Jamaican professors develop courses focused on Caribbean diaspora

TORONTO:

Two Jamaican professors at different universities in Ontario, Canada, have created courses that focus on the Caribbean diaspora there and abroad.

Dr Hyacinth Simpson, associate professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), and Ronald Cummings, an associate professor of Caribbean literature and black diaspora studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, offered the courses during the spring and summer terms.

From chattel slavery and the plantation society period to the present, migration in and out of the region continues to shape the experience of Caribbean peoples significantly. Dr Simpson’s course, Literatures of the Caribbean, provided the students an engagement with literary texts (short stories, poems, and a novel), as well as films and music to better understand how migrations and mass movements have affected the identities (especially ethno-racial, sexual, and gendered) of peoples in the English-speaking Caribbean and its diasporas.

In experiential learning activities, the students visited Caribbean archives and museums to interact with material culture and other resources that encapsulate the histories of Caribbean migrations. They also participated in a virtual classroom exercise with Caribbean-based students and instructors.

“I’m focusing on different periods of intra- and extra-Caribbean migrations and the diasporic communities formed as a result, and the cultural products that travel and transform within Caribbean diasporas,” says Simpson, who, in one of her classes, examined food cultures that travel with Caribbean people — from Africa to the Caribbean, and from the Caribbean to Canada — by organising a Caribbean food arcade with produce on display and food tasting.

Literatures of the Caribbean was a part of the Global Justice and Change (GJC) programme at Toronto Metropolitan University, which invited students to explore topics on a global scale — from film and migration to gender and agriculture — using an equity- and justice-oriented lens.

Applicants could choose between one of two spring 2023 intensive travel courses in either Panama or Trinidad and Tobago, or a spring 2023 course that included virtual collaboration with counterparts in the Caribbean.

All global opportunities – whether in the classroom or abroad – were fully funded. All selected participants received funding to cover the cost of tuition, travel, accommodation, and other key expenses relevant to the course.

Applications to the GJC programme were open to Canadian citizens and permanent residents who self-identify as Indigenous, black, or racialised; students with disabilities; and low-income students.

The programme is funded by the government of Canada’s Outbound Student Mobility Pilot Program and led by TMU global in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Community Services. Applications for the 2024 GJC cohort will open in September.

CRITICAL FRAMEWORKS

Meanwhile, Professor Cummings launched his new course, Windrush Writing/ Writing Windrush: Empire, Race and Decolonisation, during the summer to teach his students more about the literature and other creative forms that grew out of the Windrush generation.

For him, there is a personal connection to this exodus of Caribbean migrants, and Cummings examined the work of Caribbean-English writers who were part of the original Windrush generation, as well as those from subsequent generations influenced by that legacy of Caribbean migration in the mid-20th century.

“Like many other people in Jamaica, the story of the Windrush is also a family story. Three of my uncles, bright aspiring young men at the time, were part of the generation of Windrush migrants. Years later, in the late 2000s, when I went to England to study as a graduate student, I would see and appreciate the contributions of that generation; and the stories that they would recount, gathered in my uncle’s front room or at the pub, were so full of life.”

By 2012 when Cummings was getting ready to leave the UK, it was clear to him that some of those histories were being forgotten.

“This erasure and forgetting would contribute to what eventually became known as the Windrush Scandal, which saw Caribbean people and their descendants actively being deported from Britain. The summer before, August 2011, saw protests in London around the police shooting of Mark Duggan. One of the lasting memories of that summer for me was of the late activist Darcus Howe, in an interview with the BBC, having to challenge the interviewer and insist that his voice, presence, understanding and memories of black Britain be respected. This is one way for me to honour those stories,” says Dr Cummings about the new course, which includes material from the McMaster Library’s archives of correspondence of writers Andrew Salkey, Samuel Selvon and Austin Clarke discussing belonging and identity during that time.

“The course is also a way for me to teach literature in a way that seriously grapples with diaspora, race and migration as critical frameworks for understanding and talking about literary histories.”

The course came at an opportune time, when the UK was marking the 75th anniversary of the 1948 docking of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in Essex.

The ship, which left Jamaica on May 24, carried 1,027 passengers (and two stowaways). More than 800 of those aboard had left countries in the Caribbean for new opportunities in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of World War II, encouraged by the British Nationality Act of 1948 that granted citizenship and right of abode to all people within the British Empire.