Monthly Archives: February 2025

Call for Papers – 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference

The University of Miami, Coral Gables, Department of English & Creative Writing and Hemispheric Caribbean Studies invites submissions of abstracts for the 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference to be held October 8-11, 2025.

Today, Caribbean societies and, by extension, Caribbean writers, reckon with crises that feel both new and cyclical. Increased volcanic activities, record-breaking hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves are only some of the environmental pressures we face. States of Emergency in response to political and social violence have become commonplace in Haiti, Trinidad and Jamaica. As a group of Caribbean critics, we have also had to reckon with the passing of a generation that helped to establish and define our field. In its broadest sense, this year’s Conference of West Indian Literature, convened around the theme, ‘The Time of the Bruggadung: States of EmUrgency,’ asks the simple question: what are Caribbean writers reckoning with today?

That almost comic word of Bajan creole, ‘bruggadung’, becomes something even larger than the onomatopoeic sound of a bang or commotion in the mytho-poetic world of Brathwaite. Instead, it becomes the sound of environmental disaster (“all uh know/ is that one day suddenly so/ this mountain leggo one brugg-a-lung-go” – “The Dust”), or else the sound of social and cultural disaster (“but leh murder start an’ bruggalungdung/ yu cahn fine a man to hole up de side.” – “Rites”), or even the sound of the collapse of Apartheid (‘bongo man a come/ bongo man a come/ bruggadung’ – “Soweto”). Always, the bruggadung signals a time of reckoning.

For this convening of the conference, we are particularly interested in papers that might approach the theme in a broad context. Critical considerations might include:

How have Caribbean writers and other cultural producers been engaged in ringing the warning bell to alert us of the impending social and environmental urgencies of the time?

To what extent has Caribbean literature historically grappled with the intersection of natural disasters and colonial legacies, and how have these narratives foreshadowed the Anthropocene’s emergence as a dominant paradigm?

How has a new generation of Caribbean writers understood and reimagined the emUrgencies of their own times? Moreover, how might we understand these generational differences and the new dialogues that may be required from its critics?

In a world increasingly characterized by physical and ideological barriers, how might the expansive imaginative landscape of mytho-poetics foster cross-cultural understanding and solidarity in the face of various social, economic, and environmental challenges?

Given the prominence of “resilience” discourse in disaster contexts, how have cultural producers challenged the prevailing narratives of trauma and immobility, offering alternative modes of representation that empower affected communities?

For full details, please see: CFP-The 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference

Deadline for abstracts: April 2, 2025

Notifications of acceptance: May 15, 2025

JWIL mourns the passing of Velma Pollard (1937-2025)

We honor the Jamaican scholar and writer Velma Pollard’s life and her invaluable contributions to Caribbean literary culture and education. She was retired from the University of the West Indies, Mona where she was Dean of the Faculty of Education. Over her decades of teaching in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the US, she trained many students, including J. Michael Dash and Victor Chang, who would go on to have their own lasting impact on Caribbean letters. Her scholarship explored the richness of Caribbean Creoles and Caribbean women’s writing. As she describes in a 2018 interview with Simona Bertacco, she considered herself “a teacher who writes” and her multiple poetry and short story collections influenced and inspired many. Her novella Karl won the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1992.

You can read here Pollard’s interview with Bertacco, where she depicts her trajectory as a teacher and writer and emphasizes the importance of regional institutions such as the University of the West Indies as a heady gathering place for fellow Caribbean writers from whom she describes receiving constant encouragement. She was part of the generation of Caribbean students who graduated from UWI in the 1950s and who attended the institution during the time of the short-lived West Indian Federation. This shaped the vision and sense of the Caribbean as a cultural space that we see throughout her work. She also returned from studies in the US and Canada to teach at UWI for a major part of her career, contributing immensely to the life of the institution.

Here she is in conversation with Geraldine Skeete on the Caribbean literary podcast The Space Between Words founded and produced by the late Dr. Giselle Rampaul.

These other resources offer more insight into her prolific and inspiring career:

https://japoetryarchive.nlj.gov.jm/velma-pollard/

https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/velma-pollard

https://www.peepaltreepress.com/blog/whappen/velma-pollard-1937-2025-tiday-fi-mi-tumaro-fi-yu

https://globalvoices.org/2025/02/03/jamaican-poet-velma-pollard

And, from our JWIL archives, here is Velma Pollard in conversation with fellow Jamaican intellectuals and UWI stalwarts Evelyn O’Callaghan and Betty Wilson at a West Indian Literature conference circa 1984.

Finally, we offer an excerpt from Velma’s own poem “Warner Woman Too” published in JWIL’s November 2006 festschrift issue for Edward Baugh, which is a fitting reflection on this somber moment:

 

I turn death columns every day

Stricken with fear

That I might find a face I know

eyes bright still

shining from the page

 

or worse that

“In Memoriam”

some friend

I thought had merely gone

last year

or year before to foreign

crying crime or the economy

(or both)

 

might sit there gazing

schoolgirl smile intact

(wearing the age she chose)

and almost wave at me

after the internal warner woman

whispered (sudden)

tapping on her arm

“your time now, dear”