THE CENTRE FOR CARIBBEAN STUDIES
at
THE UNIVERSITY OF
WARWICK
1. STAFF AND ADVISORY BOARD OF THE CENTRE FOR CARIBBEAN STUDIES (2005-6)
Details of the staff and Advisory Board to the Centre for Caribbean Studies are shown below. The current Director of the Centre is Dr. Cecily Jones.
Staff:
Professor David Dabydeen (Translation Studies)
Telephone: +44 (0)2476 523467
Email:
Dr John Gilmore (Translation Studies)
Telephone: +44 (0)2476 528171
Email:
Dr Sam Haigh (French)
Telephone: +44 (0)2476 523335
Email:
Professor Gad Heuman (History)
Telephone: +44 (0)2476 523408
Email:
Dr Cecily Jones (Sociology/Women & Gender)
Telephone: +44 (0)2476 523073
Email:
Dr Timothy Lockley (History/CAS)
Telephone: +44 (0)2476 524764
Email:
Dr Lynne Macedo (History)
Email:
Advisory Board:
Professor Harry Goulbourne
Professor Stuart Hall
Dr Rosemarie Mallett
Professor Gert Oostindie
Professor Clem Seecharan
Dr Paul Sutton
Secretary:
Mrs Marjorie Davies
Telephone: +44 (0)2476 523443
Email:
Website: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ccs
1984-1993 – Director: Alistair Hennessy
Professor Alistair Hennessy, Chairman of the School of Comparative American Studies established the Centre for Caribbean Studies in 1984 and was its first Director.
It was his enormous intellectual and organizational energy which drove the Centre forward from 1984 (when I was appointed Lecturer in Caribbean Studies). Professor Hennessy negotiated successfully with Leverhulme for a five year Fellowship programme which enabled the Centre to host visits by Miguel Barnett, Ken Ramchand, Michael Gilkes, Harry Goulbourne and others. Annual international Conferences were held under his Directorship. (Wilson Harris, which produced a book edited by Michael Gilkes; Indians in the Caribbean, which produced a book edited by David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo; The Three Guianas; etc.). Professor Hennessy also negotiated with Macmillan to set up the Warwick University Macmillan Caribbean Series (the Centre’s publication flagship) and was its first General Editor. He edited and published in the Series magisterial study of Caribbean intellectuals. Hennessey introduced a host of Caribbean scholars and politicians to the Centre, visitors like Basdeo Panday and Cheddi Jagan (later Prime Minister and President of Trinidad and Guyana respectively), Winston Dookeran, Rex Nettleford, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Verene Shepherd, Kamau Brathwaite, Nana Wilson-Tagoe, among countless others. It was Professor Hennessy who was instrumental in creating a national and international profile for the Centre. His services to Caribbean scholarship was recognised by the award of the OBE
2. DIRECTOR’S REPORT
In the twenty years since it was established, The Centre for Caribbean Studies has developed and sustained a well-deserved reputation among scholars globally as the ‘spiritual home of Caribbean Studies in the UK’. Since it first opened in 1984, the Centre has been a nurturing ground for some of the most intellectually talented scholars from a variety of academic disciplines working on the Caribbean region.
The Centre began under the visionary leadership of Professor Alistair Hennessy at a time when Caribbean Studies was still very much in its infancy. Professor Hennessy played a pivotal role in placing Caribbean Studies – both here at Warwick and elsewhere – on the intellectual landscape of the UK. Since then, the Centre has gone from strength to strength under the respective stewardships of Professors David Dabydeen and Gad Heuman, each of whose contributions have made Caribbean Studies at Warwick a recognised centre of academic excellence.
At the Centre we have a scholarly tradition of which we can be rightly proud. In addition to our teaching, research and supervision activities, we have also hosted diverse conferences, symposia, lectures and readings that have attracted leading international scholars in the field of Caribbean studies. Our interdisciplinary seminar programme has been particularly successful, bringing together scholars and students from across the community at Warwick and beyond. We remain committed to fostering an active postgraduate culture and the launch of our postgraduate research forum in 2005 will provide a meeting place for postgraduate students to exchange ideas, learn about each other’s research and support each other.
We have long enjoyed a close relationship with the University of the West Indies and we are especially pleased to be able to offer Fellowship Awards to scholars from UWI who are able to spend periods of research time with us. These transatlantic exchanges benefit UWI scholars but are also important in strengthening our own global reputation.
This year 2005 marks not only the Centre’s ‘coming of age’ 21st birthday, but it will also be the 25th Anniversary of the assassination of the Caribbean intellectual Dr. Walter Rodney, after whom our Annual Public Lecture is named. The Lecture is delivered each year by an internationally renowned scholar or dignitary, and attracts a diverse national audience. It has become one of the most important events in our academic calendar. I feel particularly fortunate to be leading the Centre at this time of significant anniversaries. The year 2007 will mark the bicentennial of the end of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, and we wish to commemorate this momentous event by hosting an international conference and a special seminar series during that year.
Although we are a small Centre, we are fortunate in being able to draw on the support and expertise of many colleagues here at Warwick. I should particularly like to thank Professor Susan Bassnett and Dr. Piotr Kuhiwczak (Translation Studies) and Professors Colin Jones and Tony MacFarlane (History) for the administrative and intellectual support they have given to the Centre over the years. I should also like to extend appreciation to the support of Vice Chancellors past and present, and to my colleagues David Dabydeen, Gad Heuman, John Gilmore, Tim Lockley (CAS), Sam Haigh (French), Lynne Macedo (History), Kathy Williams and Marjorie Davies (Secretary).
The next few years will pose many challenges, at a time of uncertainty and in a climate within which Caribbean Studies becomes increasingly marginalised. However, we are working hard to build on our current position, and to develop the Centre in new directions. In October 2004, we were pleased to announce the establishment of an Appeal Fund, which we envisage will enable us to bring scholars from the Caribbean to the UK to engage in periods of study and research. We have been extremely fortunate in securing the close involvement of Baroness Valerie Amos, ex-Diplomat Edward Glover and Warwick University’s Joan Cole (Alumni Office), together with the Guyanese and BBC journalist John Mair to steer the Appeal Committee.
We will also seek to strengthen our cross faculty relationships with other departments at Warwick, while at the same time forging greater collaboration with other Caribbean Studies departments in the UK. We will also aggressively pursue sources of public funding to enable us to develop a variety of research projects and developmental work with other public institutions such as museums and archives. I remain conscious of the necessity to build on our existing links with local community organisations, and in the course of the coming years look forward to working more closely with local groups.
Cecily Jones
3. HISTORY OF THE CENTRE FOR CARIBBEAN STUDIES
1993-1996 – Director: David Dabydeen
When I assumed the Directorship of the Centre in 1993 I decided on two immediateissues. Firstly, the need to democratise the Centre by getting agreement from my colleagues that the Directorship should be limited to a maximum of six years. This would enable all the members of the Centre – full-time academics – to have the opportunity of reviewing the work of the Centre and leading it in new directions. Secondly, to enhance our staff numbers. I was lucky to have the chance to bid to the University’s Funding Council for a three-year lectureship in Caribbean Studies. The bid was successful and John Gilmore was appointed and is still with us, teaching Caribbean literature and culture, supervising PhD students and researching and publishing on Caribbean issues.
As Director I increased the number of Caribbean people in our Associate Fellowship scheme. Al Creighton (now Deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Guyana) and Yesu Persaud (Chairman, Demerara Distillers) were appointed. I also launched a publicity effort to increase our profile in the Caribbean, meeting individually with the Principals of the three University of the West Indies campuses; with the Chancellor and vice-chancellor of the University of Guyana; with the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and the President of Guyana; and with the Ministers of Education of Barbados, St. Kitts, Jamaica, Guyana, Antigua and Trinidad and Tobago. Soon after Sir Shridath Ramphal, Chancellor of UWI and Warwick gave the Centre’s tenth anniversary address. John Gilmore and I edited and published in the Warwick Macmillan Series a selection of his speeches; the book was launched in both Guyana and Jamaica.
The Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies gave invaluable help in increasing the number of Caribbean students on the MA degree in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures. Our PhD students tripled in number, and every doctoral dissertation on Caribbean literature found academic publishers (books by Mark Stein, Sukhdev Sandhu, Lynne Macedo, Michael Mitchell, Sarah Lawson Welsh, Alison Donnell).
The Centre hosted a number of distinguished guests including the Archbishop of Canterbury, V.S. Naipaul and Seamus Heaney (both Nobel laureates), Sarah Lawson Welsh, Lord Palumbo, S.I. Martin, Lynne Macedo, Bruce King, Moses Nagamootoo, Chantal Zabus, Pauline Melville, Maurice Pierre and Cheddi Jagan.
Finally, joint work with other organisations. The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago gave £1,000 to the Centre to organise a one-day Conference on Sam Selvon, jointly with Queen Mary’s College, London and the South Bank. The Canon of Coventry Cathedral and I launched a research project on relationships between the Church of England and religious clergy of other faiths. This project was given personal and institutional backing by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and Professor Jim Beckford (Department of Sociology here at WarwickUniversity) was invited to conduct the research, with finance provided by the Church of England and the ESRC.
None of the above efforts in my three-year Directorship would have been possible without the formidable organisational talent of Marjorie Davies, Secretary of the Centre, and my academic colleagues. My pride in being a West Indian coolie running the Centre for Caribbean Studies was shared by my government which appointed me Ambassador-at-large and then Ambassador and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO. These duties (which, according to the letters of credentials, include the authority to declare war on other nations, or to sign treaties in the name of the President and people of Guyana!) meant I no longer had adequate time to devote to the Directorship. Sir Brian Follett (then vice-chancellor) agreed that I should focus on raising funds for the University of Guyana (in far greater need than Warwick) and, after three years, graciously released me from my indentureship to the Centre. I would like to record my gratitude to the University administration for unfailing support for the Centre and the Caribbean (Jim Rushton, Deputy Registrar, sat on the Presidential Commission of Enquiry into the University of Guyana; Mike Shattock, the Registrar, was engaged to report on UWI reform). The budget was as tiny as ever (£2,000 or so per annum) but the moral support was crucial.
David Dabydeen
1997-2004 – Director: Gad Heuman
During my time as Director it was possible to build on foundations established in the earlier history of the Centre and to develop new initiatives. One of the main activities of the Centre has been its seminar series and symposia. We have had several seminars each term, seeking to look at the Caribbean from an interdisciplinary perspective. Speakers have included our own post-graduate students as well as academics from across the UK and the Caribbean. We have also had a variety of symposia: these have ranged from sessions on “Martin Carter”, on “Gender and Emancipation in the Caribbean”, on “Return Migration” and on “Cinema and the Caribbean”. In addition, the Centre held a major international workshop in July 2000 on “Control and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean”; this workshop in July 2000 on “Control; and Resistance on the Post-Emancipation Caribbean”; this workshop was held in conjunction with the Nigerian Hinterland Programme at YorkUniversity, Toronto and attracted academics from the Caribbean, the United States and England. The papers from this workshop were subsequently published in the Warwick University Caribbean Studies book series (see section 12).
We have been fortunate in attracting major figures to the Centre. Derek Walcott, the Nobel-Prize winning poet, gave a reading to over 700people in November 1998. Similarly, Linton Kwesi Johnson, the well-known dub poet, has performed twice at Warwick. The Centre also had a benefit for the victims of the Montserrat volcano and raised over £1,000 for the purpose.
It was possible to revive the Walter Rodney Lecture Series during this time, further details of which appear in Section 6 of this Booklet.
One of the most significant developments during my period as Director was establishing a programme of Visiting Fellows from the University of the West Indies. Through the generosity of the then vice-chancellor, Brian Follett, it was possible to establish a fund for short-term Fellows from the Caribbean. We have welcomed several Fellows from various campuses of the University of the West Indies, including Professor Evelyn O’Callaghan (Barbados), Dr. Rita Pemberton (Trinidad), Professor Michael Gilkes (Barbados), and Dr. Silvia Kouwenberg (Jamaica). The Centre also won a prestigious Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship (see Section 8), which was held by one of our former students, Dr. Marcia Burrowes, now a Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Barbados.
I made various administrative improvements to the Centre, including establishing a Management Committee to discuss activities of the Centre. The Committee consisted of representatives from History, Comparative American Studies, Cultural Studies, French, Sociology and CRER. I also re-established the Advisory Board detailed in Section 1.
The active publication programme of the Centre continues. The Warwick University Caribbean Studies series published by Macmillan (see Section 12) is one of the largest book series on the Caribbean. Like our seminar and symposia series, it is interdisciplinary in focus.
It was also possible to create closer links with the Society for Caribbean Studies; the learned society dealing with the Caribbean in the UK. The Centre now serves as the administrative base of the Society; moreover, the Centre also hosted the annual meeting of the Society on two occasions.
We have continued to welcome post-graduate students to the Centre, one of whom, Hazel Pierre, won a prestigious Warwick Teaching Fellowship Award. The Centre developed a new taught MA, consisting of courses taught by the staff of the Centre.
Through all these activities, the Centre has become the most important research centre on the Caribbean in the UK. Looking to the future, we have now embarked on a major fundraising campaign in the hope of continuing to provide Visiting Fellowships and Scholarships for academics and students from the Caribbean.
Gad Heuman
4. STAFF PROFILES AND RESEARCH/TEACHING INTERESTS
Professor David Dabydeen:
David Dabydeen is currently doing research on 18th Century London for the Oxford Companion to Black British History which he is co-editing with John Gilmore and Cecily Jones. He is also working on a neglected 19th Century Caribbean poet, Egbert Martin. His new novel, Our Lady of Demerara was published in 2004. He was consultant to Channel 4’s three-part series on interracial sex, Forbidden Fruit, which was broadcast in 2003. His one-hour documentary Painting the People was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. He has been awarded the 2004 Raja Rao Award for Literature.
He teaches on the following MA courses in the Centre:
Literary Translation and Creative (re)Writing in a Global Context
Fictions and History
Black British Writing
India in the Caribbean in Literature
Recent publications:
Our Lady of Demerara (Chichester: Dido Press, 2004)
Lutchmee & Dilloo: A Study of West Indian Life by Edward Jenkins, ed. David Dabydeen (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2003)
A Harlot’s Progress (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999)
Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Black Writers (Pickering and Chatto, 1999)
The Counting House (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996)
Turner (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995)
Disappearance (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993)
Black Writers in Britain, 1780-1890 (Edinburgh University Press, 1991)
The Intended (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991)
Dr John Gilmore:
John Gilmore was educated in Barbados and in England, where he was a student at SidneySussexCollege, Cambridge (BA 1977, MA 1981, PhD 1985). He lived and worked in Barbados for fourteen years, where he taught at the University of the West Indies (1982-1986) and later worked as Cultural Officer for Literary Arts at the National Cultural Foundation (1986-1990), in a local advertising agency, and as Managing Editor of the regional newspaper Caribbean Week. Since 1996 he has been a lecturer in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick. His interests include Caribbean history and literature, British literature of the eighteenth century (in English and Latin), and Translation Studies.
Current projects include a literary biography (funded in part by a BritishAcademy grant) of the earliest Black writer of the British Empire, the eighteenth century Jamaican poet Francis Williams. He has been commissioned to edit (with David Dabydeen and Cecily Jones) the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Black British History.
He teaches on the following MA courses in the Centre:
Literary Translation and Creative (re)Writing in a Global Context
History of Translation
Literature, Politics and Society in Britain
Literature and Empire
Recent publications:
Freedom and Change (Harlow: Longman Caribbean, 2004)