Global Voices » Nicholas Laughlin

Caribbean: Talking to Giselle Rampaul of ‘The Spaces Between Words'

Nicholas Laughlin — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:05:15 +0000

Giselle Rampaul is a literary scholar in the Literatures in English (LIE) section at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Her research interests include the intersections between British and Caribbean literature, representations of childhood in Caribbean literature, and the work of the Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon. She is currently working on a project on Shakespeare in the Caribbean.

She is also the editor and producer of ‘The Spaces Between Words: Conversations with Writers‘, a podcast series launched in November 2011. Currently hosted by UWI-St. Augustine’s Liberal Arts department website (but with plans to move to its own dedicated site), and drawing on the help of Rampaul’s LIE colleagues, The Spaces Between Words features interviews with writers and readings from their work, released at approximately weekly intervals.

Giselle Rampaul

The series opened with the Jamaican novelist Marlon James, and has included other Caribbean writers like Lorna Goodison, Edward Baugh, Jane King, and Mark McWatt, as well as V.S. Naipaul’s British biographer, Patrick French. All the podcasts thus far were recorded at the inaugural Bocas Lit Fest, a literary festival in Port of Spain.

With the festival’s second edition a few weeks away, and Rampaul’s team gearing up to record a new round of interviews, I asked her some questions via email about her experience editing The Spaces Between Words and how it could be used as a tool for teaching at UWI and elsewhere.

•••

Nicholas Laughlin (NL): Why did you decide to start the Spaces podcast series?

Giselle Rampaul (GR): Last year in March, UWI’s STAN magazine invited me to do an interview with [Canada-based Trinidadian writer] Shani Mootoo when she was writer-in-residence at UWI. While transcribing the audio-recording of the interview, I really enjoyed being able to actually hear Mootoo’s voice as she discussed her writing and her experiences, and thought that other people might find this appealing as well. It was because of this that one of my friends, Ben Braithwaite (who also later designed the logo for the podcast), suggested I begin a podcast series of interviews with writers.

Because I was also then the co-ordinator of Campus Literature Week, which aims to showcase the work of both new and established local writers, I thought that such a series could easily intersect with and develop this thrust in the Literatures in English (LIE) section. It would allow listeners to hear the writers not only read from their work but also discuss issues related to their creative processes and their writing. The interviews would be useful to students of literature and creative writing, giving them a range of perspectives on different issues. The podcasts could also be used as teaching tools or support material for university courses, not just here at UWI, but in other places that teach Caribbean literature.

One of the advantages of producing a podcast series is that it provides free access to knowledge. This, I think, is especially important in the current technological age, when the future of academic publishing is constantly being discussed. At the same time, the podcasts were not meant to be purely of academic interest, but would appeal to anyone with a love for books, or anyone with a general interest in creative writing or issues related to Caribbean identities.

Luckily, the idea for the podcast came just a month or two before the 2011 Bocas Lit Fest, when many writers were going to be in the country. [GV managing director] Georgia Popplewell, who has experience with podcasting for Caribbean Free Radio, gave me some advice. At this time, there was no technological infrastructure at UWI to support podcasts, but our webmaster, Daren Dhoray, very quickly got on the job.

Once I began editing the interviews with my assistant editor, Ryan Durgasingh (who is also now diligently working on our new website at www.spaceswords.com), I approached Satanand Sharma at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts for help with the theme music. He very kindly allowed us to use his composition “Papa Bois’s Song”, which begins and ends every interview.

So it was with the help of many different people that the podcast came into being. The interview that did, in fact, inspire the idea for the podcast is not actually in the series. But perhaps we’ll catch Shani Mootoo another time!

(You can read the interview with Shani Mootoo here.)

NL: How do you choose your interviewers, who seem impressively knowledgeable about the writers they talk to?

GR: Some of the interviewers last year came from staff of the LIE section at UWI —Geraldine Skeete, Jean Antoine-Dunne, and me. I also wanted to get students involved in the project: Rhonda Harrison, a PhD student in literature; Barbara Jenkins, a creative writing MFA student and also a prize-winning writer; Vladimir Lucien, an undergraduate student at the time, whose poetry appears in international journals; Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon, another PhD student who was keenly interested in the Naipaul biography.

This year, a few more people have been added to our team: Paula Morgan, another member of the LIE staff; Nicole Roberts, lecturer in Spanish literature at UWI; and Ryan Durgasingh, an MPhil student in literature and the assistant editor of the podcasts, who will be adding interviewing to his many podcast-related activities. The interviewers are chosen based on different kinds of expertise, but also because of their keen interest in the writers, their work, and literature in general. They’ve tended to be UWI-based so far, as well.

NL: Of all the writers you’ve included so far, which one (or ones) gave the most surprising interviews?

GR: I am not sure if I’d describe any of the interviews as surprising, but they certainly have all been very enjoyable. The readings at the beginnings of the interviews have all been fascinating introductions to the writers’ work. You can’t help wanting to read The Book of Night Women after hearing Marlon James reading from the first paragraph of his book. The range of Caribbean (and sometimes also non-Caribbean) accents also brings the books to life in a very appealing way and makes every interview unique. In fact, Charlotte Williams points out the performative aspect of readings by Caribbean authors especially in her interview. And Edward Baugh talks about his inspiration for his own oration from church sermons.

Hearing about Patrick French’s experience of Trinidad as he did his research for The World is What It Is is fascinating — not least because he is writing about someone as controversial as V.S. Naipaul. Lorna Goodison’s interview has also been very popular, and shows her range as a creative writer — she reads a poem at the beginning of the interview, but talks about her teaching of short story writing and about her memoir, From Harvey River. And her name keeps coming up as a major source of inspiration for other writers, like Tanya Shirley and Jane Bryce. So there are interesting intersections among the interviews as well. Perhaps one of the most quirky and funny things I’ve heard in the interviews is Charlotte Williams talking about her current project, “The Toilet Papers.”

NL: So do UWI faculty actually use the podcasts as teaching tools?

GR: There have recently been training sessions on how to produce podcasts by the Instructional Development Unit, but I am not sure whether any other department has yet produced their own podcasts. However, UWI faculty do link to podcasts and videos on their course profiles. UWI staff also provide links to podcasts through social media groups. The UWI Linguistics Society Facebook group is very active, for example, and faculty members often post language-related podcasts there for students. Some lecturers in the LIE section, who have been teaching some of our featured writers, have also been posting our podcast interviews on their course profiles.

NL: Are there similar projects based at UWI, combining an archival function with public outreach?

GR: There are a few similar projects in the Department of Liberal Arts. The Modern Languages section takes part in an annual Inter-Campus Foreign Language Theatre Festival that is open to the public, for example. Campus Literature Week is an annual event open to the public and features readings by local creative writers, followed by a gala reading by a distinguished featured writer. All these events are audio- and video-recorded and archived. There are also efforts to make snippets of these readings available online.

International conferences held by the department are usually recorded and archived as well. The first issue of the online journal Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies is the result of a past conference. The Linguistics section is also involved in the documentation of endangered heritage languages (such as Patois and Bhojpuri) through interviews with the elderly, and other language custodians. There is also a collaborative project, involving members of the Deaf community, to create a large digital archive of Trinidad and Tobago Sign Language, from which descriptive (grammars and dictionaries) and practical (e.g. smartphone apps and text books) materials will be developed.

Follow The Spaces Between Words on Twitter @SpacesWords

Caribbean: Talking to Peter James Hudson of The Public Archive

Nicholas Laughlin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:59:06 +0000

Peter James Hudson is a historian based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. His parents hail from the Caribbean —specifically, Jamaica — and Eastern Europe the former Yugoslavia.

Hudson’s field is modern American history, specialising in “the cultural and political-economic history of American empire and the cultural history of the African diaspora in North America,” and he is currently working on a book that looks at the political and economic history of US banks operating in the Caribbean.

In February 2010, together with his colleague Samira Sheikh, Hudson launched The Public Archive: History Beyond the Headlines, a blog-format “clearinghouse of historical and archival sources” on Haiti. (And he tweets at @public_archive.) As he explains, The Public Archive was a response to the debates about Haiti’s past, present, and future that broke out after the devastating January 2010 earthquake.

Peter James Hudson of The Public Archive

Hudson wrote then:

Given the incredible loss of life resulting from the January 12, 2010 earthquake in the Republic of Haiti, it may appear frivolous to turn to history — but history, too, has been a casualty of this disaster. In the reporting on the earthquake and the relief operations, Haiti’s history has been contorted by cliché, smudged by misrepresentation, or not represented at all. The country and its citizens have been rendered history-less, and its historic significance in the region and the world made invisible.

With The Public Archive’s second anniversary approaching, I interviewed Hudson via email about the issues raised by the kind of “digital humanities” intellectual work the blog represents.

•••

Nicholas Laughlin: Did the idea to start The Public Archive come after the January 2010 earthquake and its media coverage, or was it something you had in mind before that?

Peter James Hudson: While we didn’t have anything in mind before the earthquake, the idea to start The Public Archive came about not as a result of the earthquake itself, but as a result of a profound sense of despair at and frustration with the media coverage of Haiti following the earthquake. As professional historians with laymen’s interests in Haiti, we thought that we needed to make some small, however limited, intervention in the coverage of Haiti, and we agreed that the best way to do it was by mobilising the research skills we had as historians in an attempt to provide some context for understanding Haiti’s history, and how that history was constructed and represented in the media.

NL: Were you involved in an online project like this before, or was this your first foray into using blogging tools for doing this kind of research/archiving/advocacy work (because The Public Archive involves elements of all those activities)?

PJH: I had been involved in those activities in the print world, but never before online.

NL: Are your students and colleagues at Vanderbilt regular readers? How have they reacted? What’s your sense of where the blog fits into your research interests?

PJH: I know it has been used in a number of classes at Vanderbilt and at other institutions. The response has been mostly positive — though, in some cases, I think the idea of “digital humanities” is still recent enough that there is an old guard of academics who don’t believe that digital media are part of the proper set of professional endeavours of academic historians. As academics, we’re encouraged to use blogs and twitter and the like to teach our students, but using them for other purposes isn’t seen as something that will help you on the road to tenure.

As for where the blog fits into my own research interests, in some ways it doesn’t. While it has led me to a number of digital repositories and open-access periodicals and journals that I did not previously know about, the history of Haiti is really a secondary part of my research. I’m trained as an Americanist, and my primary research is on the expansion of Wall Street and American banking interests into the Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century. Haiti is significant in this — especially through the role of the National City Bank (the precursor to Citigroup) in the first US Occupation (1915-1934). However, Haiti was but one of the Caribbean republics, colonies, and dependencies on the radar of Wall Street at the time.

NL: Do you have a notion of where most of your readers are, and whether you have a readership in Haiti itself?

PJH: The majority of our readers are in the United States, followed by Canada and Britain, with a smaller segment in Haiti, Jamaica, and India.

NL: Do you think the earthquake — and all the debate and interest it generated — has had a lasting influence on how Haiti is perceived by the wider world, or has it been the case that old stereotypes and received ideas have actually been reinforced by the nature of that debate?

PJH: Many of the old stereotypes persist — but I also think a new set of perceptions have been generated. There is a greater awareness that Haiti exists, but it seems that now Haiti and Haitians are seen as permanent wards of the international aid community. As a permanent ward, Haiti is now competing (in the minds of North Americans) with much of Africa as the site of celebrity rehab and redemption. And here there is the danger — and I think this is already happening — that as donor fatigue sets in, and a new fashionable catastrophe occurs somewhere else, Haiti will return to obscurity, until, of course, there’s another crisis.

More importantly, the moment you assume that Haiti couldn’t survive without your help is the moment that you assume that Haiti can’t be helped. And all the old tropes of dependency, paternalism, and, implicitly, racial hierarchy fall into place. This comes out in some strange ways — in everything from the benignly ignorant advertisements recently produced by Donna Karan in the name of “helping Haiti” to the sickening way non-Haitian photographers can build their careers on, literally, the corpses of Haitians, to the incredible number of architects and designs students who have settled on the idea that the best way of helping Haiti is to design, literally, huts and villages for the Haitian people. While this vision of huts and villages points to the paucity of the imagination of the reconstruction plan for Port-au-Prince, it also suggests Haiti is next to the racist constructions of Africa within the North American imagination. Port-au-Prince is estimated at between two and three million people; it’s the size of Chicago or Houston. Nobody refers to those cities as villages and nobody, from what I know, in those cities lives in huts.

That said, I think the question of perception and representation of Haiti is in some ways misleading. Sure, these things shape how we see Haiti, but I think what more people in this part of the world need to do is look less at Haiti than at the engagements the United States, Canada, France, and Brazil have with Haiti. At this point, I think it would make more sense for Oprah and Kim Kardashian to visit the Red Cross or the United Nations.

NL: Have you thought about expanding the scope of the site to include other Caribbean locations, or do you plan to keep it focused on Haiti?

PJH: In the Caribbean, I’ve thought about expanding it to include Puerto Rico. I had the opportunity to spend a month in 2010 as a visiting scholar at the University of Puerto Rico’s Institute of Caribbean Studies. The energy of its director Humberto García Muñiz — especially in the face of the constant cuts to his budget — was inspiring, and he has a real vision of Puerto Rico in a pan-Caribbean context, something that comes through in the pages of the interdisciplinary journal Caribbean Studies, which he edits. But my time in Puerto Rico and, after I returned to the US, the incredible protests organised by the UPR students, really made me aware of the absolute ignorance that we in North American have about Puerto Rico. Yet the work going on at the Institute, and the protests of the students, coming long before the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, suggest a visionary understanding of the processes of neoliberalism and neo-colonialism in the Caribbean and the wider world.

On another tip, we also considered expanding The Public Archive to include Somalia and Pakistan.

NL: What other online resources on Haiti or the Caribbean would you point readers to?

PJH: I follow the twitter feeds of Alterpresse, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, the Haiti Information Project, BriKouri Nouvèl Gaye, Defend Haiti, and Haiti Liberté for Haiti news. Together, they create a consistent and critical newsfeed. I also follow Inner City Press for their dogged pursuit of answers from the United Nations on the activities and behavior of MINUSTAH.

For the Caribbean, my favorite blog is Norman Girvan’s Caribbean Political Economy. I was always a fan of Girvan’s writing on the political economy of development and underdevelopment in the Caribbean, and the impact and role that transnational corporations have had on Caribbean political sovereignty and economic integrity. Girvan’s Corporate Imperialism, Conflict, and Expropriation: Essays in Transnational Corporations and Economic Nationalism in the Third World (1976) and his Aspects of the Political Economy of Race in the Caribbean and in the Americas (1975) are, in my mind, classics of political economy and, of course, his theoretical work with the New World Group in the 1960s is inspirational — I wish more people were reading both the New World anthology Readings in the Political Economy of the Caribbean, which Girvan edited in 1971, as well as the recent collection that Girvan edited with Brian Meeks, The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonisation. All of these texts provide important ways of understanding the contemporary global economic crisis.

Girvan’s Caribbean Political Economy blog offers an important extension of this work, providing an accessible entrance into many of the questions of economy and politics facing the contemporary Caribbean, and while it displays the depth of knowledge of a policy wonk, it is written with the clarity and language of a journalist.

I’m a huge fan of many of the better-known literary and cultural sites on the Caribbean — sx salon, The Caribbean Review of Books, La Jiribilla, and Repeating Islands — and also the African Diaspora, but I think we need more work on political economy. Girvan is sending us in the right direction. There is also a fantastic blog on Dominican thought and culture called Cielo Naranja, and I’m also a regular reader of Pambazuka.

I also want to mention two digital history sites that I regularly frequent, and whose online archives have led to posts on The Public Archive. The first is the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) — an online archive run by a cooperative of partners and administered by Florida International University and the University of the Virgin Islands. While they have a specialised Haiti collection, they also have documents, periodicals and newspapers, maps and photographs, letters and documents from throughout the region. The second is the Centre International de Documentation et d'Information Haïtienne, Caribéenne et Afro-Canadienne — or CIDIHCA — based in Montreal. CIDIHCA do not have the slickest website out there, but as a highly specialised, well-curated independent archive, they offer a model of possibility for other similar institutions and organisations looking to create online archives. They have uploaded back issues of the Montreal-based Haitian journals Nouvelle Optique and Collectif Paroles, as well as collections on the Haitian Left and Haitian numismatics. Both the Digital Library of the Caribbean and CIDIHCA are well worth a browse.

NL: In these interviews I always like to ask what’s been the most unexpected thing about running the site.

PJH: Probably the power of Twitter. I wasn’t really a social media person before the site started; since then, I’ve found that through Twitter you can curate an individualised clearinghouse of information and news on whatever theme you’re interested in, that goes far beyond a reliance on a single mainstream news source. By now, this is probably obvious to most people, but it wasn’t to me. Twitter has become an important source for generating traffic to the site, but also for creating a broader historical and cultural context — and a broader community — in which the site is engaged. I’ve also spent more time on Google Books than I’d like to admit, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that the entire back run of Black World/Negro Digest has been uploaded.

Jamaica: why they lost the election

Nicholas Laughlin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:24:51 +0000

Active Voice analyses yesterday's general election in Jamaica, explaining how Prime Minister Andrew Holness and the Jamaica Labour Party — who looked, a month ago, set to be returned to office — lost in a landslide to Portia Simpson-Miller and the People's National Party. “Let’s see if the PNP having gained such a huge nod from the electorate will now put its mouth where its money is and really strike a blow for equal rights for all.”

Trinidad and Tobago: a lesson about strength

Nicholas Laughlin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:06:39 +0000

When Passion.Fruit sets out to rescue a trapped pigeon, a random encounter with a passing grandmother teaches her a lesson about strength, patience, and wisdom. “She cooed and comforted — nothing weak about her…. An accustomed unbinder of trapped limbs.”

Jamaica: a new prime minister

Nicholas Laughlin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:59:24 +0000

As Girl with a Purpose reports, the governing Jamaica Labour Party was defeated in yesterday's general election, and People's National Party head Portia Simpson-Miller is Jamaica's new prime minister — “a leader whose educational background is not as brilliant as her competitors,” observes Abeni from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, “but one who has that something which draws people.”

Barbados: too many cars

Nicholas Laughlin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:37:53 +0000

Barbados Underground asks: how can the island solve its perennial traffic problem? “Barbados is 166 square miles and at some point commonsense will have to take root. The number of vehicles on our roads cannot be allowed to go unregulated for much longer.”

Guyana: crime and insecurity

Nicholas Laughlin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:32:38 +0000

“Travel around coastland Guyana and you will see it too,” writes Imran Khan: “burglar bars, grillwork, heavily armed company security forces, reinforced doors, guard huts, watchmen, security lights, CCTV cameras.” He muses on the relationship between crime, underdevelopment, and political leadership.

Bermuda: rethinking ties with Britain?

Nicholas Laughlin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:21:01 +0000

The British government is reviewing its relationship with its overseas territories, writes Catch a Fire, and inviting Bermudans to share their perspectives. “I think we need a new Constitutional Convention to modernise and reform our relationship with the UK … and I would like each Overseas Territory to have a representative (an MP) in Westminster.”

Cuba: on writer Achy Obejas

Nicholas Laughlin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:15:47 +0000

Montague Kobbe profiles Achy Obejas, a Cuban-American writer who “constantly challenging her readers to (re)think their positions in relation to the most basic principles that govern our attitudes towards each other.”

Jamaica: missing children

Nicholas Laughlin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:11:40 +0000

Where are the more than 500 children reported missing in Jamaica this year, asks Petchary — and why are more people not paying attention to “a serious issue which, at the best of times, is brushed aside as if it is nothing of great importance”? “How many are alone, hopeless, despairing, struggling? We don’t know.”

Jamaica: politician too loud?

Nicholas Laughlin — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:04:42 +0000

Yvette J. Rowe contemplates a Jamaican election campaign advertisement that portrays opposition leader Portia Simpson-Miller as “too loud”: “These ads about attitude and posture are scoring dubious points rather than talking about the policies or the future of the country.”

Barbados: leptospirosis outbreak

Nicholas Laughlin — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:58:57 +0000

A government press conference addressing a leptospirosis outbreak prompts Barbados Free Press to ask some questions: “Why must every new leptospirosis outbreak be a surprise? Why are Barbados governments incapable of implementing and carrying through with long-term plans about issues that are foundational to the health and safety of citizens?”

Barbados: old-time Christmas

Nicholas Laughlin — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:45:50 +0000

Barbados Underground indulges in some seasonal nostalgia and describes a traditional Christmas “the Bajan way”: “Our young ones are missing that special warmth that we made as children.”

Cuba: talking to Orlando Luis Pardo

Nicholas Laughlin — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:39:09 +0000

Along the Malecón posts a three-part video interview with Cuban writer, photographer, and blogger Orlando Luis Pardo of the blog Boring Home Utopics.

Bermuda: a blog break?

Nicholas Laughlin — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:34:49 +0000

Is Bermuda’s blogosphere “taking a general break from blogging”? “Many of the newer blogs that set up in the last year or two seem to have generally been abandoned,” writes Catch a Fire, but he suggests that with a general election on the horizon Bermudan bloggers are likely to pick up pace once more.