ACTIVISM
red hibiscus; the yellow handkerchief she wore around her head tied in the Martinique fashion with the sharp points in front; the colours of the stained-glass window. I want to think of the Caribbean reality that is real to us in all of its aliveness.” S peaking to the concept of aliveness, the second graduate of the doctoral programme at the IGDS: NBU at Cave Hill referenced the work of Black studies scholar Kevin Quashie whose 2021 book Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being spoke about aliveness as the repertoire of having ethical orientation in a world that is not ethically oriented. It was also the concept of aliveness that inspired the title of the lecture, following Baldwin’s encounter with brackish water during a 2021 visit to St. George’s Caye, an island off the coast of Belize. “This encounter prompted me to look and see from another angle; [it] prompted me to ask a number of questions, such that there was something about brackish water and its potential to create different life and ways of living; something else it might be able to tell me about the Caribbean. “Could interrogating the brackish tell me something about moving outside of the limits [in] which we have been [conditioned] to be, and help me to see from a transgenre perspective? Could it provide a lens from which to think about how Black people globally, and in the Caribbean specifically, make and sustain life? About how Black people, according to Quashie, ‘surpassed the everywhere and every way of Black death to begin somewhere else, a Black world where Blackness exists in the tussle of being in a section
and ordinariness’? What might it have to offer, as I think about the Caribbean society and about Caribbean feminisms and its aliveness? And how might brackish give me a different angle, as a Caribbean feminist, to think through possibilities for future aliveness, particularly as I think about we are all connected as human and non-human living beings?” The Associate Professor of Gender and Ethnic Studies at the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at The University of Utah disclosed that she is now working post-tenure to bring to life a more audacious body of work “so that I can think reflexively about what it means to be Black and Caribbean, and to refuse Blackness and Caribbeanness as somehow tethered to death, to dying, in a constant state of trauma, and always in crisis” . She recalled the 2002 Lucille Mathurin Mair lecture delivered by the late Guyanese feminist scholar and activist, Andaiye , entitled “The Angle You Look from Determines what You See: Towards a Critique of Feminist Politics in the Caribbean” . “Like Andaiye, in this lecture … I am suggesting a different angle. I’m suggesting a different angle as we grapple with all the crises being felt in our region. Andaiye suggests that to do so, first we need to identify the world we want to build in a new language that has clarity and purpose. I would also add that we also need to examine how to deal with the stereotypes of ourselves which we have been socialised to accept.” Baldwin proposed starting from a place of aliveness: “What if starting there could open up question marks and unanswerable curiosities? What if we believed we could reach systems by creating human aesthetics that generate a point of view away from this consensual social system that detracts us?” l
Dr. Andrea Baldwin (at left) receives a gift from IGDS: NBU members: (second from left) Dr. Tonya Haynes, Coordinator of Graduate Programmes at the IGDS: NBU; Professor the Most Honourable Eudine Barriteau, Professor Emerita of Gender and Public Policy; and Dr. Halimah DeShong, Head of the IGDS: NBU.
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