MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | ISLANDS AS METAPHOR | SPRING 2022

Towards a Consciousness of Relation: Creolizing Holocaust Memory in Caribbean Art and Literature

Sarah Casteel • Carleton University

March 21st @ CANCELLED

During World War II, Caribbean immigrants to Europe found themselves caught up in the war and, in some cases, imprisoned. Meanwhile, some European Jewish refugees fled to Martinique, Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean. Long overlooked in standard accounts of the war, these entangled histories are made visible in Caribbean art and literature. The internment art of Surinamese painter Josef Nassy and the recent fiction of Haitian writer Louis-Philippe Dalembert reveal unexpected intersections between Jewish and African diaspora wartime experience. Disrupting the distinction between West and non-West, these artworks refuse singularity and fixed identities. Instead, they promote a relational understanding of the past that unsettles disciplinary formations and established categories of knowledge. This talk highlights Caribbean artists' capacity to intervene into memory culture and generate alternative methodological paradigms grounded in a lived experience of creolization.

Islands as Metaphor and Method
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