Fifth International Conference of Caribbean Women’s Writing

Centre for Caribbean Studies
Department of English and Comparative Literature
27 – 28 April, 2007

Draft conference programme

Conference registration form [Word]

 

THEME: Writing, Diaspora and the Legacy of Slavery

The conference theme seeks to embed the central motif of burden of production/ reproduction which fell to African-Caribbean women in the immediate aftermath of abolition and to extend this to contemporary issues of writing and representation within the region and the diaspora. Assuming Creole culture to be a significant part of the legacy of Atlantic slavery, how might meanings of creolisation inscribed within artefacts of the culture be fruitfully read? In engaging with creolisation, is the breadth of responses limited in applicability to the region or is the diaspora also to be considered relative to issues of creolisation? Conference papers will explore these and many more questions interrogating cultural responses to the complex knowledge and experience of trans-Atlantic slavery.

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Professor Sue Thomas

Conference Update
Grace Nichols to read from her seminal collection: I IS A LONG MEMORIED WOMAN

Grace Nichols’s first poetry collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman, published in 1983 has remained a significant text not the least for its gendering of the experience of the Middle Passage. The collection, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, has inspired films, conferences, festivals and much more. Nichols’s reading on Thursday 27 April will be highly important to the Conference theme.

Conference Panels include:

• Slavery and the Gendered Body
• Feminising Freedom
• Oral word/ Written Word/ Visual Word
• Creative Friction & Conditions of Literary production
• Creolisation and Diaspora
• Caribbean Writing in Britain
• Women, Representation and Diaspora
• Writing the Legacy of Slavery and Motherhood
• Slavery Roundtable: Looking Back/ Looking Forward
• Plantation/ Plot/ Space
• History Borders & Intersections