Conference Report 2002
Trinidadian journalist Raymond Ramcharitar gave a paper at the 2002 conference at Warwick University. He sent us his observations on the whole experience.
Society for Caribbean Studies (UK) Annual Conference, Warwick University, 2002
Academic conferences might seem daunting and esoteric to the layman, and particularly so when they are centred on a theme so broad and undefined as "Caribbean culture". This has been the case with the five or so conferences I've attended in the last two years, but the (British) Society for Caribbean Studies conference, held at Warwick University in England, in early July, took academic inquiry up a not-often-trod path. The conference was actually interesting and interested in something other than academic politics - some of the information evinced was relevant to, and largely unavailable in, the Caribbean.
What is also interesting about the UK-based society is that while the majority of members are scholars who have done, in some cases extensive, research on the Caribbean, very few of them are actually from the Caribbean. As presenters went, there was a handful from the Caribbean, some West Indians living and working in the metropole, and a large number of foreign academics. This was not a bad thing by any means, given the knee jerk politicisation and egomania which infest even the most insignificant bureaucracy/cultural enterprise in these parts. The situation also afforded an interesting vantage on the notions of the Caribbean that circulate and are given currency outside. It's gratifying to report that the Caribbean (and particularly the Anglo Caribbean) seems to be taken much more seriously by these people than it is by our "own"- a story eloquently told in the title of a paper on research difficulties: "Frogs, Wood Ants, a Truck Tyre and the Archives dumped on the floor: Just some of the Problems Encountered in Conducting Foreign Policy Research in Guyana". [presented by Keane Clyde] More evidence was to be found in the variety of the papers presented, and the range of disciplines from which they came. There were geographers, social scientists, historians, environmentalists, literary scholars, an itinerant journalist - who presented papers on everything from the political economy of festivals like Carnival and St Lucia Jazz, to the design of tourist accommodation in Jamaica and the implications to the discourses of tourism.
And not in the least, the conference also provided information that you'd be forgiven for thinking was non-existent. Geraldine Skeete, a UWI St Augustine graduate student, for example, presented a paper on the 1994 Patricia Powell novel, A Small Gathering of Bones, which dealt with the lives of homosexuals in Jamaica. Skeete's investigations, which included interviews with the author, presented an account which was based on the actual conditions in Jamaica under which those with alternative sexual preferences must live. Homosexual men must marry and fully integrate into the ultrahomophobic society; they then establish "safe" residences, devise systems of signs by which they recognise each other, as well as rituals for anonymous sex, which are conducted in public parks, and initiated by a system of touch recognition. The value of this knowledge cannot be understated, as it is unlikely such research would be welcome or even accepted as relevant in Jamaica, or even in Trinidad, for that matter.
More along the lines of the knowledges we take great pleasure in, came from a UWI lecturer. Dr Keith Nurses paper investigated the political economy of cultural festivals in the Caribbean. He has been contracted to conduct research into festivals like St Lucia Jazz,Trinidad Carnival, Barbados Crop Over and Jamaica's Reggae Sunsplash. It appears from Nurse's calculations that these festivals generate returns of anywhere between 200 to 700 per cent. These felicific figures were only slightly marred by social scientist Caroline Allen's paper, according to which, the Caribbean's rate of HIV infection was exceeded by only sub-Saharan Africa's-with one of the sources of infection being sex tourism.
There were the conventional papers on conventional readings of Caribbean literature for their multifarious meanings in the diaspora. One academic proposed that dub poetry, far from being an exercise in illiteracy, was in fact a counter-hegemonic poetic form [Molly Thompson]. Another that the simplistic notion of Uncle Tomism (a staple technique of local cultural personalities seeking foreign grants) was in fact an ironic strategy of slaves, as demonstrated in the novels of Caryl Phillips [John Ford].
The SCS is based at Warwick University, where the conference was coincidentally convened this year. Warwick is a relatively new university, but one of the highest rated in the UK, competing with Oxford and Cambridge for students. The campus itself resembles a small town. It accommodates about 17,000 students (47 from the Caribbean) and has its own shopping centre, cinema, theatre and, of course, pubs. You get the feeling amidst all this that the Caribbean, and Caribbean studies, are very far away, but the University has strong links with the Caribbean - Sir Shridath Ramphal up till recently, was the Chancellor. The Centre for Caribbean Studies, which is headed by Gad Heuman, a historian, is also one of the most respected in the UK, and provides a multidisciplinary programme, including literature, history, and the social sciences. So there's a lot going on here, and a fair bit of interest in the Caribbean, which is the sense of variety that the society promotes.
A recent feature of the conference is a bursary for travel awarded to an artist or arts practitioner from the Caribbean to bring his/her work to the conference. This year's bursary went to the distinguished Guyanese artist, Stanley Greaves, who addressed the conference about his life and work, exhibiting (via slides) a series of paintings entitled "There is a meeting here tonight". (A detail from a painting from the series, which explores the artist's take on (Anglo) Caribbean politics, is on the cover of the Veerle Poupeye book, Caribbean Art.) In the course of his address, Greaves trotted out what were clearly some of his pet peeves as far as Caribbean art and scholarship went - principally the dearth of writing about art and the anti-intellectual environment. "Artists started working at the same time as writers," he said, "but bookstores have miles and miles of texts written by Caribbean writers and miles of commentaries, but there is no book on Caribbean visual art. Art is looked at as not having an intellectual component." This omission, he said, fits into the general intellectual impoverishment of the region, which has resulted in much talk, but little by way of doing anything useful. "The societies have no systems to nurture artists," he said, an ethos which was reflected in the regional education system, which "stifle[s] the imagination of children" - a point which caused him to resign from the CXC art committee. Neither was Greaves any more complimentary about regional artistic/cultural politics. "Carifesta is like a sweet you give to a child. A lot of high-sounding talk, but I have yet to see anything realised. I have been hearing about the'Caribbean aesthetic' but I have not found it. We need a set of rules and values by which we can identify." His own approach to this, Greaves labelled "buccaneer aesthetics, whereby he felt no compunction about borrowing or appropriating from any body of knowledge to create his own - a concluding note which resonated with the conference's shape.
Raymond Ramcharitar
July 2002
THE SOCIETY FOR CARIBBEAN STUDIES (UK) ANNUAL CONFERENCE PAPERS, VOLUME 3, 2002, makes available selected papers from this conference, including Raymond Ramcharitars presentation. To view the available papers see 'Conference Papers 2000 - present'.