Thursday 17th October 2013, 6-7 p.m., Regents Park College, Oxford
Paul Sutton and Kate Quinn (HSG Committee Members) will be launching their book Politics and Power in Haiti (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). It will follow on from a lecture by Professor Emeritus Gad Heuman on “The Caribbean after Slave Emancipation” which will be delivered at Regents College at 5 p.m. Both events are free.
Saturday 26th October 2013, 10 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. – STUC Black Workers’ Committee Celebration of Achievement – Past and Present. MORE INFO: Sandra Walker on 0141 337 8100 or email [email protected]
This event celebrates the achievements of black people past and present. There will be contributions from black people in Scotland who have, and continue, to inspire their communities and beyond. The world is richer thanks to the diversity of the people, none more so than in Scotland.
Sunday 27th October – Monday 28th October 2013 – The Black Jacobins Revisited: Rewriting History ConferenceWorkshop to mark seventy-five years of C.L.R. James’s pioneering anticolonial classic The Black Jacobins Venues: International Slavery Museum, Liverpool and The Bluecoat, Liverpool. Introducing the Keynote Speakers:
Robert A. Hill, C.L.R. James’s Literary Executor and Professor Emeritus of History, UCLA. Title: Truth, the Whole Truth, and Revolution-making in The Black Jacobins
Bill Schwarz, Professor of English, Queen Mary University of London. Title: Primitive Emancipation
Rawle Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, theatre scholar, playwright, director. Title: Dechoukaj!: The Black Jacobins and Liberating Caribbean Theatre
Yvonne Brewster, OBE, Founder of Talawa Theatre Company and The Barn Theatre. Director of the 1986 London Production of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins Play. Title: From Page to Stage
Nick Nesbitt, Professor of French, Princeton University. Title: Paradoxes of Production: Labour, Revolution, and Universality in The Black Jacobins
Matthew J. Smith, Senior Lecturer in History, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Title: ‘The Spirit of the Thing’: The Black Jacobins and Caribbean Discourse on Haiti
Selma James, Activist, Writer, International Coordinator of Global Women’s Strike, Founder of Crossroads Women’s Centre. Title: Black Jacobins: History as a Political Weapon
Frank Rosengarten, Professor Emeritus of Italian, City University of New York. Title: The Interplay Between Literature and History in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins
Selwyn Cudjoe, Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative Literature, Wellesley College. Title: C.L.R. James and His Intellectual Background (Trinidad & Tobago)
Tuesday 29th October 2013 – Talking About Haiti 3-6pm, University of Glasgow, St Andrews Building, Room 213. Organised as part of the University of Glasgow Colonial and Postcolonial Group’s seminar programme, in conjunction with the African and Caribbean Network, Glasgow and the Haiti Support Group. Many thanks to the School of Social and Political Sciences for providing refreshments, and to the Alliance Française de Glasgow for their generous support.
4pm – Made By Revolution: C.L.R. James and West Indian Visions of Haitian History – Matthew J. Smith, Senior Lecturer in History, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
5pm – Fragments of a Universal History: Masses, subjects and ideas in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins – Nick Nesbitt, Professor of French, Princeton University
In December 2009, Atiz Rezistans, the Sculptors of Grand Rue, hosted their first Ghetto Biennale. They invited fine artists, film-makers, academics, photographers, musicians, architects and writers to come to the Grand Rue area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to make or witness work that was made or happened in their neighbourhood. The Biennale aimed to be a “third space … an event or moment created through the collaboration between artists from radically different backgrounds” (John Keiffer). A second Biennale was held in December 2011. Yet while the Ghetto Biennale was conceived to expose social, racial, class and geographical immobility, it seemed to have upheld these class inertias within its structural core.
In this seminar, Leah Gordon, co-founder of the Ghetto Biennale, addresses the contradictions and challenges posed by the event, and how the 3rd Ghetto Biennale seeks to confront them. Is the Biennale institutional critique or a season ticket to the institution? Poverty tourism or an exit strategy from the ghetto? What was the effect of the earthquake and the ensuing NGO culture on cross-cultural relations in Haiti? Can the 3rd Ghetto Biennale produce meaningful discussion about sameness and difference in an allegedly de-centred art world, and transcend different models of ghettoization?
