2012 Conference
The following is a list of presentation and their abstracts. In addition to reading about the presentations, you may also listen to selected audio from the 2012 Conference.
Claude McKay’s search for an original form of literary expression started in Jamaica and continued in his subsequent travels abroad. His 1922-1923 visit to the former Soviet Union and his engagement with the Russian writers of the nineteenth century are important in the analysis of his work. In Home to Harlem, Ray, the Haitian writer and protagonist of McKay’s first two novels, reads Crime and Punishment and refers to Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev as creators of genuine art. In Banjo, he conducts a more complex, longer-lasting dialogue with his literary master, Leo Tolstoy. Bita Plant, the protagonist of McKay’s third novel, Banana Bottom, continues the search for a particular Afro-Caribbean identity started by Ray in North American and French settings. In the final novel, there is no longer a surrogate dialogue with the Russian writers, but a practical application, an actual integration of the educated colonial with the common Jamaican people and their culture. The engagement with the nineteenth-century Russian writers in Home to Harlem and Banjo left a mark on the writer’s fiction and facilitated his formation of national Jamaican consciousness and sentiments. C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière, McKay’s Trinidadian contemporaries, also acknowledged the importance of Russian literature in their artistic development. While the writings of the nineteenth century “native soil” thinkers enabled de Boissière to see the importance of the native intellectual’s connection with the common Caribbean folks and their values, involvement with Marxism provided a way for James to portray the dispossessed masses as builders of their own history. Cultural dualism, a deep appreciation of the lower classes, and criticism of the middle class for imitating foreign ideas principles are some of the most important affinities that these Anglophone Caribbean writers share with each other and with their Russian predecessors.
Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley, Ph.D. Assistant Professor| Department of Language, Literature,
and Communication Elizabeth City State University
Location matters in teaching, as with real estate, and that axiom is dramatically realized in teaching immigrant literature in London with a group of college students from a regional university in the American south—most of whom have almost no experience of travel. A text like Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners takes on a powerful piquancy for students who are themselves feeling culture-shocked and alienated in a place which is stunningly diverse and difficult to navigate. Although somewhat baffled by Selvon’s idiom, they understand his book in ways that students sitting in an American classroom can’t or won’t. Similarly, the romance of a book such as Andrea Levy’s Small Island takes on special power for students who can still feel in their bones what it means to “just get off the boat” and to enter a forbidding landscape.<br/><br/>Coupled with authors such as Zadie Smith, Buchi Emecheta, Monica Ali, Elif Shafak, and Xiaolu Guo representing a wide cultural variety, students can more tangibly imagine the experience of Caribbean immigration before and after World War II, even in the dramatically transformed London landscapes of the early twenty-first centuries. This presentation will focus on the power of place in reading two texts, Selvon’s and Levy’s, and the effect of an urban classroom setting smack in the middle of these authors’ landscapes, although a half-century or so later.
Rick Taylor is area coordinator of Multicultural and Transnational Literatures and associate professor of English at East Carolina University. He is the author of Goldsmith As Journalist (1993), and a variety of articles on British culture and transnationalism.
There has been a great deal of discussion regarding the connection between drugs in Caribbean countries and in the United States. Many anti-drug intervention methods have been attempted. However, there is very limited information in the literature that focuses on prevention and treatment. The U.S. has adopted an affordable recovery reform act that includes substance abuse services for individuals who are addicted to chemical substances. Thus, more substance service counselors must be trained to deliver quality substance abuse counseling to clients. Federal dollars will be used to assist with providing this training to produce competent counselors. This paper will address the need to extend the collaborative efforts between the U.S. and Caribbean countries (particularly Jamaica) to form partnerships to train Caribbean counselors to become substance counselors who will be able to work more effectively with drug-addicted client populations. Currently in Jamaica, school guidance counselors are used to perform community outreach drug education since there are only 449 registered counselors (NBCC, 2008) and Jamaica is no longer represented as an NBCC international field and regional office (NBCC, 2011). The majority of drug counseling in Jamaica is conducted by churches, family members, and school guidance counselors with limited substance training (Palmer, 2008). Many counselors in Jamaica have received their training in the U.S., but have discussed the many barriers and great hardship that was endured in the process. Therefore, it is reasonable to consider a collaborative model that would eliminate or at least reduce many of the barriers that would allow an opportunity to increase the number of trained substance counselors in Jamaica. Specific strategies are discussed and recommendations are provided.
Meagan Capers is pursuing her Masters in the School of Social Work at East Carolina University.
New ways of documenting everyday life emerge as technologies advance and contemporary theories change. Photos have been used in anthropological fieldwork since the 1890’s. Ethnographers use photography to study the traditions, customs, daily life, ceremonies, and distinctive aspects of world cultures. Bateson and Mead’s Balinese Character (1942) and Gardner and Heider’s Gardens of War (1968) are among the exceptional publications of photographic ethnography. <br/><br/>The creation of photographic records has been based on the assumption that the cultural artifacts photographed have a finite and fixed symbolic meaning and were used to represent a specific physical environment (Collier and Collier 1986). Photographs taken in the field are similar to written field notes; they help reconstitute events in the mind of the ethnographer. The use of photographic images in ethnography involves three fundamental components: description, analysis, and interpretation. Although useful to represent aspects of cultural objects and individual subjects, they are limited, since they are only from the ethnographers’ understanding of culture. <br/><br/>Today, ethnographers collaborate with participants to produce photographs in various ways. Contemporary researchers view the use of photography during ethnographic fieldwork as an integral process of creating and representing knowledge about given societies, cultures, and individuals based on interactions with the cultural environment. It does not claim to be an objective account of reality but aims at offering a version of the ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to the context. There is no hierarchy of knowledge or media for ethnographic representation; in some cases, the visual may become more important than the written, even though visual materials cannot replace written text. A balance is struck between text and visual representation.
Participants respond by suggesting to the ethnographer what they want to have documented and why. This “directed” photography becomes a way of reinforcing ethnographic knowledge of social facts that have been explained previously in conversation. When photographs are produced in this way they combine the intentions of the ethnographer/photographer and those of the participant and represent the outcomes of their negotiations.
The photographic/ethnographic research represents fieldwork spanning a five-year period, (2007-2012), and includes photos taken both by the researcher and participant(s) in Havana, Cuba. The photos were part of the interview process and represent important aspects of daily life, the economic system, household economies, social relations, and social capital.
Luci M. Fernandes, Ph.D., teaches for the Department of Anthropology at East Carolina University.
It is clear that a communication gap exists between patients and medical professionals in many parts of Guyana, especially in rural areas where Guyanese expressions flourish. In many cases, non-English-speaking foreign medical professionals find it even more difficult to communicate with their patients, and vice versa. When that happens, an entry-level Guyanese health worker is usually the default proxy translator. A dictionary of Guyanese medical terms would serve to bridge this linguistic divide by offering a list of Guyanese expressions paired with their English translations and medical terminologies. Such a compilation makes several statements about our own culture (and sub-cultures), linguistic identity, and medical conditions. However, before such a compilation becomes adopted by the health sector and viewed as an academic publication, there are several considerations that must be thought out and discussed: (a) What writing system should be used? (b) Should a Spanish component be included? (c) Should the Ministry of Health have a linguistic briefing during the orientation of all medical professionals before they enter the field? The answers to the foregoing questions should indicate whether such a dictionary will be seen as necessary and practicable or as something destined only for the academic bookshelf.
Kencil Banwarie recently immigrated to the USA from Guyana where he worked
in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Guyana.
Through its marriage with postcolonial and multicultural studies, Caribbean Criticism has become an emergent and a popular culture—producing Twenty-First Century cutting-edge literature and two Nobel Literature Laureates—Derek Walcott (1992) and V. S. Naipaul (2001). The Caribbean, however, more than any other region, has suffered most uniquely from colonial exploitation, oppression, and marginalization; but it is only now receiving some critical attention and international recognition. Proportionately, in geography and population, to other regions like India, Africa, and Central and South America, the Caribbean or West Indies has been the recipient of a longer and more intense period of colonial domination and fragmentation. The eye of the hurricane—Hurricane European Colonization (HEC)—has hit the innocent and unprepared Caribbean in a ferocious and devastating manner. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin concur, in The Empire Writes Back that, “in the Caribbean, the European imperial enterprise ensured that the worst features of colonialism throughout the globe would all be combined in one region” (145). In reality, slavery in the Caribbean commenced from the time of Christopher Columbus’ discovery or rediscovery of Hispaniola in 1492, and ceased in the 1960s, which means over 550 years of displacement and dislocation.
Dr. Seodial Frank H. Deena is Professor of Multicultural and Postcolonial/Transnational Culture, Literature, and Criticism at East Carolina University where he has co-coordinated the Graduate Multicultural and Transnational Literatures Program for fifteen years (1994-2009), and where he teaches multicultural, world, postcolonial, African American, and Caribbean literatures, as well as the Bible as Literature. He received his Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, his MA from Chicago State University, and his BA from the University of Guyana.
Scholars of vulnerability and resilience have highlighted the need to examine how multiple stressors may impact communities undergoing environmental change. This is particularly true in rural agricultural settings of the Global South, which may be particularly vulnerable to disruptions brought about by climate change, on the one hand, and the global restructuring of agriculture, on the other. In this paper, we draw upon research with farmers and local government officials to describe how different systems of agriculture mediate the experience of vulnerability in Southwestern Jamaica, a region facing significant ‘double exposure’ from climate change and market variability. Although most producers in the region practice traditional farming on relatively small plots, the Jamaican government has recently promoted initiatives aimed at enhancing the technological sophistication of agricultural production, including new irrigation infrastructure and greenhouse farming. Drawing upon information from semi-structured interviews, we suggest some of the ways that these different types of agriculture are influencing the vulnerability and resilience of rural Jamaican communities.
E. Jeffrey Popke, Ph.D., teaches for the Department of Geography at East Carolina University.
Derek Walcott’s latest and final book of poetry The Prodigal is the story of the son of colonial Antilles who was educated and reared under British rule and who journeyed to Europe to discover he can’t leave his homeland behind. From Italy to Spain, he is always reminded of St. Lucia. As Walcott wrote in his Nobel Speech, “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. And this is the exact process of the making of poetry, or what should be called not its making but its remaking, the fragmented memory” (Walcott).
Through the wounded collective memory of colonialism, Walcott struggles to gather the “broken pieces” of the Antilles through language and memory, to find a place and sense of self within his divided consciousness. Even after a long time away, the Prodigal Son must always return home, but has home remained the same or will he find the pieces to be “disparate, ill-fitting, and containing more pain than their original sculpture?”
Angie Mellor, a proud Wisconsinite, has thoroughly enjoyed all of her studies in the Multicultural and Transnational Literatures Program at ECU, especially those in Jewish and Native American Literature. After graduating in the Spring of 2013 from the MTL program, Mellor intends to pursue a PhD in Creative Writing and Native American Literature. Her thesis research focuses on sexual violence against Jewish and Native American women in the texts And the Rat Laughed and Solar Storms.
(Transcript)
In the Summer of 2012, I participated in ECU’s Summer Study Abroad trip to Belize. Headed by Seodial Deena, several colleagues and I traveled around the country learning about the history and culture of this Central-American nation. During the trip, as I learned more about the political and societal situations, I began to question the ingredients involved in establishing a national identity. The adopted political stances as well as the number of donated landmarks sparked a discussion of authenticity (for lack of a better term). In this presentation, I explore the contexts and frameworks of creating and solidifying a national identity; not simply in the context of Belize, but postcolonial countries in general. Using Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, I attempt to demonstrate the indigenous attempt to establish a national identity on behalf of their brethren through literature as well as the struggle of acquiring that recognition because of the not-quite-accurate interpretations of scholars. The indigenous people are writing a history that they did not have access to before. Harris’s novel is an example of how the postcolonial rewrite begins the movement of solidifying an identity on their own terms instead of accepting the identity imposed upon them by a colonizing nation.
Jewel Williams is a second-year Masters student concentrating in Multicultural and Transnational Literatures. She is currently teaching two sections of English 1100 and hopes to continue on to receive her PhD in multicultural literatures.
(Transcript)
The media have pronounced 2012 as a dangerous year in which the world as we know it might come to an end on December 21 or 23 according to the ancient Maya calendar. Numerous popular books have been published and movies have been made which inflate the 2012 events from a contemporary perspective. Various ceremonies are planned for this Christmas season in the Maya region. My paper will briefly explain the Maya calendar and inform the audience what the ancient Maya prophesied for December 21 or 23, 2012. The Classic Maya calendar registered time using three counting systems: the tzolk’in consisted of 20 day names combined with 13 numbers, for example 1 Imix, 2 Ik’, 3 Ak’bal. Each day name and number combination repeated after a cycle of 260 days had elapsed. The ha’b was made up of 18 months with 20 days and one additional month of 5 days, forming a cyclical period of 365 days approximating one solar year. Each day was assigned one position in the tzolk’in and one in the ha’b. The third counting system was the linear Long Count which measured time mostly in units of 20 from a relatively recent creation date of 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u 13.0.0.0.0. (13 Bak’tun ending) (August 11, 3114 BC) and then extending into the future. Each day was further identified by one Long Count designation. According to ancient Maya calculations, the next 13 Bak’tun period after this creation will terminate on December 21 or 23, 2012. In Mayan thinking, this means that time will turn over into the next 13 Bak’tun period.<br/> The ancient Maya carved stone stelae and erected specific architectural complexes to positively influence these liminal moments and transitions of time overseen by local rulers. From the Colonial Period in Yucatan, written prophecies (such as The Books of Chilam Balam) have survived which fix the fate of certain periods identified by personified day names which were associated with good or bad predictions. The ancient and contemporary Maya do not view December 21 or 23, 2012 as a doomsday, but as a potent period ending which should be approached with respect and ritual ceremony.
Jessica Joyce Christie, PhD, Associate Professor, East Carolina University School of Art and Design