Monthly Archives: June 2022

JWIL pays tribute to George Lamming (June 8, 1927-June 4, 2022)

JWIL pays tribute to Caribbean literary luminary George Lamming, who passed away on June 4, 2022 at the age of 94. A towering figure in Caribbeana, Lamming was one of the pillars of a foundational period of our literature, part of the Windrush generation. Creative writer, thinker, scholar, teacher, journalist, he brought all his gifts to bear on the weighty ruminations on Caribbean societies and the search for solutions for our development. Nadi Edwards notes that Lamming  “was a brilliant writer whose complex experimental novels signaled the emergence of a distinct Anglophone Caribbean modernist fiction. He was also an insightful critic whose reading of folk culture, colonial exile and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest anticipated contemporary postcolonial theories of indigeneity, diaspora, and linguistic and cultural hybridity. To quote José David Saldivar, he is ‘the supreme commentator, the one author from our America, who pulls Old World colonialist and New World colonized writing into a coherent and continuous line’”. Lamming’s passing brings us closer to the end of an epoch, though his staggering legacy will never allow the “sun to set” on the Caribbean’s response to empire and its afterlives.

Jarrel De Matas’ Twitter residency on Caribbean sf (June 6-13, 2022)

Join us from June 6-13, 2022 when Jarrel De Matas will be taking over our Twitter feed. Jarrel will be tweeting about our Caribbean sf tradition (science fiction/speculative fiction/fantasy/folklore).  His Twitter residency will highlight some of the creative and intellectual ancestors of Caribbean sf. Over the week, he will shine light on writers such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Suzanne Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, and Curdella Forbes – who he considers to be the initiators of our developing Caribbean sf tradition. He will provide excerpts of each writer’s work including interviews, as well as his own interpretive framework that can allow us to view our “old” creatives in new ways.
Jarrel De Matas is from Trinidad and Tobago. He holds an MA in English Literature from the University of the West Indies. He is a PhD candidate in English and a teaching associate of college writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His main research interests are the confluence of Caribbean science fiction, speculative fiction, and posthuman studies. He is the producer of the podcast “The Caribbean Science Fiction Network.” Twitter handle: @caribbeansfnet.
Jarrel’s previous research in Caribbean studies can be found here:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=03fhkfUAAAAJ&hl=en