FIRST THEY MUST BE CHILDREN: THE CHILD AND THE CARIBBEAN IMAGI/NATION A CULTURAL STUDIES CONFERENCE
MAY 21ST & MAY 22ND 2009
THE LEARNING RESOURCE CENTRE, UWI ST AUGUSTINE

 

Overview

The adage children must be seen and not heard points to an inherent ambivalence in the Caribbean’s collective psyche about the place and role of children in its social order which simultaneously recognises and silences their presence. Children and adolescents are central to the region’s cultural practices and creative productions. Children, for instance, have key roles in folk tales, songs and games. Novels of childhood and adolescence are positioned at the core of Caribbean literary culture, often analogising the developing nation and its cultural consciousness, as well as the migratory practices of its citizenry.

Despite iconic status of children in Caribbean cultural practices and  spiralling concern about their social and psychological well being, the issues surrounding Caribbean childhood have not been given sufficient academic attention. Sorely lacking on a regional scale is the institutional infrastructure to facilitate effective interventions. The conference seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue on the social experiences and representational patterns related to the Caribbean child and childhood. It invites analysis of ideological perspectives and discursive practices in relation to children as social and imaginative subjects; the roles, symbolic codes and identities they have been assigned; their acts of resistance and transgression as cultural agents; and the multiple meanings of their presence in traditional and contemporary Caribbean mythologies of being and becoming.