Hello all, silent and otherwise:

I want to join in thanking Alicia, Haidee and Mimi in breaking the silence
on the list.  I don't believe I have fully introduced myself.  I am a
communication researcher teaching at a small, comprehensive liberal arts
college far away from the Caribbean in Southern California.  I have a
master's in Romance Languages and Literatures with an emphasis on the
Caribbean and Brazil.  While I finished my doctorate at Stanford in
communication, the world of business held me in thrall during the 80s,
spurring me to an MBA from UCLA, and positions in telecom, satellite, and
cable marketing (HBO).

Needless to say, the galloping greed of the decade left me dissatisfied
and I returned to academe and the Caribbean and Latin American studies
amidst a heavy teaching load.  

The Elian Gonzalez saga pushed the Caribbean, Cuba, and non-Cuban
Caribbean folk to the fore for a time.  I am interested in how the media
consume the Caribbean and situate it in North American popular culture.  I
am from New Orleans, whose historical connections to Caribbean politics
and music are well known, but whose position in the larger US culture
is diminished because of its carnival-party reputation.  I also am
interested in how the global information technology hegemony has annointed
new cultural heroes and elites (e.g., Bill Gates) centered in North
America rather than the Caribbean and the South.

I eagerly look forward to discussing Caribbean studies in this forum.


Russell Stockard, Ph.D. School
of Business & Communication Arts Dept. California Lutheran University
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
Office phone: 805-493-3365
Office fax:   805-493-3354
Home phone:   818-991-0723

"Do not follow the path.  Go where there is no path and start a new one."
- Ashanti proverb.

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Sheller, Mimi wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> As one of the 'silent' academics reading this mail list, I just want to thank
> Alicia and Haidee for breaking the silence about what the purpose of this
> medium is. I know some of you are very busy with examinations at the moment, so
> please read no further if you haven't the time.
> 
> I don't think I properly introduced myself when I joined the list, so let me do
> that first. I am from Philadelphia and am currently a lecturer in sociology at
> Lancaster University. I am interested in questions of freedom, democracy,
> gender, race and power in the Caribbean (and the wider Atlantic world), issues
> which I have approached through the history of post-slavery societies. I did my
> Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research, in New York, and the thesis will
> soon be published under the title 'Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and
> Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica' (Macmillan, in press for Sept. 2000).
> I am now working on a new project called 'Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks
> to Zombies', which will be about the relations between Europe and North America
> and the Caribbean region over the last 500 or so years, in terms of the
> consumption of tropical food, land, and landscapes, but more importantly the
> consumption of people's bodies, labor, and cultures -- and how this has been
> resisted.
> 
> So, what I really wanted to talk about was passing and privilege. We just held
> a very interesting conference here at Lancaster, called
> 'Uprootings/Re-groundings: questions of home and migration', and these very
> questions were raised by some of our speakers (who came originally from
> Trinidad, Haiti, Nigeria, South Africa and Israel via various other places in
> Europe and North America, while those of us who organized the conference came
> to England from the US, Canada and Australia, but have family roots in various
> other places). I feel compelled to respond to Haidee's comments on this list in
> part because the conference compelled me to think about the unequal power
> relations involved in sitting back as an 'academic' and listening to others (in
> this case Black women) do all the hard work of dealing with the lived
> experience, theoretical questions, and political praxis of 'passing' in an
> academic world which has been set up by and for a white male power structure.
> 
> We all have an obligation to disrupt those proceedings wherever possible, and
> if making us stop and think about the purpose of this mail-list is one way of
> doing it, then let's take up the challenge. How does 'Caribbean Studies' fit
> into the larger academic and political scene? How is it produced and how is it
> consumed? For whom and for what purposes? How do academics studying the
> Caribbean, whether they are from the region or from elsewhere, engage with
> other kinds of people 'interested' (in the widest sense of the term) in the
> Caribbean?
> 
> Those are some of my thoughts today...I hope to hear back from some of you who
> have taken the time to read this far. As you may have gathered by now, part of
> my interest in these questions relates to the book I am working on which will
> in part consider how 'Caribbean Studies' is consumed in locations of power
> elsewhere. 
> 
> With respect,
> 
> Mimi Sheller
> 
> Mimi Sheller
> Department of Sociology
> Lancaster University
> Lancaster LA1 4YL
> England
> 
> tel: +44-1524-65201 ext. 93442
> email: [log in to unmask]
> 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From:	[log in to unmask] [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> > Sent:	Tuesday, May 30, 2000 6:22 PM
> > To:	[log in to unmask]
> > Subject:	Intorduction
> > 
> > Hello Everyone,
> > 
> > About three weeks ago Alicia Carson introduced herself to us
> > through this medium. In her introduction she told us that
> > she has a "passion for issues related to the Caribbean."
> > She went on to elaborate that her interests lie in current 
> > events, educational issues and relations between the 
> > Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba and the USA.  I was struck by how 
> > she is so eager to interact, as a matter of fact she said she 
> > feels she has come across a good resource.
> > 
> > As a result, it made me realise how lax we are regarding the
> > purpose of this mailbase.  We have not really discussed
> > Caribbean issues (past or present), and have turned the
> > mailbase solely into a message board.  Please do not
> > think that I am excluding myself for I am just as 
> > guilty.
> > 
> > Suppose I said that to pass into a forced whiteness begs
> > amnesia, how would you answer?  What if I were to say
> > that Sir James Mitchell of St. Vincent needs to step down?
> > Or Dr. Eric Williams spoilt his people like an over-indulgent
> > parent?  How about God bless Michael Manley?
> > 
> > Walk good,
> > Haidee.
> 



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