By Nicole Burrowes
Nicole Burrowes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her current book project, Seeds of Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana, explores the historical possibility of a struggle forged at the edge of empire in the midst of economic, political and environmental crises.
This week, on May 5 and May 6, 2022, “The Many Worlds of Mainland ‘British Latin America’” Symposium will be held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in New Jersey. Co-hosted by the Rutgers British Studies Center and Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, this hybrid event will bring together scholars who work on the region and reckon with the British presence and legacy in the mainland Caribbean and Latin America. Gauitra Bahadur, author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, and currently Assistant Professor and Journalism Program Coordinator in the Faculty of Arts, Culture & Media at Rutgers University will give the keynote address entitled “Tales of the Sea,” on Thursday, and Alissa Trotz, Professor of Caribbean Studies and Director of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and editor of The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings by Andaiye, will offer closing comments to the gathering on Friday. In addition to hearing from these daughters of Guyana, there will be much of interest for a Guyanese and regional audience.
From artistic production and cultural politics, to systems of enslavement, indenture and convict labour, presenters will workshop papers that engage a wide array of topics. Other topics of note include forging identities, the politics of caste and colour, the colonial gaze, entanglements of empire, and the village movement.
“The Many Worlds of Mainland ‘British Latin America’” symposium will generate important discussions on histories, meanings, and the arts in the study of the region. The phrasing “British Latin America” may be unfamiliar to some, but the titling is meant to provoke conversation in academic fields where places like Guyana, Belize and San Andrés do not often occupy centre stage.
The following highlights a few of the sixteen papers that will be discussed during the symposium. Grace Aneiza Ali will present “Artistic Responses to Crossing the Kala Pani,” which uses poet Derek Walcott’s words, “the sea is history,” to consider how contemporary artists of Indian Guyanese heritage explore memory and repair. In “Subjects not Citizens: West Indian Immigrants and the Struggle for British Subjecthood,” Khemani Gibson examines how West Indian migrants to Panama and their children understood their socio-political identities as they advanced efforts for equality and self determination in the mid-20th century.
In “Transimperial Mobilities, Slavery, and Becoming Catholic in Eighteenth Century Cartagena de Indias,” Bethan Fisk examines how enslaved people of African descent moved between imperial zones and enacted knowledge to become Catholic in ways that could meaningfully transform their lives. Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard asks “Is the ‘Coolie’ Woman a Banker?” by exploring the indentured Indian woman’s practice of collecting and fashioning jewelry, and how she held value on her person. Catherine R. Peters will present “Water, Indenture, and the Long Village Movement in 1840s–1850s Coastal Guyana,” as a way to engage the question, “What evidence of collaboration, solidarity, or kin-making can be gleaned from records which presume to segment people of Asian and African descent into separate histories?”
Thinking about the current moment, Jazmin Miller’s “Belize Da Fi Wi Now & Forever, 8867: Examining Local Politics Through a Belizean Carnival,” looks at carnival as a space where Belize’s multicultural national identity is celebrated, negotiated and contested. Moving to Colombia, Sharika D. Crawford raises questions about Indigeneity and British legacies by examining why leaders of the “native” island population within this multiracial and multicultural landscape, invented the term “raizal”meaning “rooted in and from” the island, in her paper, “From Native to Raizal: Indigeneity and the Anglophone Heritage of San Andrés and Providencia Islands.”
The Many Worlds symposium is co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, the South Asian Studies Program, the Department of Africana Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences, at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and is organized by Yesenia Barragan, Nicole Burrowes and Seth Koven.
This symposium is free and will be held online, as well as with a smaller group in-person at Rutgers University on the New Brunswick campus in New Jersey. Attendees are encouraged to read the precirculated papers and works-in-progress in order to ensure a robust discussion.
For the schedule, click here:
https://rbsc.rutgers.edu/events/11858/the-many-worlds-of-mainland-british-latin-america-symposium
To register and to join us online this week, go to https://www.jotform.com/build/221105668742051
