Over the course of this afternoon of multiform panel presentations, we will engage critically with the digital as praxis, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that evermore intensely reconfigure the social, historical, and geo-political contours of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Presenters will consider the affordances and limitations of the digital with respect to their particular methodologies – notably, representing the past, historicizing space, and telling stories. Discussions will pick up themes addressed in our 2014 inaugural event as well as anticipate the launch of sx:archipelagos, a peer-reviewed Small Axe Project publishing platform dedicated to scholarship of and emerging from the Caribbean – set to go live in 2016.
The conference is open to the public.
FRIDAY, 4 DECEMBER
Maison Francaise – Columbia University
1PM Welcome
Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College
1:15PM Opening Remarks
David Scott, Columbia University
1:30-3:00PM Panel I – Histories
Vincent Brown, Harvard University – Two Plantations: Enslaved Families in Virginia & Jamaica
Laurent Dubois & Mary Caton Lingold, Duke University – Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica
Jennifer Morgan, New York University – Discussant
3:00-3:15PM BREAK
3:15-4:15PM Panel II – Cartographies
Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College & Alex Gil, Columbia University – In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography
Ian Baucom, University of Virginia – Discussant
4:15-4:30PM BREAK
4:30-6:00PM Panel III – Narratives
Robert Antoni – As Flies to Whatless Boys
Oonya Kempadoo – Naniki
Kelly Baker Josephs, York College, CUNY – Discussant
6:00-6:30PM RECEPTION
Sponsors: Small Axe, Barnard's Department of Africana Studies and Forum on Migration; Columbia's Center for the Study of Social Difference, Maison Francaise, Digital Humanities Center, Institute for Research in African American Studies, and Greater Caribbean Studies Center.
Columbia University and Barnard College are committed to creating an environment that includes and welcomes people with disabilities. This event will include sign language interpreters. If you need further accommodations because of a disability, please email ye2164@columbia.edu at least one week in advance.
Recording of sessions 1 & 2 available here.