 28, 2009, at a seminar on the theme “Education through Community Issues and Possibilities for Development.” It explores the foundational ideas of Dr. Eric Williams about education as a vehicle for decolonization through nation-building, most of which he outlined in Education in the British West Indies,(1) a report that he prepared under the auspices of the Caribbean Research Council of the Caribbean Commission between 1945 and 1947, and published in 1950 in partnership with the Teachers’ Economic and Cultural Association [TECA] of Trinidad and Tobago. Drawing heavily upon De Wilton Rogers’s The Rise of the People’s National Movement,(2) this essay will detail Williams’s association with the TECA and its education arm, The People’s Education Movement [PEM] between 1950 and 1955 when Williams made the transition from research to politics via lectures, first at the Port-of-Spain library, then before massive crowds in Woodford Square. It will also explore the issues of education, community, and nation-building during the early Tout Moun ▪ Vol. 2 No. 1 ▪ October 2013 2 Gordon Rohlehr years of the PNM’s first term in office, when Williams struggled to sell his ideas(2) about educational reform and development to a skeptical and sometimes hostile hierarchy of entrenched interests. -
English 6410: Caribbean Poetry and Drama January - May, 2012 Time: 4.30 to 7.30Pm Professor: D
University of Puerto Rico English Department College of Humanities Graduate Program English 6410: Caribbean Poetry and Drama January - May, 2012 Time: 4.30 to 7.30pm Professor: D. Kuwabong, PhD Office: Edificio Pedreira Sotano #11. Office Hours: Tuesday: 10: 00 A. M – 12:00 P.M. Course Description: This course will examine selected plays and poetry from the Caribbean. As a site of multiple historical and cultural experiences, any study of Caribbean drama and poetry necessarily implies a multi-disciplinary approach. Hence, in this course, we will explore the selected works from historical, cultural, social, political, economic, and linguistic perspectives, which have in different ways shaped Caribbean literary texts. The course will invariably, therefore, invite a critical engagement with various texts, drawn from both the fields of social science and humanities, and from Caribbean literary texts. Some areas of special interest that will be examined in relation to the development and practice of Caribbean drama and poetry include folk festivals, carnival, nine nights, mumming, the spectacle in which music, dance, masquerades, etc., are important elements. Thematic concerns revolve around: history, politics, economics/class, spirituality, sex/gender (sexism, femininity and masculinity), power relations based on qualifiers such as education, colorism, mothering and motherhood, travel, nostalgia, alienation, re-memory, environmentalism, urbanism, cuisine, language, among others. Required Texts: 1. Waters, J. Erika and David Edgecombe, Eds. Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean. (The plays: No Seeds in Babylon, by Ian Gregory Strachan (the Bahamas), Bellywoman Bangarang, by the Sistren Theatre Collective (Jamaica) and Kirnon's Kingdom, by David Edgecombe (U.S. Virgin Islands). 2. -
The Caribbean Artists Movement Louis James
CHAPTER TEN The Caribbean Artists Movement Louis James At a Conference of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) held at the University of Kent in 1969, C. L. R. James spoke with typical energy of his experience of growing up in Trinidad. I didn’t get literature from the mango-tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of the colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilization. This is where I have come from, and I would not pretend to be anything else. And I am able to speak of the underdeveloped countries infinitely better than I would otherwise have been able to do.1 On the same occasion Edward (now Kamau) Brathwaite, as a founder member of CAM, spoke in a very different way about his attitude to growing up in a society dominated by Western culture. The point I am making here is that my education and background, though nominally middle class, is, on examination, not of this nature at all. I had spent most of my boyhood on the beach and in the sea with ‘beach-boys’, or in the country, at my grandfather’s with country boys and girls. I was not therefore in a position to make any serious intellectual investment in West Indian middle class values.2 The two statements are not necessarily in opposition. C. L. R. James was speaking of his fiercely independent reading in ‘the literature, phi- losophy and ideas of Western civilization’. Brathwaite was reacting against the European tradition, as it emerged in his experience of ‘West Indian middle class values’. -
Sam Selvon's London Novels
Kunapipi Volume 17 Issue 1 Article 19 1995 Setting Up Home in a City of Words: Sam Selvon's London Novels Sushiela Nasta Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Nasta, Sushiela, Setting Up Home in a City of Words: Sam Selvon's London Novels, Kunapipi, 17(1), 1995. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol17/iss1/19 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Setting Up Home in a City of Words: Sam Selvon's London Novels Abstract Although a sense of the need to migrate clearly affected early writers born in the Caribbean such as the Jamaican, Claude McKay who left in 1912 for the United States, the period immediately following the Second World War was particularly important for the arrival m London of a number of talented young West Indians artists. London, as Henry Swanzy the producer of the influential BBC Radio programme Caribbean Voices once aptly observed, had become a 'literary headquarters'. It had become a centre where writers from the various islands were meeting for the first time and attempted paradoxically perhaps after departure from the islands to establish a firm estW Indian cultural identity. It was also a time when over 40,000 West Indians emigrated to Britain in search of employment. Originally invited to the 'mother-country' by the post-war government as an attempt to solve the immediate labour crisis followmg the Second World War and commonly known as the 'Windrush generation', these islanders moved to Britain expectant to improve their standard of living. -
Contextualizing the "Cannibal Joke" in Calypso and Literature Gordon Rohlehr [email protected]
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Volume 3 Issue 2 Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Article 1 Imagination: A Special Issue December 2005 CARNIVAL CANNIBALIZED OR CANNIBAL CARNIVALIZED: Contextualizing the "Cannibal Joke" in Calypso and Literature Gordon Rohlehr [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium Recommended Citation Rohlehr, Gordon (2005) "CARNIVAL CANNIBALIZED OR CANNIBAL CARNIVALIZED: Contextualizing the "Cannibal Joke" in Calypso and Literature," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 3 : Iss. 2 , Article 1. Available at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss2/1 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rohlehr: CARNIVAL CANNIBALIZED OR CANNIBAL CARNIVALIZED... Congo Man The Mighty Sparrow first performed “Congo Man” at Queen’s Hall, Port of Spain, Trinidad, early in October 1964 (Trinidad Guardian [TG] 5 October 1964). Over four decades since then, he has performed it regularly and recorded it six times (de Four 72). Treating it as a sort of signature tune, Sparrow delights in creating a new version of strange sounds every time he performs it. “Congo Man” has been cited by journalist Debbie Jacob as “Sparrow’s own all- time favourite” (Sunday Express [SE] 10 February 1991). An intriguing calypso that only Sparrow can convincingly perform, “Congo Man” has raised questions about the centuries-old encounter between Africa and Europe in arenas of ethnicity, culture, gender and politics; the racial stereotyping that has been an almost timeless aspect of this encounter; the erasure of any clear image of Africa from the minds of diasporan African-ancestored citizens of the New World, and the carnivalesque performance of “Africa” in the transfigurative masquerades of Trinidad and New Orleans. -
Writin' and Soundin' a Transnational Caribbean Experience
Spring 2013 Dubbin’ the Literary Canon: Writin’ and Soundin’ A Transnational Caribbean Experience Warren Harding Candidate for Honors Africana Studies Africana Studies Honors Committee: Meredith Gadsby, Chair Gordon Gill Caroline Jackson Smith 2 ABSTRACT In the mid-1970s, a collective of Jamaican poets from Kingston to London began to use reggae as a foundational aesthetic to their poetry. Inspired by the rise of reggae music and the work of the Caribbean Artists Movement based London from 1966 to 1972, these artists took it upon themselves to continue the dialogue on Caribbean cultural production. This research will explore the ways in which dub poetry created an expressive space for Jamaican artists to complicate discussions of migration and colonialism in the transnational Caribbean experience. In order to do so, this research engages historical, ethnomusicological, and literary theories to develop a framework to analyze dub poetry. It will primarily pose the question, how did these dub poets expand the archives of Caribbean national production? This paper will suggest that by facilitating a dialogue among Jamaicans located between London and Kingston, dub poetry expanded the archives for Caribbean cultural production. In this expansion, dub poetry’s simultaneous combination of literary and sound genius not only repositioned geographical boundaries of Jamaican identity but also grounded the intersecting spaces of the written, spoken, recorded, and performed word. 3 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………...4-9 Theories, -
Rivers of Sound TT DIRECTOR : JEAN ANTOINE -DUNNE
Rivers of Sound TT DIRECTOR : JEAN ANTOINE -DUNNE The documentary Rivers of Sound celebrates the life and career of Gordon Rohlehr. In the main, it is a montage of images of Rohlehr’s formative years, through which the film traces the high points of his career and focuses on ideas that have become synonymous with his work. Footage from several archives dating back over forty years is used for this purpose. These include interviews with Gordon Rohlehr filmed in Trinidad primarily by the TV channel Gayelle and featuring Tony Hall in the 1980s; and excerpts from a Trinidad radio series on calypso, “From Attila to the Seventies” hosted by Rohlehr from January to July 1973. There are also clips from videos of keynote lectures, primarily the Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture, 22 November 1990 delivered in Barbados, and The Mellon Lecture, 1997, delivered while Rohlehr was Visiting Mellon Foundation Scholar for Tulane University. The main body of the documentary was filmed in Trinidad and Guyana. The film crew visited Guyana on two occasions and interviewed his family, in particular his mother, Mrs. Iris Rohlehr and sister, Ms. Iris Rohlehr, and brother, Godfrey. We also filmed Rohlehr at his home in Tunapuna and spoke to his wife, Betty-Ann, daughter Donna and son Dike. The documentary begins at the conference celebrating Rohlehr’s life and works hosted by the Department of Liberal Arts, the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 2007. It features Professor Bridget Brereton’s address and events from the Creative Arts presentation, including their reenactment of Rohlehr’s musical piece “Depression Blues” which was put to music by Sat Sharma, then Head of Creative Arts at the University of the West Indies St Augustine. -
Edgar Mittelholzer Lectures Vol.1
BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES VOLUME 1: 1967-1971 Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew O. Lindsay 1 Edited by Andrew O. Lindsay BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES VOLUME 1: 1967-1971 Preface © Andrew Jefferson-Miles, 2014 Introduction © Andrew O. Lindsay, 2014 Cover design by Peepal Tree Press Cover photograph: Courtesy of Jacqueline Ward All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission. Published by the Caribbean Press. ISBN 978-1-907493-65-2 2 Contents: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................iii NOTE ....................................................................................... v PREFACE: THE MITTELHOLZER LECTURES IN CONTEXT by Andrew Jefferson-Miles ......................vii INTRODUCTION by Andrew O. Lindsay .................... xiii First Series, 1967: Edgar Mittelholzer – The Man and his Work by Arthur James Seymour INTRODUCTION by Celeste Dolphin............................... 3 LECTURE I ............................................................................. 5 LECTURE II .......................................................................... 26 LECTURE III......................................................................... 48 LECTURE IV ........................................................................ 65 Second Series, 1969: Image and Idea in the Arts of Guyana by Denis Williams FOREWORD by A.J. Seymour .......................................... -
Tracing Black British Literary Aesthetics from the Shores of The
“Xplode the prison/ burn the clock”: Tracing Black British Literary Aesthetics from the Shores of the Caribbean to the Streets of South London Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with research distinction in English in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University by Lucille Wanjiru Wainaina The Ohio State University April 2018 Project Advisor: Professor Hannibal Hamlin, Department of English Wainaina 2 Introduction Only in recent years has the amount of literary scholarship on hip hop and rap exploded producing a general acceptance that these black authored aural texts are indeed poetry. Hip Hop and Rap benefit from critical study that examines their dynamic political affiliations, symbiotic relationships with artistic movements, and most notably their increasing transnationality. However, it seems that the same scholarly attention is lacking for black cultural production just across the Atlantic. Black Britons have been responsible for influencing, if not birthing, some of the most distinctly English sounds of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Their work presents a synthesis of sound and written language similar to that of black American poets whose work is also founded on the oral tradition. Therefore, a comparable pluralism must undergird black British poetry at the present leading towards the inseparable unification of music and poetry. However, there is a dearth of scholarship that seeks to connect this current moment to the history of black poetics in the UK, which exists within a larger framework of postcolonial nation building and identity negotiation within the “parent nation.” This paper will chart the evolution of black London’s investments in poetic pluralism, i.e. -
The Caribbean Artists Movement Louis James
CHAPTER TEN The Caribbean Artists Movement Louis James At a Conference of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) held at the University of Kent in 1969, C. L. R. James spoke with typical energy of his experience of growing up in Trinidad. I didn’t get literature from the mango-tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of the colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilization. This is where I have come from, and I would not pretend to be anything else. And I am able to speak of the underdeveloped countries infinitely better than I would otherwise have been able to do.1 On the same occasion Edward (now Kamau) Brathwaite, as a founder member of CAM, spoke in a very different way about his attitude to growing up in a society dominated by Western culture. The point I am making here is that my education and background, though nominally middle class, is, on examination, not of this nature at all. I had spent most of my boyhood on the beach and in the sea with ‘beach-boys’, or in the country, at my grandfather’s with country boys and girls. I was not therefore in a position to make any serious intellectual investment in West Indian middle class values.2 The two statements are not necessarily in opposition. C. L. R. James was speaking of his fiercely independent reading in ‘the literature, phi- losophy and ideas of Western civilization’. Brathwaite was reacting against the European tradition, as it emerged in his experience of ‘West Indian middle class values’. -
Interview with Gordon Rohlehr Paula Morgan the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, [email protected]
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Volume 10 Issue 2 Intellectual Formations: Locating a Caribbean Article 10 Critical Tradition November 2013 Interview with Gordon Rohlehr Paula Morgan The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium Recommended Citation Morgan, Paula (2013) "Interview with Gordon Rohlehr," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 10 : Iss. 2 , Article 10. Available at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol10/iss2/10 This Part II: "The Generation of 1968" is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Morgan: Interview with Gordon Rohlehr Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago June 2013 PM: Thank you for granting this interview. It is intended to be a short piece on the influences which have shaped your vision and your critical practice. That is a good point of departure for our conversation. GR: Any of our writers, at any given point, become the most penetrative critics of their work, of the society, of other writers’ work. How are you going to begin to even discuss the voluminous amount of the work produced by writers and critics like Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming - their essays, commentaries, newspaper articles, speeches? How are you going to ask a person like that to summarize what he has been doing, what influences fed into his work and his vision? We do not begin to understand the dimension of the writers and we do not understand the variety of forces that have shaped them and to which they have responded - sometimes in an utterly contradictory manner ...but they are growing all the time.