Going Beyond the Literary III : Methods for Caribbean Interdisciplinarity
Description
This seminar explores how Caribbean methods of comparison – multi-modal, multi-lingual, and interdisciplinary – make common cause with other comparative fields. “Going Beyond the Literary I & II" highlighted the interdisciplinarity of Caribbean studies by productively complicating literary analyses through ethnographic, linguistic, historical, artistic, performance, or spiritual materials and approaches. These seminars participated robustly in the field's efforts to devise and describe new epistemologies, new language, new methodologies, and new models for Caribbean studies while attending in particular to critical questions raised by the literary. “Going Beyond the Literary III” continues this work and seeks to build on it by forging connections with other comparative fields throughout the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
From Sylvia Wynter, to Edouard Glissant, to Roque Salas-Rivera, Caribbean philosophy and poetics are formed with reflections on ritual, dance, rhythm, and visual art. In order to attend to its physical, cultural, and geopolitical environment, including indigenous, ancestral, and syncretic cultural and spiritual forms, the literary scholar of the Caribbean must often demonstrate (inter)disciplinary agility in criticism that can engage the ubiquitous extra-literary aspects of Caribbean writing.
Building on a tradition of comparative Caribbean scholarship, what vocabularies can we continue to develop for "going beyond the literary" to the oral, the embodied, the visual, the historical, the spiritual and the cultural? In what ways can this grounding in other fields expand or interrogate the literary through engagement with local modes of historiography, philosophy, theology, linguistics, or theory?
To address these questions, we invite contributions from scholars in all disciplines that
-deepen interdisciplinary scholarship of Caribbean visual art, literary, music, new media, and performance works;
-work with Caribbean methodologies as they inflect and travel with other comparative disciplines, particularly Indigenous, Ethnic-American, Queer, Disability Studies;
-explore how Caribbean arts, literature, and other cultural forms might generate strategies of comparison, appreciation, dialogue, and thought that demand more attentive, grounded, embodied, or place-based study than a single discipline’s training alone could have.
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
Dr. Natasha Bissonauth is Assistant Professor of Art History at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC. She received her Ph.D. in Art History at Cornell University in 2017 and her research centers queer aesthetics and archival logics across South Asia and Indian Ocean diasporas. Her SSHRC-funded book project on collage and assemblage sutures and severs across legacies of immigration and indenture, in search of Black and brown seams.
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Patrick M. Crowley writes about decolonial aesthetics in Caribbean literature and visual culture. He is the co-editor of Decolonial Thinking: Resistant Meanings and Communal Other-Sense (Indiana UP, 2025) and his writing has appeared in journals such as Black Camera. He is an interdisciplinary researcher with a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University (SUNY). He teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne University.
Speaker Bio
Anya Lewis-Meeks is the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Literary Arts at Brown University. A recent Duke PhD in English, she writes, researches, and teaches Caribbean and African & American Literatures, speculative fiction and folklore. Her book project, Spectacular Chaos: Folkloric Caribbean Futures, argues that Caribbean writers use folkloric traditions, rooted in cultural heritages and shaped by resistance against colonial hierarchies to imagine just futures for the region and its people.
Speaker Bio
Nicola Hunte is a lecturer in the Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus. She teaches Caribbean diasporic literatures and has published on popular culture, specific to Barbadian expression on and offline in the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL). Her research interests include the critical texts of Guyanese writer/theorist Wilson Harris and speculative fiction, particularly from the Caribbean and the African cultural diaspora.
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Rasheed Tazudeen is Senior Lecturer in English and Environmental Studies at Yale University and author of Modernism's Inhuman Worlds (Cornell UP, 2024). His second project, The Musicked Earth: Towards a Decolonial Sound Ecology, explores the musical, poetic, and spiritual resonances between the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and Black Atlantic. Recent work from this project is forthcoming in the collections Black Environmentalisms (Duke UP 2026) and The Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms (OUP 2026).
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Tania Nicolaou received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research is interdisciplinary and decolonial in nature, and she explores contemporary literature and film of the United States and the Caribbean. She currently teaches at CUNY and NYU, and she is a postdoctoral researcher at a Communication Design non-profit.
Speaker Bio
Anne (Annie) Margaret Castro is an Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Florida International University. Her monograph The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature was published with University of Virginia, and her articles have appeared in Religion and Literature, Journal of West Indian Literature and Afro-Hispanic Review. Annie also has a chapter in the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook to the Ghost Story.
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Speaker Bio
Dr. Amanda Perry teaches English literature at Champlain College-Saint Lambert and Caribbean Literature at Concordia University. Her monograph, The Cuban Revolution in the Caribbean Imaginary: Race, Censorship, and Regionalism, based on work that won the CSA's Best Dissertation Award, is currently under consideration with University of Virginia Press. Previous articles have appeared in Small Axe, The Global South, and numerous edited volumes, with research support from the ACLS and the SSRC.
Speaker Bio
Andreu Gesti Franquesa is a professeur agrégé of Spanish language and a PhD student at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He is currently working on the postcolonial and decolonial appropriations of The Tempest in the Caribbean context, under the supervision of Professor Tiphaine Samoyault. His thesis is based in an interdisciplinary and a multi-lingual approach, that tends to explore how literature and arts can engage a counter-hegemoinc discourse on history and culture.
Speaker Bio
Kavita Singh is Associate Professor of Caribbean Literature at the University of Houston. Her work in the Francophone and Anglophone literary and cultural traditions explores performance, multilingualism, and the negotiation of autonomy within the constraints of post/coloniality.