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JWIL has been awarded the 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters

JWIL is the proud recipient of the 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters. We extend our deep thanks to the Bocas Lit Fest team for honoring our work in this way. This is indeed wind at our backs as we herald the 40th year of the JWIL project, fruit of multiple generations of labor and commitment. Below you will find the very generous commendation from the Bocas team. Please support Bocas in turn as they continue to nurture and sustain Caribbean literature and literary community in vital and irreplaceable ways. https://www.bocaslitfest.com/awards/henry-swanzy-award/

“The recipient of the 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award is The Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL), first published in 1986, in recognition of its indelible role as the most significant scholarly journal dedicated to the field of Caribbean literature — a vital forum for critic and creative debate, and an archive of research and thought including almost every scholar of note working on Anglophone Caribbean literature over three generations.

All the previous winners of the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award have been individuals, rightly honoured for their singular careers. This year’s award breaks new ground, recognising an institution that is also a collective. As we know from the history of the Bocas Lit Fest itself, much pioneering work in the creative field, as in scholarship, is the product of collective and collaborative effort. As we mark the 15th year of the Festival, it is an appropriate moment to expand the scope of the Swanzy Award in this way, and set a new precedent.

JWIL, from its beginning, has been a collaboration among the campuses of The University of the West Indies, rooted in efforts, dating back to the 1970s, to firmly establish and validate West Indian literature as a scholarly field. At the same time, the journal has always had an international remit, as befits a discipline rooted in a particular geography and history but global in its concerns, ambitions, and influence.

Over the decades — first in print and, since 2015, as an entirely online journal — JWIL has published approximately 1,000 pieces: scholarly articles, book reviews, and interviews, as well as occasional creative works. Contributors have ranged from eminent senior scholars — some of them rightly known as parents of West Indian literary studies — to early-career researchers, and indeed publishing a peer-reviewed piece in JWIL has long been considered a rite of passage within the discipline. In recent years, the journal has worked to expand its reach beyond academia to address broader literary audiences, including innovations such as regular social media residencies which allow scholars to share ideas and reflections on their current research, or on a key literary figure.

In the editorial note opening JWIL Vol. 1, No. 1 — published in October 1986 — original editor in chief Mark McWatt explained the initial motivation for founding the journal, as a forum for publishing the increasing number of papers presented annually at another institution, the West Indian Literature Conference. As McWatt plainly wrote: “It was felt that, like other national and regional literatures, West Indian literature deserved its own scholarly journal.” McWatt, long based at The UWI’s Cave Hill campus, was indefatigably assisted from the beginning by Victor Chang of Mona campus, who eventually succeeded him in the formal role of editor in chief. Chang was succeeded in turn by Evelyn O’Callaghan, and the current co-editors in chief are Michael Bucknor and Lisa Outar. These five have successively headed JWIL’s masthead over the years, and deserve particular credit and praise for their vision and leadership. But the Bocas Swanzy Award also encompasses, and is shared by, the dozens of scholars and writers who have served on the editorial board; as editorial advisors; as section editors; as editors of special themed issues; and for that matter as peer reviewers, contributing thousands of hours of their time to the essential and entirely anonymous intellectual labour of evaluating and helping improve the work and thought of their colleagues.

As our region’s literary canon expands, as more and more writers add their voices and ideas to the creative ferment, as Caribbean literature shoots off into ever more diverse and unexpected directions, the need for critical and scholarly analysis and interpretation will be ever more urgent. The institution and the community of JWIL will continue to be crucial, as a forum for debate and an instrument of dissemination — the journal of record, in many ways, for the nation of the imagination that is Caribbean literature.”

Introduction to JWIL Blog

We inaugurate this new JWIL blog with Michael R. Soriano reflecting upon the launch of the exciting new digital publishing initiative Machineel + Seagrape, an open-access journal founded by Kelly Baker Josephs and dedicated to the publication of Caribbean plays. As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the JWIL project, which was founded in 1986, we are looking backwards with an impulse to preserve the record of work that has gone before to build the field of Caribbean literary studies, as well as looking forward to the new stages of life and community building for the journal that lie ahead.

We imagine this blog as a space for reflection on past and ongoing innovations in the field of Caribbean letters. The JWIL blog will be published quarterly. We invite proposals and submissions from our literary community for this blog series. As Josephs has noted, “The Caribbean blogosphere [has] recreated . . . a place to gather and discuss current events and longstanding issues of concern to Caribbean peoples and Caribbean literature” (225). We envision this blog operating in this way, offering insights into the behind-the-scenes work that goes into growing the field and as a space where we can highlight figures and texts, both past and present, whose contributions have not received the recognition they deserve.

This period in Caribbean literary culture is especially ripe for reflection as foundational figures join the ancestors and as key anniversaries come around. With JWIL, Peepal Tree Press, and Sister Vision Press all turning forty, and House of Nehesi Press turning forty-five, we are especially attentive to the field of Caribbean publishing and to the vital role that regionally oriented projects have in nurturing and sustaining intellectual community. We turn our attention in this first blog post to Machineel + Seagrape’s work to improve access to Caribbean drama, which has been one of the most accessible and popular forms of Caribbean literature for decades, but has also been among the most ephemeral in terms of preservation and circulation. We welcome you as readers and invite your proposals for future contributions.

 

Work Cited

Josephs, Kelly Baker. “Digital Yards: Caribbean Writing on Social Media and Other Digital Platforms.” Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020, edited by Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 219–34.

 

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”

 

 

Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute 2025 in Jamaica

The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) invites applications for their week-long residential digital humanities institute, to be held at The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in June 2025. The CDSC supports the growth and development of digital humanities scholarship, training, and infrastructure for the Caribbean and its diasporas. The Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute (CDSsi) trains scholars, at all levels, working at the intersections of Caribbean Studies and digital humanities. Thanks to a generous Mellon Foundation grant, the CDSC will be able to cover travel and accommodations for fellows selected for participation in the summer institute.

For more information, including the requirements for submission and application form, please see the Call for Applications here.

The deadline for applications is Friday, 31 January 2025 and there will be a virtual information session on Thursday, 16 January 2025.

JWIL mourns the passing of Maryse Condé (1934-2024)

The Journal of West Indian Literature joins many in celebrating the life and writing of Maryse Condé, the dynamic Guadeloupean author who passed away on April 2, 2024 at the age of 90. Her prolific and globally-recognized body of work offered postcolonial feminist perspectives informed by her peripatetic life led across the Caribbean, Africa, Western Europe and the US. Among the many awards she gathered in her lifetime were two major honors by France – a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor in 2014 and a Grand Croix in the National Order of Merit in 2019 – and the New Academy Prize in Literature, an alternative prize created when the Nobel was not awarded in 2018. She was twice shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, first for her entire body of work in 2015, and then for her novel The Gospel According to the New World in 2023. She chaired Columbia University’s Center for French and Francophone studies from its foundation in 1997 to 2002. She retired from teaching in 2005.

Her debut novel Hérémakhonon was published in 1976 after Condé returned to France (where she had been sent from Guadeloupe for high school) after over a decade spent in West Africa. She completed her doctorate in comparative literature in 1975. Her major works include the novels Ségou (1984) and its sequel Ségou II (1985); Moi, Tituba, sorcière: noire de Salem (1986; I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem), based on the story of an enslaved woman tried for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts; and Une Saison à Rihata (1981; A Season in Rihata), set in late twentieth-century Africa. Condé continued to explore with great complexity and nuance themes of postcolonial identity, gender, memory, community belonging, and Black diasporic life in her later works such as Traversée de la mangrove (1989; Crossing the Mangrove), La Colonie du nouveau monde (1993), La Migration des coeurs (1995; Windward Heights), Desirada (1997), Célanire cou-coupé (2000; Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat?), The Belle Créole (2020), Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003; The Story of the Cannibal Woman), Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006; Victoire: My Mother’s Mother), Les belles ténébreuses (2008), En attendant la montée des eaux (2010; Waiting for the Waters to Rise), Fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (2017; The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana), and L’Évangile du nouveau monde (2021; The Gospel According to the New World). She was known for challenging orthodoxy of all kinds and was especially resistant to the idea that she needed to write in creole or to conform to masculinist ideas about the nature of créolite.

In her later years, Condé, despite failing health, continued to delve into profound storytelling, describing it as a compelling yet enigmatic compulsion. During her JWIL Twitter residency on Condé in April 2023, Kavita Ashana Singh (@kavitaashana), a Caribbean literature professor at the University of Houston and a former student of Condé’s, reflected on the inseparability of life and writing in the Guadeloupean writer’s oeuvre. Singh’s interview with Condé appears in JWIL’s November 2022 issue. We honor her life and her work.

JWIL mourns the passing of Rooplall Monar (1945-2024)

We at JWIL honor the memory and legacy of the Guyanese writer, Rooplall Monar (1945-2024). A poet, novelist and short story writer, Monar’s work, which centers a rich Guyanese creole, paints vivid pictures of Indo-Guyanese lives on the terrain of the sugar estates and elsewhere. Part of the influential Messenger group of Guyanese writers, Monar’s 1985 Backdam People, with its humor, orality and poignancy, remains essential reading for its portrayal of Indo-Guyanese sugar estate workers in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work treats with dignity the lives of the rural working class and their resilience and community building in the face of exploitative conditions.

https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/rooplall-monar
https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/reviews/backdam-people-3

The 2024 Caribbean Digital Virtual Artist’s Residency

The 2024 Caribbean Digital Virtual Artist’s Residency

The Caribbean Digital (TCD) and Alice Yard invite applications for their annual virtual residency program for artists of the Caribbean and its diasporas who work in digital media. The residency aims to facilitate the development of new artworks in digital media that investigate ideas and practices in Caribbean Digital Humanities and engage with scholars in the TCD network and community. The residency is offered in conjunction with the annual Caribbean Digital (TCD) conference, an international event hosted annually at locations in the United States and the Caribbean since 2014, in partnership with Alice Yard, a contemporary art collective based at Granderson Lab in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. This program, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, offers a cash stipend to support research and creative work, curatorial mentorship, virtual studio visits, publication by a professional art writer to document artist’s work, and travel accommodations to present at the annual TCD conference in December 2024.

For more information, including the requirements for submission and application form, please see the Call for Applications here: https://thecaribbeandigital.org/residency/

The deadline for applications is Monday, 1 April 2024

Linzey Corridon’s online residency on the work of Cliff Lashley (Feb 26-March 4, 2024)

Join us from Feb 26-March 4, 2024 for the next JWIL online residency. This residency will be a collaboration between sx salon (@sxsalon) and JWIL (@jwilonline). Linzey Corridon (@westawestindian) will be sharing reflections on the life and work of Dr. Cliff Lashley, the Jamaican librarian-critic, poet, and aesthete (1935-1993).

Cliff Lashley died in February 1993. In 2023, to mark the 30th anniversary of his passing, sx salon did a special issue on his life and work. See smallaxe.net/sxsalon/issues/sx-salon-42. This residency revisits that special issue to think about the intertwined work of memory and mourning. Throughout the week, Corridon will share from popular and less known works by Lashley (both prose and poetry). Many of these texts were gathered as part of the Zotero bibliography of Lashley’s work compiled by Linzey Corridon and Ronald Cummings. See https://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/cliff-lashley-bibliography. The residency will also explore Lashley’s ongoing cultural relevance and the impact he continues to have on the shaping of Caribbean and diaspora society.

Linzey Corridon (@westawestindian) is a writer, Vanier Canada Scholar, and PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. A Vincentian who now resides in Canada, his critical and creative research primarily examines unsettled ideas concerning gender and sexual nonconformity in contemporary Caribbean and diaspora society. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection West of West Indian (Mawenzi House, 2024).

JWIL online residency on Edward Baugh (Jan 29-Feb 5, 2024)

Join us for JWIL‘s first online residency for 2024 which will be a tribute to professor and poet Edward Baugh. From Monday Jan 29 to February 5, we will be sharing readings from Baugh’s poetry by Caribbean writers and scholars.

This residency is a collaboration with the Off the Page Initiative and grows out of the gathering that Off the Page convened on New Year’s Eve to remember Baugh and celebrate his work. Off the Page is a literary initiative based in Jamaica and spearheaded by Carolyn Allen. It aims to share the region’s literature through various forms that engage with the region’s oral and performance culture.

At the end of the residency, the videos, in tribute to Baugh, will be made available on JWIL‘s newly launched YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/@JournalofWestIndianLiterature/videos