Erna Brodber is perhaps the Caribbean writer who has engaged most complexly with the meaning of Emancipation across her novels and critical work. For August, the month when we mark Emancipation, we turn our attention to the writings of Erna Brodber. Join us from August 14-21 when Leighan Renaud (@LeighanRenaud) will be looking at the life, fiction and nonfiction of Erna Brodber.

“I will consider the ways that Brodber engages with many aspects of Caribbean studies through both ethnography and fiction. I will consider in detail Brodber’s engagement with the fractal, and think about the possibilities of the fractal as a model for a Caribbean cosmology.”

Leighan Renaud (@LeighanRenaud) is a lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol, UK. She completed her PhD in 2018, and her research focused on representations of matrifocality in contemporary Caribbean literature. Leighan’s research interests include Caribbean family, Caribbean folklore and storytelling practices. Leighan is also incoming Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies.

You can read Leighan Renaud’s essay ‘“The end linked with the beginning and was even the beginning”: Fractal Poetics in Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat” in JWIL Vol. 28, No. 2 November 2020.

Join us from July 17-24, 2023 for our next JWIL Twitter residency when Amanda M. Smith (@amandanzas) will be sharing her research. She writes, “The geographic expanse that we call the Caribbean after the Carib peoples straddles islands, seas, and continents and has always been a pluricultural and plurilinguistic region. These qualities, which make the Caribbean fascinating to study, also make it challenging to navigate as students and scholars. How do we demarcate the necessary limits of our areas of focus as literary and cultural critics? Colonially? Nationally? Linguistically? What kinds of cartographies inform our studies and how can we think beyond them? As a Latin Americanist who came to the Caribbean via the Amazon, and then up the Orinoco with Rómulo Gallegos, in this Twitter residency with the Journal of West Indian Literature, I explore the fluidity of regional divisions. Specifically, I will focus on how attention to Indigenous traditions, even those appropriated by national literary and artistic traditions, offer one way of charting new maps of the Caribbean. My examination of how the pan-Indigenous shamanic practice of kanaima informs literary and artistic production across Venezuela and Guyana (two countries rarely considered together in literary and cultural studies) offers a lens through which to reimagine the region, but other areas of study as well. I will highlight the work of Wilson Harris, Mark McWatt, Pauline Melville, George Simon, Rómulo Gallegos, and Lino Figueroa, among others.”

Amanda M. Smith (@amandanzas) is associate professor of Latin American literature and culture at UC Santa Cruz. Her book, Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool University Press, 2021), examines how stories told about the Amazon in canonical twentieth-century novels have shaped the way people across the globe understand and use the region. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and is PI on a Modern Endangered Archives Program grant to digitize the Biblioteca Amazónica of Iquitos, Peru.

You can read Prof. Smith’s essay “From Indigenous Practice to Trope: Kanaima in the Literary Geography of the Guiana Shield” in JWIL Vol 31 No 1 (Nov 2022).

https://www.jwilonline.org/downloads/vol-31-no-1-november-2022/

During her Twitter residency on Maryse Condé, Kavita Ashana Singh (@kavitaashana) reflects on how life and writing are inseparable in the Guadeloupean writer’s oeuvre. Condé is the winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize for Literature (2019), and now two-time finalist for the International Booker Prize (amongst numerous other accolades).

Kavita Ashana Singh (@kavitaashana) is a Caribbean Literature Professor at the University of Houston and a former student of Condé’s. Her book, Carnival Language (Rutgers UP, 2024) dedicates a chapter to how Condé plays mas’ with literary categories while inventing her own language for telling the truth. Singh’s interview with Condé appears in JWIL‘s November 2022 issue.

This year marks seventy years since the 1953 publication of George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin. In our March 27-April 3, 2023 Twitter residency, Alfrena Jamie Pierre (@AlfrenaJamiePi) reflects on Lamming’s classic novel, described by Bruce King and others as one of the foundational texts of anglophone Caribbean Literature. In her praise of Lamming’s work at his memorial service on July 1, 2022, Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, argued that “In the Castle of My Skin said so much for each and every Barbadian and Caribbean person.” In this residency, Pierre reexamines this novel for the issues it addresses regarding notions of Caribbean being. She explores “The God Question” as presented by Lamming and broaches the topic of Christianity’s relevance for examining Caribbean lived reality. Pierre frames her interrogations of the novel through the theorizations of various scholars, including those of Lamming himself.

Bio

Alfrena Jamie Pierre ( @AlfrenaJamiePi ) is a PhD Candidate in Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago. Her research interests include representations of Christianity in literature, the work of George Lamming, Caribbean poetics, identity and trauma. She has presented academic papers on Lamming’s oeuvre at local, regional and international conferences and has also published on Lamming’s work.

Her tribute to Lamming appears in the UWI, Cave Hill Campus’s CHILL News 60th Anniversary edition (March 2023). https://sta.uwi.edu/uwitoday/archive/july_2022/article2.asp

You can also read tributes to George Lamming by Aaron Kamugisha, Curdella Forbes and Honor Ford Smith in the most recent issue of JWIL (Vol. 31 No. 1). https://www.jwilonline.org/current-issue/