KEYNOTES – biographies and abstracts

Desrie Thomson-George

Jilo – the Survivor

Desrie Thomson-George’s presentation will focus on the inspiration and motivation for her work, specifically her recent exhibition at the Art Academy, entitled 'Liberated' about Jilo - a Black woman living in the West - the narration of her struggles and her journey.

Biography

Desrie Thomson-George, is a UK based visual artist, the Chair of Black Ink Legacy and Co-Founder of Black Ink Collective (1978-1987), the independent publishers which provided a platform for young Black Britons to write and be published. She has designed and produced children's books and illustrations and created magazines including No Limits for girls (1997) and the first national Black History Month magazine - BHM Magazine (1999).

She was formerly the Head of Campaigns and Marketing at the Commission for Racial Equality where she devised and led national campaigns, including Visible Women, Global Words, and Race in the Media Awards (RIMA)

Thomson-George was born in Guyana and brought up in London. Her work has its basis in the social, cultural and political awareness of her existence as a black woman brought up in the West and its effects. Her practice focuses on art for empowerment to provoke dialogue and affect change.

She received a BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree from Nottingham Trent University, was awarded the Candace Magazine International Black Women's Achievement Award for Race Relations (1997) and was runner up for the Surrey Society Sculpture Prize 2017.

Caribbean Women (Post) Diaspora: African-Caribbean Interconnections

Gina Athena Ulysse

Rasanblaj Mobiles

A lyrical mediation on the politics and poetics of movement and suspense. Culling archives of all kinds in search of an unsettled post-diasporic blackness, this is an attempt to confront self, community within a history of geopolitics. The aim is to make some sense of why we carry what we do against the weight of exile, and in the shadows of capital.

Biography Gina Athena Ulysse is currently Professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University in CT. She is a feminist academic-artist-activist, and self-described Post-Zora Interventionist. An interdisciplinary methodologist, her research interests culminate at the intersections of geopolitics, historical representations and the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions. A prolific writer, Gina Athena’s latest publication, Because When God is too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) a collection of photographs, poetry and performance texts. This book was long listed for a 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Her first monograph was based on her dissertation research, Downtown Ladies:  Informal Commercial Importing, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (Chicago, 2007) received honorable mention in the Caribbean Studies Association Book Prize. Her second book, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post Quake Chronicle (Wesleyan, 2015) was published as a tri-lingual edition in English, Kreyòl and French.

In March 2018, she was commissioned to respond to the Room 3 exhibition “Haiti and Toussaint L’Ouverture” at the British Museum for which she presented a spokenword meditation titled, “Remixed Ode to Rebel’s Spirit”.

Caribbean Women (Post) Diaspora: African-Caribbean Interconnections

Jan Etienne

Windrush sisters – in search of literary womanist voices inside Matriarchal Learning Hubs

Today, ‘West Indian’ women who came to the UK in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s, to work for the motherland are finding new agency inside ‘Matriarchal Learning hubs’ (Etienne, 2016). Their inspirational literary womanist voices, steeped in language delivered with passion and filled with Caribbean colloquialism, pain and struggle are finding new opportunities for learning and ways of expressing sisterhood, freedom and liberation. The potential for this distinct, often theatrical language used by first-generation African Caribbean women inside their informal learning settings is to be celebrated and usefully employed in feminist discourse. ‘Matriarchal learning hubs’ described as ‘emancipated spaces of learning’ allow for the construction of such literary womanist voices to emerge. Womanist voices, acknowledges the need to tackle the under-representation of black women in British feminist research. It engages with ‘Womanist learning’ – a black feminist approach in education and learning which depicts the ways in which older black women learn whilst at the same time locating their learning in the heart of their communities.  In this way Womanist learning becomes synonymous with community activism as the women find ways to help build stronger, local communities and rise above past and current oppression. 

This paper acknowledges the sacrifices made by the Windrush sisters (first-generation African Caribbean women) whose womanist voices were for far too long supressed as they prioritised support for the family and wider community. New generations of women of African Caribbean heritage are now taking up the challenge to present their auto ethnographic stories and have their voices heard. Such a challenge, is a call for inclusion and the transformation of gender studies and other feminist based learning programmes to allow such significant literary, womanist voices of black women of Caribbean heritage to be heard. It asks: What next for post-diaspora gender studies programmes? And what gains for the legacy of first-generation African Caribbean women?

Biography

Dr. Jan Etienne is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the Assistant Programme Director for the BSc Social Science in the Department of Geography,

Caribbean Women (Post) Diaspora: African-Caribbean Interconnections

Environment and Development Studies. She is the Convenor of the BSc Social Science and Community Development and Public Policy Dissertations Workshop programme.In 2008, Jan was the recipient of the Michael Stephens award to support her research into lifelong learning and first generation African Caribbean Women.

Diana Evans

Novelist

Diana Evans is the author of the novels 26a, The Wonder and Ordinary People. She has been shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Best First Book Award and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough Award. She has been a deciBel Writer of the Year winner at the British Book Awards and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She lives in London.

Alecia McKenzie

Novelist, Short-story Writer and Journalist

Author of the novel, Sweetheart (2011), awarded the Caribbean Book Prize and the Prix Carbet des Lycees, and the short story collections, Stories from Yard (2005) and Satellite City ( 1992), winner of the Commonwealth Writers prize for best first book. Alecia has also published fiction for children and young adults: Doctor’s Orders (2005) and When the Rain Stopped in Natland (1995). Alecia lives in Paris.

Caribbean Women (Post) Diaspora: African-Caribbean Interconnections