You are warmly invited to the following seminar at the Institute for the Study of the Americas on Wednesday 5th November:
 
Wendy Knepper (ISA and Brunel)“Entangled Encounters: The Global Imaginary in Contemporary Caribbean Writing”
 
Venue: Room 12, Institute for the Study of the Americas, 35 Tavistock Square, London
Time: 5pm
The seminar will be followed by a wine reception.
 
 
Bio: Dr Wendy Knepper is a Research Fellow at the ISA and adjunct lecturer in Postcolonial Literature and Theory at Brunel University. Prior to moving to the UK in 2007, she taught Caribbean literature and gender theory at Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2003 to 2005, she held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship in affiliation with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard and the African Studies department at New York University. She has published articles in Small Axe and PMLA as well as contributed numerous articles to books on postcolonial theory and Caribbean liteature. Recently, she completed a monograph on the Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau. Currently, she is working on a book about the entanglements of globalisation and postcoloniality in contemporary Caribbean literature. Her lecture is an excerpt from this book-length project.
Abstract: 
Entangled Encounters: The Global Imaginary in Contemporary Caribbean Writing: 
Postcolonial Caribbean literature and theory have long been concerned with historical representation, the recuperation of memory and anxieties about past-present horizons in the contemporary world. Recently, however, many argue that globalisation studies and globalisation as a lived experience have challenged postcolonial frameworks of interpretation. In the words of Arjun Appadurai, the globalising world represents a “complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot be understood any longer in terms of existing center-periphery models” (Modernity at Large, 32). Critics are not alone in this view. In A New World Order, Caryl Phillips, a well-known “postcolonial author,” observes that “[t]he colonial, or postcolonial, model has collapsed. In its place we have a new world order in which there will soon be one global conversation with limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none” (5). Nonetheless, in this new world order, the Caribbean remains a compelling field of study, particularly because the region and the peoples are seen as forerunners in the long history of globalization. It is widely acknowledged that many of the defining features of globality have long been present in the region, including transnational flows of trade and investment, mass migration to and from far-flung parts of the world, intermixture of many ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups, and dynamic processes of creolisation.
What role do Caribbean literary and cultural works play in a world where postcoloniality appears to be waning and globalization seems to be increasing? What might we learn from the Caribbean’s longstanding entanglements with the wider world? How do we describe the poetics at work in contemporary Caribbean writing? In responding to these questions, I outline a theory of “vernacular globalism” that is attentive to the long history of globalization and various constructs of the global imaginary, including colonial and postcolonial perspectives. Drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai, David Scott, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Soja and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I take up the question of the relations between the world, the text and the critic in light of the fresh perspectives vernacular globalism brings. My focus is on the “–scapes” (Appadurai), chronotopes (Mikhail Bakhtin) and spatio-temporal dynamics of contemporary writing, which serve to foreground the entangled encounters of the worlding of the text and the textualities of the world. In the second part of this lecture, I present close readings of how a theory of “vernacular globalism” accounts for the local-global dynamics at work in a text where the incipient presence of globalization can already be seen, Dickie Jobson’s 1982-film entitled Countryman. In closing, I consider a twenty-first century text that enunciates a new understanding of global relations and solidarities through sonic histories and other vernacular globalisms: Kamau Brathwaite’s “9/11” from Born to Slow Horses.




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