The Caribbean Coalition at UC Berkeley hosted the Imagining Caribbean Futures Symposium, a two-day interdisciplinary event that took place from April 10 to 11 at UC Berkeley. This event engaged with the question: What are Caribbean futures? Through dynamic panels, a screening of Burnt Milk by Joseph Douglas Elmhirst, and a keynote address by...
These lectures explored an anthropogenic history of sound during the first half of the twentieth century (up to the 1960s), a period of intense imperial expansion of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the first three lectures, Ochoa approached the centrality of media and the development of new sound technologies in such a history. Ochoa particularly focused on the transformation of the relation between histories of life, extractivism, and sound produced by sound technologies. In the last two...
In recent decades, an explosion of critical interventions from multiple fields has emphasized the return to the archive as one of the key axes from which central problems of the culture and history of the Americas are thought about, read, and discussed. However, studies on critics and artistic practices have, to different extents, always been anchored in and in conversation with the archive.
This set of presentations sought to reflect on the way in which Latin American studies have positioned themselves...
“The Petro-State Masquerade” considers how postcolonial political futures in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago came to be staked to the market futures of oil, natural gas, and their petrochemical derivatives. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Jobson theorizes how the tenuous relationship between oil and political power—enshrined in the hyphenated form of the petro-state—is represented by postcolonial state officials as a Carnivalesque “masquerade of permanence” through the perpetual...
Join us for a book talk with Dr. Oneka LaBennett as she presents her latest work, Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond, which exposes the global threat of environmental catastrophe and the forms of erasure that structure Caribbean women’s lives in the overlooked nation of Guyana.
Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation....
