Paula Morgan – författare

This edited collection brings together the work of scholars in the field of Caribbean literary and linguistic study. Its genesis was the University of the West Indies 2011 commemorative conference in honour of recently retired professors Bridget Brereton, Barbara Lalla and Ian Robertson. This volume engages the seminal work done by Lalla and Robertson with focus on their contributions to theoretical constructs, original data collection and analysis, and the formation of a Caribbean-based ethos. The rich deliberations demanded fuller development and preservation and Reassembling the Fragments answers that call. Part 1, “Tributes and Critical Appraisals”, engages the ground-breaking work of the eminent professors with a focus on originality, scope and impact on subsequent knowledge creation. Part 2 presents the contributions of scholars whose thought has been influenced by their incisive concepts, paradigms and methodologies. The collection responds to the ongoing archaeological imperative of unearthing and reassembling fragments of voice and identity. It adds to the multigenerational project of naming and fashioning the diverse island cultures of the Caribbean and offers yet another shard of honour, duty and love. Contributors: MarÌa Landa Buil, Niala Dwarika-Bhagat, Karen Eccles, Michelle Gill, Barbara Lalla, Nivedita Misra, Paula Morgan, Velma Pollard, Jennifer Rahim, Ian Robertson, Lise Winer, Donald Winford, Marsha Winter, Valerie Youssef

The Terror and the Time contributes to the ongoing project of mapping the myriad ways in which contemporary individual and social scenarios and suffering are rooted in unresolved traumas bequeathed by the origins of the New World societies of the Caribbean. This study traces legacies of enforced and voluntary migrations: subjugation of language, custom and being, and violent rupture of ancestry and community, nation and ethnicity, family and sexuality. It draws its raw material from literature, personal narratives, print media and popular culture discourses to explore the interface between the psychological condition of having been colonized and the surviving cultural and material practices.Part 1 deals with traumas of being and becoming; part 2 focuses on social suffering that results from state torture, aging and Alzheimer’s, child shifting, alcoholism and poverty. Morgan argues that modern Caribbean societies have been indelibly imprinted by the cataclysmic encounter between worlds and that substantial cross-sections of Caribbean populations are still reeling from the force of that wounding. This study probes the impulse of creative authors and cultural practitioners to revisit the seedbed of traumas and to variously respond with aesthetics of amnesia and negation, and/or to fashion therapeutic interventions through empowering narratives of resistance, self-fashioning, creativity and wholeness.