Professor Brinsley Samaroo made a sterling contribution to the field of history, particularly that of Indian indentureship and the atrocities of the colonial past. He was a historian of the people, ...had entered national politics in one phase of his career and continued all his life to serve as a public intellectual for the society of Trinidad in defence of many groups and causes. In this tribute to his life, the author establishes the intellectual heights he had plumbed by the age of 83 and draws on the testimonies of four persons whose lives have been influenced by him in different ways. Each individual underscores the wealth of his knowledge, his generosity as a scholar, his accessibility, gregarious nature and penchant for storytelling. Yet all of this was packaged in a disciplined and no-nonsense individual who was deeply committed to recovering the voices of those who have not yet been heard in history.
How has a movement built on the consciousness of sisterhood become so fragmented between the end of the 20th and into the second decade of the 21st century? As different political tendencies, widely ...varying economic conditions and cultural dissimilarities emerged in global struggles to achieve diverse visions of women's and gender equality, the current feminist movement appears to be characterized by chasms between the east, west, north and south rather than viewed as a movement whose basic tenets are parallel across racial, geographic and social barriers. By looking at lived examples of confrontations, and through a deliberate process of self-reflexive questioning, this paper looks at what elements might sustain the global nature of the feminist movement into the future. Through a re-examination of key authors who have identified differences wrought by geography and culture, among them Chandra Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes", and in conversation with two feminist scholars from North America and India, the author interrogates the concept of difference and argues that confronting and accepting difference might teach us more about our "sameness under the skin" and about the continued building of consciousness across borders.
This essay examines the organic connection between the methods and materials used by Indian artist Wendy Nanan and the metaphysical ideas that underpin her creativity. Her exposure to a mixture of ...religious and cultural practices drawn from Presbyterianism and Hinduism, to the variegated festivals of a postslavery postindenture society of Trinidad is re-presented in the symbolic and allegorical pieces that Nanan has produced for over two decades. These evoke messages of harmony despite difference and of political agency for a nation. Her symbolism establishes an Indian aesthetic and iconography that has evolved in this society beyond its original moment of entry to a point of no return to an imagined purity.
GREAT ADAPTATIONS Mohammed, Patricia
Journal of West Indian literature,
11/2017, Letnik:
25, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Relatively few Caribbean novels have been adapted to feature films. This paper looks at the film Green Days by the River, directed by Michael Mooleedhar in 2017 and adapted from the novel of the same ...name written by Michael Anthony and published in 1967. The essay argues that the two genres are different art forms and that a critical review of the film primarily based on a comparison between text and cinematic translation overshadows the element of originality that the director brings to an interpretation. Film adaptations grant novels and their authors new life and extend the legacy of their work by inviting dialogue with new generations who perhaps migrate to reading through film.
The history of Islam in the Caribbean has not been rigorously traced (Khan 2004: 190).¹ No pure story of traditions that arrive and are transformed over time by individuals or groups emerges. As with ...all cultural phenomena, growth and expansion are influenced by factors of migration, global currents in religious thinking, and material culture. In this essay I focus on what surfaces as a recognizable Islamic iconography in Trinidad over the history of its British colonial settlement from the nineteenth century to the present.²
In order to locate elements of an iconography, I have drawn on several sources of data,
Positioning an East Indian ethnicity as central to its argument, and using the multidisciplinary lens of art critique, literary criticism, and feminist theory, this paper proposes a politics of ...inclusion as a defining narrative in Caribbean subjectivity to heal the wounds of colonisation evidenced by racialised exclusions, competing victimhoods, and anger. It suggests that such traumas have limited the aesthetic expression of creativity through a 'divided sense of humanity'. The paper develops the idea of the cross-cultural imaginary in Trinidad in particular as it explores questions of (self) representation, gender, culture, sexuality, and race within and across the Caribbean in the search for a Caribbean centered mythopoetics of being. The paper argues in favour of a poetics of the transcendent found in art and literature as a more integral way of 'imagining' the Caribbean beyond reductive binaries such as tradition/modernity; Europe/Africa; Africa/Asia; male/female; European orientalism and cultural nativism. These factors have impeded a more meaningful understanding of Caribbean identity in the absence of an inclusive cross-cultural poetics of identity.
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