e-Publications@Marquette

Playing with the metaphor of the rebellious Caliban as protagonist, this interdisciplinary conference is guided by the following questions: How has the Caribbean been constructed historically as a geographic place and an imagined space both from within and without? How did the colonial encounter shape the notion of Caribbeans as “subhuman Calibans” or “cannibals,” and how has the coexistent resistance to such othering continued to revise colonial and neocolonial misperceptions? How have 20th and 21st century diasporas further led to questions of not only how to locate Caribbeanness, but challenged the notion of real and imagined boundaries of space, nation, and identity? And given 21st century political changes that have opened the Caribbean increasingly to global markets, how have the continued intertwinements between language, power, and mobility led to inventive artistic and literary production? The conference explored with particular interest notions of “space” and “topography” as matrices where a variety of understandings about Caribbean cultural identity are negotiated.