Abstracts

The Postcolonial period has been a challenging period for Caribbean States. In the Anglophone Caribbean, various attempts have been made towards regionalism. The West Indies Federation was imposed on the region by its former colonial power, Britain, but quickly disintegrated in less than four years when Caribbean states gained independence. Thereafter, the region attempted to foster closer economic ties from the 1960s through to the present era based on various economic reasons and a shared history and in more recent times has sought to establish a major multilateral regional trade agreement by the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas which gave rise to the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME). One of the key planks towards closer economic co-operation has been the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) which is vested with both an original and an appellate jurisdiction though the majority of member states have thus far retained the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) in England as opposed to supporting the idea of determining final appeals regionally. This paper seeks to examine the reasons for the retention of the JCPC by the majority of member states of Caricom and whether this may legitimately be viewed as one of the last vestiges of postcolonialism. It also seeks to explore whether the current arrangements for hearing and determining final appeals acts as a hindrance towards regionalism in the light of a globalised economic environment under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other economic arrangements such as the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU).

Panel Title: ‘Hips Don’t Lie’: From Postcolonial Theory to Transnational Dance

This panel responds to the conference call for submissions dealing with new geographies including power relations within the Global South, and, in particular, to the theme of ‘travelling cultures: postcolonial take on mobility and transnational connection; we also aim to speak to the conference’s interest in ‘new Geographies of power: how can postcolonial theory account for the multiple heterogeneity and the various, contested voices and positions that make up the global South?’ The panel’s collective focus will be on forms of popular dance: salsa, sega, garba and dandiya; furthermore, all papers demonstrate an interest in these dance forms as practiced through multiple displacements: salsa’s nascent popularity in India, sega’s parallels with chutney, and garba and dandiya as danced by twice-migrant East African Gujarati communities in Britain. With an accent on embodied histories, pleasure and transgression, the panel seeks to vivify postcolonial theory through an examination of transnational circuits of dance and their intersections with older, diasporic routes and roots. We also seek to interrupt productively textualised discourse through globalised economies of pleasure (as signified by our title quote from Colombian musician Shakira).
Abstracts of the individual papers, and bio notes of each contributor, follow.

Salsa, Social Class, and New Indian Cosmopolitanisms
Dr Ananya Jahanara Kabir, University of Leeds a.j.kabir@leeds.ac.uk

Abstract:
In recent years, metropolitan India is witnessing an increasing popularity of salsa and other social dance forms from the Caribbean (bachata, merengue, different forms of zouk). This paper examines the development of this new form of urban leisure in India, where popular culture is already saturated with several indigenous dance forms (pre-eminently, those derived from Bollywood), as well as with less codified movements associated with Anglo-American rock and pop. What is the significance of a Caribbean-Latin dance culture, with its specific rhythmic and choreographic demands, permeating this fabric of social leisure? What are the routes through which these forms are entering Indian public culture, what spaces nourish it, and what new forms of social interaction are being created by it?

The talk will draw on: my experience of dancing salsa in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, on Bollywood's burgeoning interest in salsa, on Indian salseros at Salsa congresses abroad, and also on the promotion of salsa by Latin American consulates in India. I argue that salsa’s rise in India points to new modes of transnational and inter-class interactions that, together, signal new Indian cosmopolitanisms in formation. Throughout, I will pay attention to the body as a layered site of inherited and appropriated dance movements, while insisting on the necessity of incorporating pleasure into theories of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism.
This research-in-progress is part of a larger project in evolution on transoceanic and transnational rhythm cultures.

Bio: Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Senior Lecturer, School of English at the University of Leeds. Her research has focused on the politics of memorialisation in post-Partition South Asia, and is now moving towards considering South-South dialogue and comparative postcolonialisms through the medium of embodied histories. a.j.kabir@leeds.ac.uk

This panel responds to the conference call for submissions dealing with new geographies including power relations within the Global South, and, in particular, to the theme of ‘travelling cultures: postcolonial take on mobility and transnational connection; we also aim to speak to the conference’s interest in ‘new Geographies of power: how can postcolonial theory account for the multiple heterogeneity and the various, contested voices and positions that make up the global South?’ The panel’s collective focus will be on forms of popular dance: salsa, sega, garba and dandiya; furthermore, all papers demonstrate an interest in these dance forms as practiced through multiple displacements: salsa’s nascent popularity in India, sega’s parallels with chutney, and garba and dandiya as danced by twice-migrant East African Gujarati communities in Britain. With an accent on embodied histories, pleasure and transgression, the panel seeks to vivify postcolonial theory through an examination of transnational circuits of dance and their intersections with older, diasporic routes and roots. We also seek to interrupt productively textualised discourse through globalised economies of pleasure (as signified by our title quote from Colombian musician Shakira).
Abstracts of the individual papers, and bio notes of each contributor, follow.

Mauritian Bhojpuri Music/Dance and Trinidadian Chutney: Parallel Embodied Histories
Babita Thannoo
Mauritius and Trinidad share a common history of African slavery and indentured labour. Enforced migration under colonial regimes has determined important parallels between Caribbean and Mascarene landscapes. Trinidad, in particular, due to its population of Indian descent, shares significant cultural traits with Mauritius which is endowed with a majority Hindu population. Prior to the digital age of technological and economic globalization, the Mascarenes and the Caribbean already experienced one of the most marked global migratory movements during European colonization.

ontemporary popular music and dance in both oceanic spaces reflect significant parallels. This paper will demonstrate how performance, body movements and cultural memory constitute dynamic fields of study whereby this South-South connection may be explored. The Mauritian repertoire of Bhojpuri and dance comprise a rich and relatively un-researched repertoire of body movements. Popular dance culture amidst the population of Indian descent display important similarities with performance of Chutney dance in Trinidad. Significant transnational echoes surface in the ways bodies have retained choreographies of resistance against Plantation regimes and have, above all, become polyrhythmic following the impact of African rhythms in the aftermath of slavery. Ongoing creolisation has further determined polyrhythmic body movements. This paper will present a comprehensive approach to popular Bhojpuri performance in Mauritius informed by previous research devoted to chutney performance in Trinidad and contemporary readings of performance and rhythm in the Caribbean and Latin Americas., The body, rhythm, movement and cultural memory will be discussed in terms of pivotal modes of re-thinking postcolonialism.

Bio: I am a 3rd Year PhD candidate at the University of Leeds (supervised by Ananya Kabir), currently researching Mauritian sega music and dance. Mauritian Bhojpuri performance comprises a major section of my research. I am interested in the manner in which Caribbean Studies can inform and enrich modes of thinking about performance in the Mascarenes. en07bt@leeds.ac.uk

Modern developing multi-cultural countries claim their status as progressive democracies by promulgating policies of ethnic equity within a national unity. However, what is promulgated through government mission statements, public speeches and the sentiments of national anthems might not successfully align with realities of citizen concern. This research introduces a Culturometric application for evaluating these claims to progressive democracy within multi-cultural developing countries. The Culturometric method is demonstrated in this research by evaluating claims to ethnic equity and national unity in Trinidad. The evaluation uses a representative sample (N=348) of Trinidadian households surveyed to identify advantaged and disadvantaged demographic groups by education, income, wealth, etc. and to measure the equity of their ethnic identities and comparative national allegiances. This new area of research has been made possible by the innovative tools of Culturometrics. Socio-cultural bricolage in modern multi-cultural societies undermines the utility of traditional cultural research that uses simplistic binary self-labelling of ethnicity based on ancestral genetic body types. The Culturometric methodology is more rigorous and applicable than traditional cultural studies in that, rather than a binary count of heads, it utilises Cultural Index Regulators that measure the strength of cultural components within individual identity.

 Whether in the experiment or its supposed technological applications the modern scientific enterprise consists of a framework of interlocking operations. In this the latest stage of modern globalization such operations seem to not merely interpret or interact with “reality” but to constitute it. If this is indeed the case this has profound implications of all kinds.
   But here in the Caribbean we are also constituted by ancestral traditions defined by operations. One key term by which this has been understood is “obeah”. Moreover in its existential intersection such obeah cannot be abstracted from this unfolding process of technological operational globalization.
   Indeed upon closer examination technological operations appear to themselves be a form of obeah.
   So what does all this mean for us here in the Caribbean? How does the engagement with this the latest phase of globalization define our own operations? And how do we in our present location understand and speak of technology and obeah?
   The paper seeks to so explore this the very unfolding of our own vital space. This in terms of the unfolding process and intersection that is now being called – globalization.
   It also seeks to so engage possibility not only for the Caribbean but also in terms of how globalization itself is to be understood and engaged. It is hoped then that the paper will contribute to a critical ongoing debate.

In December 1943 the renowned Austrian-American architect Richard J. Neutra was commissioned by Rexford Tugwell, governor of Puerto Rico to oversee an ambitious project for the design and construction of schools, clinics, hospitals and community centers on the island. The following year the U.S. Department of State sent him on a goodwill mission to South American with the purpose of promoting knowledge of the American architecture abroad. These experiences, at a point of maturity in Neutra’s career, opened up new possibilities for the architect who then began to cultivate his presence in Latin America envisioning his role as a sort of architectural missionary to the impoverished.
Neutra was interested in assuming a role of leadership in the region. He criticized the imitation in Latin America of European architecture, most likely referring to the importance of Le Corbusier in Brazil, and advocated a new conception of American architecture which included North and South America as well as the Caribbean. However, his rejection of the idea of Europe as a model for America did not keep him from proposing, in another colonialist attitude, the United States and its industrialized architecture as model for Latin America.
This paper examines the discourse of Neutra in relation to the notion of an “American” architecture and his publications on the role of architecture in dealing with social needs in South America, specifically programs for hospitals, schools and community centers based primarily on his experience in Puerto Rico. It illustrates both his perspective as “missionary” to Latin America and the reception of this discourse in the region.
Biography
Catherine R. Ettinger is an architect with a Master’s Degree in historical preservation and doctorate in architecture. She is the author of seven books published in Mexico on topics related to architecture. She is a full professor at the school of architecture in the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo.

Contact information
Email:  ettinger@umich.mx  or  crettingerm@gmail.com
Street address:  Juan de Dios Peza 639, Lomas de Santa Maria, Morelia, Michoacán 58090 México
Telephone:  52 443 323 5899   Celular pone: 521 443 318 0984  FAX: 52 443 327 2201

One of the most commonly cited manifestations of globalization in world cinema has been the increase in transnational film production practices, including co-production and so-called runaway production. Both of these practices have been widespread in the film industries of the Caribbean, with scholarship mainly portraying both as culturally deleterious to the region, even if industrially speaking the region is very dependent on the practices and will likely continue to be if the goal of sustainable indigenous screen industries is to be realized. This paper will seek to take a fresh look at these practices – which have created films ranging from the Pirates of the Caribbean series to the politically-engaged films of indigenous auteurs such as Raoul Peck – in light of current developments in Transnational Film Studies, where debates have turned to exploring the complexities of globalization and its impact on world film cultures. In trying to reconcile some of the economic and cultural issues at stake in debates around transnational film production, the paper will suggest three overlapping but distinct theoretical categories for understanding transnational film production in the Caribbean: post/colonial, neocolonial and post-imperial types of film-making. Each of these categories will be shown to reflect the various forms that “globalization” has taken in the region’s film industries as well as the power dynamics inherent in those forms. The paper will argue that while all forms of film production have had economic benefits for the region, it is film production along post-imperial lines that has been (and will likely continue to be) the most beneficial to the region in both economic and cultural terms.

I’m focusing on “geographies of power” as central to the contested terms “globalization” and “postcolonial studies,” and how we may view various representations of these issues in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Appadurai’s Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) enhances my discussion of C.L.R. James’ cultural criticism, as well as Paule Marshall's and Lawrence Scott's fiction. I’ll limit my theoretical references to Appadurai’s notion of the “ethnoscape,” the shifting paradigm of moving persons around the globe, now part and parcel of modern globalization, and his concept of “culturalism,” the local resistance to the apparently homogenizing forces of globalization.
I’ll focus briefly on two texts by James: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, and Beyond a Boundary with which we may view James’ involvement with his “ethnoscape.” James crosses geographic boundaries as well as boundaries of literary criticism, cultural studies, ethnography, and autobiography, shaving away the formalized “objective distance” of the critic as he writes himself into his literary analyses of Herman Melville’s work and the ethics of the sport of cricket. Likewise, Appadurai’s notion of “culturalism” is useful for analyzing segments of Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People set in the late 1960s, and Lawrence Scott’s short story “Ballad for the New World,” set in the 1940s-50s. Both narratives incorporate references to international business interests on the landscapes of Bourne Island and Trinidad, respectively. Have the “geographies of power” changed much since the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s?

Interviewed in 2010, Prime Minister Patrick Manning and the late anti-government activist Dennis Pantin agreed on one thing: Trinidad and Tobago is small, and that size allows the nation to delay in mitigating climate change.  Manning dismissed Trinidadians’ fifth-ranked per-capita carbon emissions as a diseconomy of scale.  Also based on scale, Pantin decried “mega-projects in small places,” a category that excluded oil and gas production.  Trinidad’s territorial compactness – they would have concurred - tempers the urgency for it to cut carbon emissions.  This paper explores the relationship between such localism and the widespread discounting of climate change.  Earlier geographic visions located Trinidad within a large place, either in the Caribbean archipelago or in th e Orinoco Delta and alongside South America.  Increasingly, nationalism and hydrocarbons – as they co-produce each other – have metaphorically compressed and isolated the island from surrounding terra firma. Size then determines responsibility: a little place cannot do much about climate change and, in any case, must attend to other priorities first.  Also, an islet would seem unable to generate renewable energy. Ironically, Trinidad is deferring solar and wind farms because they would loom as “mega projects” on the insular landscape.  Ultimately – and in places far larger than Trinidad - an obsession with locality thwarts the most pressing, planetary forms of environmental thought and action.

In this discussion paper on the intersections of global class politics and racial hierarchy in Woodbrook, Trinidad, Post-Colonialism is defined as an economic and cultural movement that involves the socio-economic assimilation and class consolidation of indigenous colonial elites and local masses in the successful expansion of global capitalism. It is the era before and after Independence in which foreign elites are replaced by local ones, such as the “Afro- Saxons” in Trinidad, and the former colonial powers manage to export their internal problem and conflict between rich and poor from the national to the international stage. It is a period where the local populations of former colonies are seduced by political talk of rapid socio-economic development and progress but instead experience underdevelopment, dependency and persistent subordination to the politics, beliefs and political economy of former colonial masters and also the predominantly white settler nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia. This last point highlights the continued salience in the post-colonial era of the racial hierarchy and ideology of white supremacy produced in the original colonial encounter. In this definition, it is evidence that the post-colonial era not only failed to redress the violent legacies, both symbolic and real of colonialism, but also inscribed within the foundations of post-colonialism a cultural logic of racism tied to transnational forms of wealth creation and economic inequality. As such it becomes clear that the prefix “post” in post-colonialism, implying succession and a break with the former colonial period is disingenuous because there is substantial continuity between the eras with a relationship of domination and subordination maintained through control of the international marketplace, culture industries and local political leaders educated in and by the metropole.

Globalization is producing a new kind of fictional writing which may be better described as cosmopolitan than postcolonial because it moves beyond oppositional, emancipatory, or even center-periphery narrative threads.  I propose to illustrate this by analyzing a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (an American of South Asian origin) and a novel by Andrea Levy (a British citizen of Jamaican origin).  Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon portray, among other things, the ongoing shifts in power relationships between people whose ancestors were colonial “subjects” and those who in the past would have been privileged by their racial, ethnic, geographical , or even class positions.  However, rather than portraying a simple reversal  of power – the paradigm of “upward mobility”—both texts, in their different ways, present a much more complicated picture of the ongoing effects of globalization, thus exposing the limits of contemporary postcolonial theory.  Notions of “diaspora” and “hybridity” assume a center-margin binary which is rapidly breaking down in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world.  By discussing the specific ways in which both of these contemporary texts deconstruct simplistic binaries of power, geographical origin, geographical location, and cultural identity, the proposed paper will argue that globalization is generating an ongoing transition from postcoloniality to cosmopolitanism in these and other literary texts. 

Brief biography
Dr Elizabeth Jackson earned her PhD in 2007 from the University of London, where she taught until 2010.  She has recently taken up her current position as Lecturer in Literatures in English at UWI.  Her book Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

Cette communication propose d’analyser Le revenant I (2007) et Le Revenant II (La pierre de Damballah) de l’écrivain haïtien Gary Victor, un récit d’aventures qui renoue d’emblée avec ses origines sociales et littéraires en paraissant en feuilleton dans Ticket Magazine, en Haïti. Bouleversant indéniablement les caractéristiques du genre,  ce récit se situe au carrefour d’une tradition littéraire manifestée notamment par l’emprunt de personnages clef (les policiers corrompus, les nettoyeurs, les trafiquants…) et d’une tradition populaire haïtienne (le héros vengeur est un zombi, les diables sont de la fête…). En outre, Le revenant se lit comme un récit d’action loufoque dans lequel l’intention comique se reflète aussi bien dans l’emprunt aux croyances vaudou locales que dans la mise en écriture de formes populaires issues de différentes régions du globe (scènes et effets qui s’inspirant directement des Western spaghetti, des films de karaté ou des films/ ouvrages de science fiction, comics à l’américaine et manga).
Cette communication cherche à explorer cette alliance entre des traditions et des croyances locales et des genres populaires issus d’un contexte global.

This paper examines Nalo Hopkinson’s short story, “Shift,” from intertextual and literary linguistic perspectives. Hopkinson employs allusions from a variety of literary traditions to tell the story of a black man who compulsively seeks his identity in the eyes of golden-haired white women. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is the main source for this narrative that interprets Shakespeare’s work in interesting new ways despite its favoured status among postcolonial writers. Hopkinson refuses to be caught in the demonization of Prospero as the colonial master which tends to reduce postcolonial revisionings to binary debates. Instead, Hopkinson shifts the focus to Caliban, Ariel and Sycorax, making them the main characters in the story (Prospero and Miranda appear as minor characters only) to explore issues of racial hybridity, racism, and related issues of self-definition and identity. The syncretism of these stories and allusions, European and non-European, further complicate readings of the story, shifting interpretation (of the story and of the main characters) beyond postcolonialism to an insistence on autonomous readings of oneself and identity.
Moreover, as Hopkinson’s use of intertextual linkage suggests a shift from being seen to seeing, the varying narrators and codes at work in the short story reinforce the idea of “shift” via linguistic means. The mutability of voice, pronoun reference, and seeing “I” in the work complicate ideological positioning by showing Caliban’s identity to be open to his own interpretation while simultaneously suggesting, in its use of the passivising second person narrative, that he must make a concerted effort to do so by first breaking ties with the subject-object binary.

This paper proposes to analyze images of the United States found in a representative array of Anglophone Caribbean literary texts, including Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death,  George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Paule Marshall’s “To Da-duh, In Memoriam,” Caryl Phillips’s A State of Independence, and Dionne Brand’s “I Used to Like the Dallas Cowboys.”  The aim will not be an exhaustive analysis of these texts, but instead a suggestive catalog of the ways in which the United States has been perceived in the Caribbean literary imagination.  In turn, this catalog will be used to propose the critical benefits of disrupting the binaristic, colonizer-colonized lens through which Anglophone Caribbean literature is traditionally viewed.  Such benefits, the paper will suggest, include a healthy suspicion of the reflexive conception of the United States as merely (and always) a neocolonial power and, subsequently, a more nuanced and politically productive understanding of how the cultural and economic power of the United States might function within English-speaking Caribbean societies in a global – and globalizing – context. 

From the mass hysteria/demonic possession at the local secondary school to the descent of helicopters and military personnel to the town savannah, the first week I spent in Moruga was punctuated by events that conjured the place of this region in the national imaginary.  These two events, especially the former, stirred local and national debates regarding the relation of belief in supernatural forces, on the one hand, and rural economic livelihoods, on the other, to postcoloniality, development and modernity.  This paper examines the complex relations and convergences between religion and rationality, spiritual and psychological forces, modernity and belief, and rural and urban spaces that these events in Moruga conjured.
While questioning the construction of Moruga in media and popular discourse, as purportedly marked by superstition, obeah or illicit livelihoods, I will ask what this imagined elsewhere says about the spatialization of a postcolonial modernity in Trinidad and Tobago.  Interviews and field work in Moruga underscore the cosmopolitan character of the place and a longstanding and complex relation with “science,” conceived as experimentation with both spiritual and material forces.  In addition, interviewees often emphasized how military operations, the failure to deliver running water, and lack of economic opportunity reinforced a perception of neglect by the national government.  Finally, interviews revealed issues of gender and sexual violence, which the events at the secondary school, whether “mass hysteria” or “spirit possession,” evoked.   

Broadly speaking, postcolonial theory has often come under criticism for being too generalising, lacking geographical specificity or historical nuance. However, postcolonial theorists have increasingly placed greater emphasis on issues of locality and transnationalism in a bid to move beyond both Eurocentric and nationalistic boundaries.  With attention to these developments, this paper considers the nationalising of Trinidad and Tobago as narrated from the political heart of the nation, Port of Spain, from literary sources such as Earl Lovelace, Monique Roffey and Eric Williams. Drawing on particular local sites of national galvanisation and tension, the argument considers the symbols, rhetoric, mobility and emplacement of the nation’s political figureheads.
Dubbed the University of Woodford Square and the People’s Parliament by Eric Williams and the Black Power movement respectively, Woodford Square has been symbolic historically as a site of national politics, local agitation, trade unionism, demonstration and even suppression. The fragmented narratives that have made this site politically resonant reflect issues which are still of great local, regional and global concern today.
At heart, tensions arose in 1970s Trinidad as pre-existing fissures from the colonial era appeared to carry over into the independent state. It is here that the ‘post’ in postcolonialism serves as an interesting meditation on the life of nations after colonialism. In conclusion, the paper considers how increasingly concerns about ‘the local’ affected national politics and may shed light on future models of development. 

According to Barbara Lalla, Caribbean criticism has adopted a “take it or leave it” attitude to postcolonialism. The ambivalence the statement evokes, an all too familiar avowal/disavowal syndrome that has come to represent what it means to be (post) colonial, opens a teasing gateway into a matrix of intellectual and cultural  discourses and practices that are constantly being reworked as the region evolves and seeks to define what it means to have emerged from a history of colonialism and to negotiate its way in a current global order where it is simultaneously repositioned as a site for exploitation both from within and without in a manner that complicates old hegemonies of power and oppression. This paper interrogates the well-known “creature” of the Caribbean’s folklore tradition, Annancy, a well-known totem of resistance and transformation deployed by Caribbean writers and thinkers for articulating that passage, its perils and possibilities.

Carnival has become the constitutive “national” symbol of Trinidad and Tobago, while critics have frequently pointed to the exclusions inherent in the particular construction of national culture that renders the festival central. Yet in practice, Carnival is claimed across its exclusions, troubling its traditional association with particular race, class, regional, or religious affiliations. Gerard Aching points out the contemporary appropriation of Carnival by middle class women (in contrast to the lower class jamettes who helped shape its symbolism) as a means of very visibly expressing a certain subjectivity, while Tejaswini Niranjana and Shalini Puri analyze how East Indian women have extended their traditional cultural and gender roles into Carnival by transforming the musical codes within which they were expected to create. What is striking in both cases is the significant role that women play in troubling the limits of class and race as they are conceived for the performance of nation. Less explicit is the idea that these womanly transgressions are made possible through the pressures of the international sphere on a festival no longer simply national, pressures forcing Carnival to become more globally legible. The seemingly middle-class transcultural values of globalization might be the very path to a renegotiation of national symbols, where for the first time women become the pioneers and write (or sing, or dance) themselves into the tableau. But what female agency is expressed in Carnival bacchanal, what compromises made, and what exclusions written back into the reconstructed, re-gendered construction of this  Caribbean nation?

Bio: Kavita Singh is 4th year PhD student at Cornell University.  She is working on a dissertation on Caribbean literature and culture which brings together a philosophy of language and a carnival aesthetic theory to think comparatively about how nation is performed and negotiated through culture.

This paper interrogates issues surrounding Caribbean indigenous knowledge and the impact of globalisation on knowledge creation and epistemological development in the region to appeal for a return or renewal of Caribbean knowledge independence. Has the English-speaking Caribbean ever had “knowledge sovereignty” or have the region’s contributions to global knowledge always been overshadowed or subsumed within the scope of international relations? These are some critical questions this paper seeks to explore, in addition to the articulated and understood necessity that Caribbean development must fit into a globalised structural framework as it pertains to IR theory is questioned. Plantation economy theory and other relevant concepts are employed as a basis for this analysis on knowledge independence 50 years after “granted” independence in the region. Hegemonic structural discourse and an emergence of a new Caribbean ethos in respect of “genuine” scholarship, which accounts for the peculiar realities, and addresses concerns of the region are discussed.

This paper will situate a series of films made in London in the mid 70s and early 80s, including Horace Ove’s Pressure (1975) and Franco Russo’s Babylon (1980), as a grouping of historical texts that chronicle that mobilities, spaces and sounds of a specifically post-imperial image of the city of London. In conjunction with the work of cultural theorists including Paul Gilroy, George Lipstiz and others, I will argue that these films work to allegorize the experiences of post-imperial Caribbean migration and settlement in London, thereby producing a distinctly transnational image of the city, but one that also makes explicit reference to the circumstances of Caribbean migrants living in London during this historical moment. These films interweave what is fictional and with what is real, allowing one to glean the contours of a post-imperial geography of London, as a site of trauma and simultaneously, as one of potential transformation. In essence, elements of Black British Culture during his time period worked to visualize, theorize and critique the shifting dynamics of post-imperial London, thereby producing new geographical as well as conceptual understandings of the city. As such, this paper will also demonstrate the various points of intersection between these films and other modalities of Black British Culture in the 70s and early 80s, particularly with respect to literature, theoretical writings and music.

Contact Information:

Malini Guha, Assistant Professor at Carleton University
Email: Malini_Guha@carelton.ca
Address: 423 St. Patrick's Bldg.
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
K1S 5B6
Telephone number: (613) 520-2600x4015

Short Bio:

Malini is currently an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carlton University. She received her PhD from the University of Warwick, in the department of Film and Television Studies in 2009. Her research interests involve theorizing the relationship between space, the cinema and the city as well as investigating the subject of cinema and migration, with a particular emphasis on postcolonial and post-imperial modes of mobility, displacement and settlement.

Like other transnational flows, the globalisation of food has variably affected consumer preferences and values across the globe.  For instance, while many affluent consumers in the ‘North’ now prefer ‘green’ or ‘ethical’ foods, middle classes in the Caribbean (i.e. Trinidad) seem to prefer ‘modern’ culinary experiences such as that offered by Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Consumer preferences for imported, processed foods in the Caribbean are continuous with an earlier era when all aspects of society – land use, credit, research, markets, etc. – were geared towards plantation crops refined and consumed in the metropolis, which, in turn, marketed their industrially-produced foods to the colonies.  In opposition to this historical dependency, movements calling for consumers to ‘go local’ have emerged in the Caribbean, becoming part of political agendas as a result of global food crises, as illustrated by the most recent ‘Food and Nutrition Security Policy’ for CARICOM.  In this paper, I consider contested food preferences and values in the Caribbean in historical and geographical context.  Will Caribbean movements that emphasize sovereignty over the local and regional food system overturn long-held ideas about ‘modern’, imported food in the region?  Using ethnographic data, I uncover diverging narratives of food production and consumption in the Caribbean, from Cuban farmers who produce for the ‘patrimony’ of their nation to young people in Trinidad who see KFC as a prime example of ‘Trini’ food.

Theorists have argued that because of the region’s colonial history, ethnic identity is flexible in the Caribbean (e.g. Best, 2001). This was evident in the current study: half of participants did not self-report an ethnic identity. A psychological perspective was thus used to examine: (a) who reported ethnic identity uncertainty by race, age, and identity status, and (b) whether identity uncertainty was unique to ethnicity or evident in other identity domains. Participants were 127 undergraduate students, ranging in age from 19 to 60 years-old. Using options in a socio-demographic questionnaire, 35% of participants identified as African, 29% as Indian, and 34% as Mixed. An identity development questionnaire also asked participants to self-report an ethnic identity, and assessed whether participants had achieved (i.e., were committed to) an ethnic identity, as well as other identity domains. Fifty-eight percent of Africans, 32% of East Indians, and 49% of Mixed participants did not self-report an ethnic identity. Eighty-percent of participants who did not self-report an ethnic identity were also not ethnic identity achieved. This lack of commitment, however, was not unique to ethnicity. Individuals not achieved in ethnic identity were also not achieved in other identity domains. This global level of identity uncertainty might reflect historically enculturated ambivalence emerging from the identity disruption caused by 300 years of ‘seasoning’ into colonial culture during slavery. Ethnic identity uncertainty increased with age. This suggests that, unlike participants who grew up as colonials, for younger adults, ethnic identity achievement might be a consequence of attaining political independence.

This panel responds to the conference call for submissions dealing with new geographies including power relations within the Global South, and, in particular, to the theme of ‘travelling cultures: postcolonial take on mobility and transnational connection; we also aim to speak to the conference’s interest in ‘new Geographies of power: how can postcolonial theory account for the multiple heterogeneity and the various, contested voices and positions that make up the global South?’ The panel’s collective focus will be on forms of popular dance: salsa, sega, garba and dandiya; furthermore, all papers demonstrate an interest in these dance forms as practiced through multiple displacements: salsa’s nascent popularity in India, sega’s parallels with chutney, and garba and dandiya as danced by twice-migrant East African Gujarati communities in Britain. With an accent on embodied histories, pleasure and transgression, the panel seeks to vivify postcolonial theory through an examination of transnational circuits of dance and their intersections with older, diasporic routes and roots. We also seek to interrupt productively textualised discourse through globalised economies of pleasure (as signified by our title quote from Colombian musician Shakira).
Abstracts of the individual papers, and bio notes of each contributor, follow.

Garba and Dandiya in the Double Diaspora
Maya Parmar

My doctoral research, located in literary studies, seeks to comment upon cultural representation in Britain by the twice displaced Gujarati East African community. Because this double diaspora represents identity through social forms that are often beyond the traditional written text, my research accordingly refocuses the literary gaze to consider other modes of communication. These include culinary practices, visual material and dance. In reading the non-textual as textual I am compelled to critique Eurocentric modes of thought, and the binary systems they proliferate,  because western epistemology often privileges not only the written over the spoken, but language too. In this paper I shall focus on the role of dance within the Gujarati East African community in Britain. Primarily, I ask how do the dances of garba and dandiya – both arguably traditional practices of regional Gujarat – represent a community that has been dislocated twice. I also question why dance, alongside visual material and culinary practice, has been favoured as an articulation of the self and community over the fictional text by the double diaspora. What is it that the repertoire (Diana Taylor) or embodied performance can achieve that the archive cannot? I argue that in a community that has been doubly displaced ‘secrecy’ is paramount to cultural survival and the non-textual text represents an opportunity to embed identity. Whilst excavating the performativity of dance I also consider how garba and dandiya forge a collective identity and nationalism, giving way to imagined communities and imaginary homelands.
Presented alongside this paper will be digital and visual representations of the dances I refer to.

Jamaica Kincaid's *My Garden (Book)* shows how conscious she is of the implication of gardening in politics, and it connects to the repeated attempt in her garden writing to bring those politics into view as colonial, transnational, and global ones.  This recognition of the political nature of gardening is not new, since it has been prominently on view in both the literature and practice of gardening since at least the 17th century.  Given Kincaid's positioning, garden politics feed into an anti-colonial polemic; they do so throughout her writing.  But these writings tend to arrive at results disconcerting to all those involved, presenting readers ultimately with a difficult, disorienting, and idiosyncratic reading both of gardening and of postcolonial politics.

As Seyla Benhabib among others have argued, in the new multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Europe the inherent tension of the modern nation-state, between universal human rights claims and particularistic cultural and national identities, is becoming increasingly dramatic. Although the great dividing line of racism in today’s Europe is culture rather than race, it cannot be divorced from Eurocentrism and its notions of difference, supremacy and hierarchy. Accordingly, even in Scandinavia, the hostility towards “foreigners” tend to follow predictable scales beginning with neighboring Scandinavians and increasing with continental Europeans, followed by Southern Europeans and being most prevalent with non-Europeans—especially Africans. Concurrently, Scandinavian societies—with their egalitarian ideals, histories of international solidarity, and self-perceptions of being untainted by European imperialism and colonialism—are dominated by an ideology of “color-blindness” and a widespread denial that race relations and racial discrimination are relevant to its societies. Focusing on Sweden, I will argue that this kind of denial fails to come to terms with the elephant hiding in the midst of Swedish racism, namely the entitlements of whiteness, and that the new situation posed by immigration calls for an internationalization of civil rights and national belonging.

MICHAEL MCEACHRANE received his B.A. and M.A. in Sweden and a PhD in philosophy from Åbo Akademi University in Finland. He has been visiting assistant professor of philosophy at City University of New York, a visiting lecturer of philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of West Indies, S:t Augustine, Trinidad. Among other things, he is the co-editor of Sverige och de Andra: Postkoloniala Perspektiv [Sweden and the Others: Postcolonial Perspectives] (Natur & Kultur, 2001), Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and is currently working on an anthology that is forthcoming with Routledge and has a foreword by Paul Gilroy, Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Engaging Blackness in Northern Europe.

This paper inaugurates a postcolonial critique that takes stock of the fact that, beyond the much-avowed free transnational flow of capital and the restricted flow of migrants, a critical function of post 9/11 surveillance worldwide is to manage the terrorist spectacle in public spaces such as airports through a paradoxical discourse of visibility and invisibility buttressed by racial profiling. The resultant profile picture of surveillance, argues this paper, is in monochrome: black terrorists and white tourists. Mobilizing the analytical category of the assemblage whose provenance is Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical work on deterritorialization—based on the destabilization of traditional concepts of territory—aviation ports of entry are seen to discursively transmogrify into points of entry into the public discourse of the Islamic/Arab/African militant terrorist-cum-trafficker with the aid of profiling, biometrics and even nanotechnology.

Accordingly, this paper takes its cues from Hempel & Töpfer (2009) as it grounds the question of airport regulation on the notion of the ‘surveillant assemblage’ such as it is applied by Haggerty & Ericson (2000) to explain regulation as part of a surveillance consensus that creates ‘the illusion of total inclusion’ by means of technologies that increase visibility as they work invisibly.  Surely this exclusive visibility does not redeem what the socially invisible and unnamed Afro-American protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) decried but recalls instead what Fredric Jameson sees as “a problem with the body as a positive slogan”(2003:17), as well as racism against British blacks of, say, Caribbean descent so vividly captured by the titular significance of Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (1987).

In this context, airport regulation of exits and entries into airport terminals arguably renders that space what Bigo (2006a) calls the ‘ban-opticon’ (which is distinct from Foucault’s ‘panopticon’ with regard to emphasis on mobility instead of the fixed gaze), in that “only the few profiled as “unwelcome” are monitored by a few” (Hempel & Töpfer, 2009: 160). Nothing exemplifies this more than the unfair detention of Wole Soyinka in a South African airport,especially because the Nobel Prize inner was officially invited to give an address in honour of Nelson Mandela.

About the Author:
Dr Michaelangelo Kgomotso Masemola, PhD(Sheffield, U.K.) is the Chair of the English Department at North-West University’s Mafikeng Campus. His primary interest is in the representational time of transnational writing, especially autobiography and travel writing. Some of his recent articles appear in The Journal of Literary Studies, Current Writing: Text & Reception in Southern Africa, and has previously penned the odd review for The English Academy Review  He has also contributed several chapters in books, the latest of which is Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing (London & Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010) and it was edited by Rajendra Chetty (Editor), Jaspal K. Singh

La postcolonialité s’oppose à la conception d’une histoire occidentale qui serait la seule possible, ou du moins légitime, dans la mesure où elle serait humaniste et porteuse d’un progrès. Toute histoire locale décentrée ou périphérique par rapport à ce récit européen serait appelée à y entrer, c’est-à-dire en fait à s’intégrer dans l’histoire de la mondialisation qui est celle de la domination européenne. Contre cette prétention, une perspective postcoloniale considère qu’il y aurait une autre histoire possible que celle de ce récit narratif européen moderne dans lequel tous doivent entrer pour réaliser le progrès de l’humanité.
Affirmer cette possibilité d’une autre écriture de soi passe généralement par la preuve par l’exemple, consistant en l’étude d’autres cultures effectives. Cependant, les tenants de la postcolonialité s’inscrivent dans un monde mondialisé autour d’une hégémonie occidentale et se situent souvent dans une culture occidentale dont ils sont originaires, dont ils ont reçu leur formation intellectuelle, où ils travaillent ou enseignent. Il peut dès lors sembler pertinant de voir dans quelle mesure la conception même de la postcolonialité est une possibilité de la culture occidentale que pourtant elle critique.
La possibilité même d’une histoire qui ne soit pas toujours celle des vainqueurs mais celle de ceux dont la voix propre n’est pas reconnue au sein d’un récit univoque est en effet une question centrale de l’interrogation que la modernité européenne  porte sur elle-même. Il est  possible de reconnaitre dans l’ambition de la postcolonialité par exemple la réalisation d’une histoire telle que Benjamin ou Foucault l’appelaient de leurs vœux, le refus lyotardien d’une histoire unique ou l’affirmation derridienne d’une certitude de soi différée. En effet, la manière européenne d’écrire l’histoire est elle même mise en mal, plus qu’à proprement parler mise à mal, par sa propre pratique critique. Les théories postcoloniales semblent s’inscrire dans cette postmodernité et la critique postcoloniale de l’eurocentréité est elle-même en un sens une pratique européenne.
Faire subir à la théorie postcoloniale cette déconstruction à laquelle elle soumet elle-même la culture, c'est a dire l'inclure pleinement dans la culture postmoderne, peut peut-être permettre de s’interroger sur les pratiques effectives des récits alternatifs sans tomber dans la tentation du refus de tout ce qui est européen au nom de la postcolonialité. Il ne saurait s’agir en effet d’une position radicale et jusqu'au boutiste, mais au contraire de l’interrogation déconstructrice – plutôt que destructrice – des récits hégémoniques qui ne pourraient plus, dans cette perspective, être considérés comme simplement aliénants.

It would not at all be clichéd to say that much of the Caribbean is traditionalist. For many, it is still difficult to speak aloud of homosexuality and lesbianism far less of the variations in gender identity which exist. Mayra Santos Febres, the Puerto Rican novelist is one Caribbean writer whose work interrogates queer geographies. Her first novel, Sirena Selena vestida de pena is set in the heterosexualized space of one Caribbean island: the Dominican Republic. Interestingly however, what she does is present Puerto Rico as a place of resistance for gays and transgender subjects.
In the novel, Mayra Santos Febres interrogates perceptions of gender identity through three main characters. They are Selena, Martha and Leocadio. The first is a black fifteen year old boy who chooses a permanent transgender identity. His „assumed‟ mother Martha is an older transsexual and in a parallel story line, Leocadio is a young gay boy uneasily beginning to grapple with his identity. Their painful experiences throughout the novel are rendered harsher when we listen to their voices through Santos Febres‟ choice of language.
In this paper, my analysis will first discuss the novel and then present a critique of the connection between gender, race and sexuality in the novel. Indeed, I seek to demonstrate that the novel is as much a critique on heteronormative family life as it is a commentary on how sexuality and race can be “performed” thereby presenting a space of resistance. Finally the paper argues that ultimately what Santos Febres uncovers is a complicated notion of race, desire and identity assumed in a Puerto Rican (and by extension Caribbean) context.

The conflation of two manifestations of symbol power in “religion” and “orthodox masculinity” is a common mechanism for consolidating, manipulating and exercising influence. This paper explores how this process works and how it can be exploited both to advance and to suppress human autonomy in the Caribbean and internationally. Furthermore, this essay argues that the powerful alliance of both “symbol” constructs especially in their negative manifestations does a disservice to religion (in its more beneficent expressions) and undermines social integrity by fueling the motivation to violence ‘in the name of God’.

A growing body of writing and research is emerging on the discourse of globalization, which necessarily contains within it marked contradictory strands. The dominant strand, representing a hegemonic world order rooted in Europe and the United States of America describes and depicts globalization as an inevitable socio-economic force which cannot but redound to the good of all if properly handled by the powers that be; the second is a counter-discourse which demonstrates the hypocrisy in the former perspective and strikes back by redefining globalization in its own terms, by setting up new geographies of power and resistance which operate by reshaping the world in terms of a different postcolonial order.
On both sides there is inevitably a rhetoric of deceit; in this sense the discourse of globalization is no different from any that has gone before. However, the nature of new media gives it greater force, greater reaching power to influence and shape human reality as never before.
This paper critiques the discourse of globalization as the force that will ultimately determine the twenty-first century world order and argues for an ethical stance in analysis which alone can unmask the deception perpetrated.