SEMINAR SERIES IN THEORY AND CRITICISM

Sem 1, 2009-2010 || Sem 1 // Sem 2, 2008-2009 || Sem 1 // Sem 2, 2007-2008

 

Semester I, 2009-2010
THEORY AND CRITICISM RELATED EVENTS

Monday, September 14
Isabelle Constant, “Portrait of Le Clézio as Diego and Frida”

J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel prize of literature 2008, depicted book
after book the sufferings of the people who have been let down by globalization. A writer who feels at odd with the bourgeoisie and his time, he shows in Diego et Frida, a biography of the two well know Mexican artists, that he belongs to the same tribe as them, who at the beginning of the twentieth century hoped for a better future for the indigenous people of Mexico and poor workers of the world. Le Clézio speaks less about the works of the artists and more about what is at the center of their lives: love, suffering and the defense of the oppressed. I will show how those three aspects of their lives is at the root of their expression and what it means for them to be an artist. The reason why Le Clézio chose to revisit the biography of the Mexican artists is that his philosophy of art, learnt while he lived with indigenous people of Mexico and Panama rejoins theirs. It is a committed, politically involved art, and it takes its root in utopia. Obviously Le Clézio also feels an artistic fascination with the monstrous and extravagant lifestyle of the couple and expresses admiration for the freedom they displayed in their art and passion for life, which makes them at times work of art themselves. But the more interesting aspect of their work, according to Le Clézio is that their art is also medicinal. It possesses the magic quality that Le Clézio discovered when spending time with the Embera people of Panama. Their art which consisted in body painting was the expression of a humble and magical vision of art, which exists in order to heal people and that anyone, according to Le Clézio, can explore.

Monday September 28
Philip Nanton, “Urban ‘Landscape’ and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland”

On publication in 2008 Netherland received widespread acclaim and touched
a chord in the psyche of the American reading public. It won the Pen/Faulkner Award and was made Best Book of the Year 2008 by the New York Times newspaper. Terms used by critics to describe the novel among others included ‘psychologically pitch perfect,’ ‘haunting,’ ‘provocative,’‘luminous.’ The novelist Zadie Smith was a strong dissenter from this acclaim. In the New York Review of Books she described the novel as sitting‘at an anxious cross-roads where a community in recent crisis – Anglo- American middle-class – meets a literary form in long term crisis, the lyrical Realism of Balzac and Flaubert.’ She suggested that the novel ‘is entirely about anxiety, but its worries are formal and revolve around the question of authority.’ I read O’Neill’s novel as having two central themes. One is the landscape of trauma in post 9/11 New York City and in the relationship of
the van den Broek family. The process of coming to terms with after effects of the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers represents an overt element in the depiction of urban landscape. The second related theme involves what can be described as the hidden urban landscape of cricket in the United States. It depicts the process of reestablishing order in which cricket and the comradeship of cricketers forms an important feature. Netherland is an important and finely crafted novel, but its essential conservatism ultimately returns the relationship with the landscape to the reestablished order of the status quo.

Monday October 12
Polly Pattullo, “Publishing Caribbean Writing in Dominica: Yesterday and Today”

Polly Pattullo is a British journalist who lives in Dominica for some months each year and has written widely about the Caribbean region. Her books include Last Resorts: the Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean, a critical assessment of the economic, environmental and cultural impacts of tourism development in the region. A co-founder of Papillote Press, she is co-author of The Gardens of Dominica and Home Again and for many years worked for The Guardian newspaper in London. In this seminar, she will look at the issue of publishing in Dominica historically, asking how Jean Rhys, Phyllis Shand Allfrey and other writers of the period got - or didn't get – published, and why. She will compare her findings with the tendency of Caribbeanbased writers today towards self-publishing. Papillote Press is a tiny publishing house based in Dominica, in the eastern Caribbean, and in London, UK. It was launched in 1998 by Polly Pattullo, and Anne Jno Baptiste, the co-owner of Papillote Wilderness Retreat, Dominica's well-known eco-lodge and botanical gardens. Among the range of fiction and non-fiction from Dominica published by the Press are: Black and White Sands by Elma Napier, a colonial memoir by a remarkable woman who settled in Dominica in 1932 and the first woman to sit in a Caribbean parliament; Home Again, a collection of contemporary real-life stories of 22 Dominican migrant returnees from England, the United States, Canada and the Caribbean region; It Falls Into Place, the acclaimed short stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey; Most Wanted: Street Stories from the Caribbean by Christborne Shillingford, a modern, irreverent look straight from the streets; Yet We Survive - the Kalinago People of Dominica: Our
Lives in Words and Pictures and The Gardens of Dominica, the first guide to the island's rich tradition of cultivation from pre-Columbian times to the present.

Monday October 26
Richard Clarke, “Rhetoric”

‘Rhetoric’ has long had, perhaps from the time of its first tiff with philosophy in 5 century BC th E Athens, something of a ‘bad rap’ in academia. Most intellectuals are reluctant, I would think, to view themselves as engaged in‘merely’ rhetorical exercises of some sort. This is because rhetoric is most often deemed something negative, a fault of which your opponents are guilty but which you yourself obviously transcend. It is synonymous with ornament, the surface, the manifest face, the external form or outer appearance of discourse that masks, conceals, disguises, obfuscates the real or latent meaning: whatever is substantial or of real value in discourse may be found hidden beneath its obscuring veil. It is too mired in the personal, too caught up in the biases of the rhetor and too eager to appeal in turn to the prejudices of an audience. It is concerned not with establishing the truth, but with persuasion, that is, with (mis)leading persons to adopt most often erroneous beliefs. It is, in short, a duplicitous tool used (or abused) most often to deceive and ultimately for the sake of attaining goals of a dubious nature. It is little wonder, given the above, that since at least the early modern period rhetoric has historically been marginalised within the institutions of academia and its main proponents (such as Vico or Nietzsche) if not demonised, certainly relegated to something close to pariah status, their writings dismissed as either irrelevant to the serious pursuits in which academicians ought to be involved or as the ravings of so many lunatics. Recent years have witnessed, however, the emergence of a more respectful attitude towards rhetoric (subsumed under the rubric of the ‘new rhetoric’) that has striven not only to dismiss these negative stereotypes but also to argue, basically, that rhetoric is an unavoidable component of the production of all truth-claims, whether we would like to admit it or not. In this paper, I will attempt to give an account of both the historical denigration of rhetoric as well as its recent resurgence with particular reference to the work of recent rhetoricians (and thinkers sympathetic to rhetoric) like Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Chaim Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, Walter Ong, Richard Lanham and others, as well as the application of a rhetorical approach in a variety of disciplines such as Anthropology (e.g. Clifford Geertz, James Clifford), Economics (Deirdre McCloskey), Education (Lynda Stone), History (Hayden White), the Law (James Boyd White), the Natural Sciences (Alan Gross), Psychology (Michael Billig), and Sociology (Richard Harvey Brown).

Monday November 9
Yanique Hume, “From Bush to Street: the Shifting Performance Geography of
Haitian Rara and Cuban Gagá”

Removed from the locality of the Haitian countryside to the Cuban batey and
then to the city streets and stages of Santiago de Cuba, Gagá is one of the
myriad cultural forms that now participate in several symbolic systems and
performative contexts. Gagá became part of the performance geography of
Oriente with the influx of labour migrants to Cuba during the early twentieth-century. Initially cloaked in secrecy and maintained exclusively by Vodú sociétés established in rural environments, Gagá remained historically marginal and relatively invisible as a cultural form. Its marginality and invisibility in many ways historically mirror the placement of Haitians and their descendants in both the spatial and social landscapes of eastern Cuba.

However, since the mid 1980s there has been concerted efforts by regional
cultural institutions to unearth and exhibit subaltern expressions. In turn, Gagá has become increasingly enrolled in tourism projects and is the latest signifier of Santiago’s distinctive pluri-cultural and pan-Caribbean identity. Although it is enrolled in expansive performance contexts, for the descendants of Haitian migrants Gagá remains a critical performative site for the affirmation of their history and articulation of their sense of community, agency and collective identity.

Monday November 23
Claver Mabana, “The Construction of a Creole Writing in Patrick Chamoiseau’s
Chronique des sept misères”

Patrick Chamoiseau is known as one of the leading figures of the Creolité school, along with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. He was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his novel Texaco in 1992. Although Texaco and Solibo the Magnificent have been better received by literary critics, there seems to be a perception that his first novel Chronique des sept misères forms the foundation on which Chamoiseau’s writing style is based. Chamoiseau actually invents an original writing style by using the language of the ‘jobbeurs,’ i.e. words or syntactical forms from Creole. This paper, an essay in progress, is a follow up to a recent article of mine on Texaco and Solibo, entitled “Le Roman de Patrick Chamoiseau et son contexte oral,” published in Romanitas 3.2 (2009) 44-62.

Wednesday December 9
“Trans-Atlantic Journeys and Migrations,” Fifth Workshop on Caribbean Theory and Criticism (details to follow at a later date)

All presentations take place from 10.30 am to noon on the day in question. The last three presentations (i.e. those on October 26, November 9 and November 23) will be held in the Computer Science, Maths and Physics Conference Room.

 

Semester II, 2008-2009
THEORY AND CRITICISM RELATED EVENTS

Wednesday, February 4
Nicola Hunte (UWI, Cave Hill), “The Middle Passage as Memory Theatre”

Wednesday, February 18
Shara McCallum (Bucknell University), “Snapshots in Black and White”

Wednesday, March 4
Ian Craig (UWI, Cave Hill), “‘¿Barbados? ¿Dónde?’ Preliminary Findings in Caribbean Study Abroad and Immersion for Language Learning”

Wednesday, March 18
Jeannette Allsopp (UWI, Cave Hill), “Literary Bases of Caribbean Lexicography and their Illustration of Language Use across the Caribbean”

Wednesday, April 1
Richard Clarke (UWI, Cave Hill), “Further Thoughts on a Caribbean Sublime: Walcott’s Musings on History”

Wednesday, April 15
Phil Scher (University of Oregon), “Uneasy Heritage: Resisting History and Cultural Tourism in the Caribbean”

Wednesday, April 29
Bernadette Farquhar (UWI, Cave Hill), “Language Issues in the Social Unrest in
Guadeloupe, 2009"

Tuesday, May 26
Fourth Workshop on Caribbean Theory (Open Topic) (venue and times to be
announced)

Semester I, 2008-2009
THEORY AND CRITICISM RELATED EVENTS

Monday, October 6
Jane Bryce, “Outside the Machine? Donor Values and the Case of Film in Tanzania”

Wednesday, October 15 - Friday, October 17
Aimé Césaire Colloquium (Solutions Centre)

Monday, October 20
Andrew Armstrong, “Evil and the Banality of Power: Narrative and the Re-Co[r]ding of Cultural Memory in Moses Isegawa’s Snakepit”

Monday, November 3
Richard Clarke, “History of a Muse”

Monday, November 17
Victor Simpson, “Black West Indian Migration to Puerto Rico”

Tuesday November 25
David Scott Public Lecture (8 pm; ALT)

Wednesday, November 26
3rd Workshop on Caribbean Criticism and Theory devoted to the work of David Scott (1-5 pm; Dean’s Meeting Room)

Thursday, November 27
David Scott to meet with undergraduate and graduate students (10.30 am - noon, A27)

Monday, December 1
Leslie Taubman, “Judy Holliday: a Critical Study of a Star”

Semester 2, 2007-2008
THEORY AND CRITICISM EVENTS

Wednesday January 16, 2008 - Public Lecture, (3Ws Pavilion at 8 pm)

Bhoendradatt Tewarie (PVC – Planning & Development):
“V. S. Naipaul’s Contribution to Caribbean Literature and History [including a filmed interview with Naipaul]

Monday January 28, 2008 (10.30 am - noon) - Seminar Series, (Dean’s Meeting
Room, Shell Suite)

Esiaba Irobi (School of Theater, Ohio University; Professor of Theatre and Film,
EBCCI):
“Taking the Bull by the Balls: the Oriki Theory of African and African Diasporic Performance and Orature”

Monday February 4, 2008 (10.30 am - noon) - Seminar Series
Andrew Armstrong: “African Literature and the International Literary Marketplace”

Monday February 18, 2008 (10.30 am - noon) Seminar Series
Richard Clarke: “The Chicken and the Egg: Culture, Identity, Text”

Conference, February 28-March 1, 2008 (ALT)
“History, Fable and Myth: Lamming at 80,” the 27th Annual Conference on West
Indian Literature (www.cavehill.uwi.edu/fhe/specialevents/lll/wilc/)

Seminar Series, Monday March 10, 2008 (10.30 am - noon) *
Egberto Almenas: “Beyond the Tropicalist Style: José Marti against Postmodernism”

Seminar Series, Monday March 31, 2008 (10.30 am - noon) *
Nicola Hunte: “Re-claiming Loss through Images of Dismemberment: the Construction of Self in Omeros and Beloved”

“Race and Racism,” 2nd Workshop on Caribbean Theory, Monday April 7, 2008

• Don Marshall (Chair)
• Hilbourne Watson: (Bucknell University) “Race and International Relations:
  Raciology, Garveyism and the Limits of Black Nationalism in the Caribbean”
• Richard Clarke: “Three Theories in Search of an Object: Caribbean Theorists on Race.”
• Philip Nanton: “Eulogizing Heroes and Locating Freedom: Problematizing Three Recent Barbadian Texts”
• Andrew Armstrong: “‘It’s in the Blood’: Race and Skin-Colour in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood”
• Nicola Hunte “Distinctions between Colour and Race: Representations of Identity in Remembering Babylon and Heartland

Seminar Series, Monday April 21, 2008 (10.30 am - noon)
Evelyn O’Callaghan: “Naipaul’s Legacy: Created in the West Indies – For Export”

Public Lecture, Wednesday May 7, 2008 (ALT at 7 pm)
Esiaba Irobi: “Before They Danced in Chains: History, Power, Aesthetics, and the
Construction of an Afro-Caribbean Identity in Barbados, 1628-2008"

Semester I, 2007-2008
THEORY @ CAVE HILL

Monday September 10
Richard Clarke: “What is Nut Grass and Why are They Saying such Terrible Things about It?”

Monday September 24
Jane Bryce: “'Self-Writing as History: How a Postcolonial Writer Represents the
Past”

Monday October 8
Sherry Asgill: “The Interpretation and Ethics of Belief”

Monday October 22
Philip Nanton: "Knowing and Not Knowing George Lamming: Personal Style and
Metropolitan Influences”

Monday November 5
Don Marshall (Senior Fellow, SALISES, UWI, Cave Hill): “Metanarratives of
Finance”

Monday November 19 [postponed till November 26]
Stewart Brown (Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham):
“Why is That? What it Mean? Reading Sycorax”

Monday December 3
Simeon McIntosh (Dean, Faculty of Law, UWI, Cave Hill): “West Indian Constitutional Authorship”