Greetings from a new member:
I write to you all from America where, in literature anyway, Caribbean
studies falls under the dubious title of "postcolonial studies." I received
my Ph.D. from Rutgers University at New Brunswick and after a two year stint
at Kenyon College in Ohio, I start a tenure track position as assistant
professor in postcolonial literature at the University of Pennsylvania in the
fall (I teach anglophone African and Caribbean Literature).
My dissertation was an attempt to "define" a modernist tradition in the
Anglophone Caribbean novel. The dissertation was fueled by a frustration with
the silence in Caribbean discourse (under which I include imaginative and
critical narratives) about suffering--particularly the steady deracination of
the civic subject in the contemporary period, after "independence." If a
"realist" tradition focused on structural re-presentation (of the subject
under/after colonialism) then a modernist tradition turned (ambivalently, and
in stops and starts) away from the public sphere (grand narratives of
"emancipation," "independence" "national identity") toward the "private
sphere " of the psyche ("how do I love," "why do I hate," "what does it mean
to be a Caribbean woman," how will we be "free" etc.). I began with Rhys's
Caribbean novels stopped off at Naipaul and Cliff, and ended with Kincaid's
"Autobiography of my mother
Lets see..what else..
I was born in Islington, London, to Jamaican parents who were part of the
first wave of emigration to Britain, and who eventually returned to Jamaica
when I was a wee babe. And the diaspora continues since we have been living
in the US for the past twenty years...
My Question
In a seminar with Homi Bhabha a few years ago at Princeton he mentioned a BBC
series on the Caribbean which followed Stuart Hall as he made his way through
the Caribbean. Does anyone here know the title of the Series. I would very
much like Penn to buy it since I think it would be a good introduction to the
culture of the region for students ignorant about the Caribbean.
Joseph N Clarke
Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature
The University Of Pennsylvania
USA
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