ACTIVISM
What if Caribbean people began to see themselves beyond their collective traumatic history? What promise and possibilities could such thinking hold for the region and the individuals that
occupy its space? T hat was the urging of 26 th Annual Caribbean Women: Catalysts for Change lecture on 25 November that was organised by the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit (IGDS: NBU) . Speaking on the topic “Brackish Possibilities: (Re)Thinking Caribbean Feminist Ecologies” , Baldwin proposed a rethink of the Caribbean as a place of possibility and “aliveness” rather than as a region in a perpetual state of trauma and crisis. “Many Caribbean academics have theorised the Caribbean as being in a state feminist scholar Dr. Andrea Baldwin who delivered the of crisis, stemming from direct colonial and empirical rule, and now, as a result of contemporary global neoliberalism. The crisis, broadly speaking, [is] economic, social, political, constitutional and environmental,” she told the audience at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI). Reflecting on what she called the forced insertion of the Caribbean into the modern world order through the genocide of indigenous populations and the subsequent transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to work on plantations
Dr. Andrea Baldwin Associate Professor of Gender and Ethnic Studies at the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah
in the Americas, Baldwin argued that changes that have occurred in the region in recent decades, whether in the name of development, progress, or global integration, often appear to be in form but not in substance. “When I think deeply about the real lived experiences of hardship which Caribbean people living in the region experience, and which has resulted from the impact of global inequity, most recently being felt in the form of high global inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic; when I think about the Caribbean, this space I love, I want to think of this space and its rich contributions to the world, the culture, the people, [and] the colours, and I want to think something other than crisis. “I want to make room to think about the tenacity and the contradictions of the space, to also seek vibrancy in the region in the way that Jean Rhys describes in Wide Sargasso Sea: the landscape and the people; the deep blue colour of the sky and the mango leaves; the pink and
by Marie-Claire Williams
CHILL NEWS 86
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