American Tropics Conference, 4-7 July 2009

Venues:  LTB 6, 7, 8, 9, Foyer

Notes:

The sessions have been arranged to maximise both formal and informal discussion.  To that end speakers are asked to keep to the time limits indicated.

This is close to the definitive version.  No need to print it out--copies will be available at registration.

Saturday 4^th

2.00-4.30                LTB Foyer

Registration and refreshments

4.30-5.45                LTB 6

Welcome and Introduction

Richard Price and Sally Price, Visions of Suriname and French Guiana: The Changing Same [45]

Chair: Peter Hulme

6.00-7.30                Marquee

Wine reception and welcome from the Vice Chancellor of the University of Essex, Professor Colin Riordan

7.30                       Dinner

Sunday 5^th

9.30-11.30              LTB 6  Chair: Selwyn Cudjoe

Sten Pultz Moslund, The Langscapes of Emplacement in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body [20]

Jak Peake, Imperial Domains and Terrains in Western Trinidad: Yseult Bridges’s Questing Heart (1934) and Creole Enchantment (1936) [20]

Sharon Monteith,Conjuring Mississippi Freedom Summer in Sans Souci [20]

                             LTB 7  Chair: Sanja Bahun

Peter Hulme, A Passport from Realengo 18: Josephine Herbst in Oriente, Cuba, in 1935 [20]

Wendy McMahon, ‘Soy Cuba’: The Structural Dependence upon Place in the Writing of Reinaldo Arenas [20]

Margarita Zamora, Crafting Shipwrecks in Havana:  Reflections on ‘La agonía de la Garza’ [20]

                             LTB 8  Chair: Lesley Wylie

Jacqueline Couti, The Seduction of “Sable Venus” and of  “Vénus des Mornes”: Colonization and Recolonization of Space in the Tropics [20]

María Cristina Rodríguez, Making Spaces: Women Writers Retrace their Pasts [20]

Michael Niblett, The Manioc and the Made-in-France: Creolization and Commodity Fetishism in Solibo Magnifique [20]

                             LTB 9  Chair: John Masterson

Philip Crispin, The Contestation of Power and Place in Césaire’s Caribbean Plays [20]

Susan Gillman, Black Jacobins, Black Reconstruction, and New World Mediterraneans: Spectres of Comparison? [20]

Alasdair Pettinger, The Oloffson [20]

11.30-1.00              Marquee

Lunch

1.00-3.00                LTB 6  Chair: Neil L. Whitehead

Heidi V. Scott, An American Eden? Geographical Imaginations and Tropicality in the Viceroyalty of Peru [20]

Therese-Marie Meyer, The Borderlands of El Dorado: The English Guiana Plantation and Native Americans (1500-1800) [20]

Surekha Davies, The Brazilian Peoples in the European Cartographic Imagination: A Comparative Analysis of Portuguese, Norman, German and Dutch Representations on Illustrated Maps [20]

                             LTB 7  Chair: Lowell Fiet

Patricia Noxolo & Marika Preziuso, Geographies of Postcolonial Textuality: Place and Language in the Work of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé [20]

Eva-Jo Jylhä & Mirja Kuurola, Negotiating Levels of Belongingness in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and David Dabydeen’s The Counting House [20]

Danielle Carlotti-Smith, Sugar’s Sequels: Inventing Traditions in the Plantation Saga Novels of Brazil and Martinique [20]

                             LTB 8  Chair: Sharon Monteith

Crossing Flatbush Avenue: Articulating the Space of Caribbean Brooklyn

James Davis, “Success Story”: Writing Brooklyn from Black Britain [20]

Martha Nadell, A Tree Grows in Bajan Brooklyn: Paule Marshall’s Transnational/Multicultural Space [20]

Oneka LaBennett, “He Stood His Ground”: Space, Place, Gender and Transnationalism for West Indian Girls in Brooklyn [20]

3.00-4.00                LTB Foyer

                             Tea

4.00-6.30                LTB 6  Chair: Sanja Bahun

                   Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Tacarigua and the Cradling of the Caribbean Intellectual/Activist: The Case of

                        Sylvester Williams, C.L.R. James and George Padmore [30]

Shalini Puri, The Grenada Revolution:  A Cultural Geography [30]

Neil L. Whitehead, Jade Amazons and Golden Kings: Guayana as Cultural Imaginary [30]

7.00                       Marquee

                             Dinner

8.30                       LTB10

                             Jamaica for Sale: a film by Esther Figueroa and Diana McCaulay.       

                             Followed by a panel discussion with Polly Pattullo, Mimi Sheller, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Monday 6^th

9.30-11.30              LTB 6  Chair: Susan Castillo

Joanna Johnson, England’s Green and Tropical Land?: Caribbean Accounts of the English Rural Landscape [20]

Yi-peng Lai, Gardening Homeland, Deforesting Nation: Re-imagining the Tropics in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven [20]

Leanne Haynes, Accidental Arrivals - Desperate Departures. Or the Case the Olive Branch [20]

                             LTB 7  Chair: Susan Gillman

Laura Martin, The Strange Career of “A Once Lamented Pair”: “Racial” Disorientation and Barbadian Persistence in the Inkle and Yarico Legend

Gesa Mackenthun, The Conquest of Antiquity: John Lloyd Stephens, Romantic Archaeology, and Yucatan as American Interest Zone [20]

Kellie Warren, American Tropics as Problem: The U.S. Canal Zone as Remedial Space [20]

                             LTB 8  Chair: Lesley Wylie

                   Luciana Martins, Bittersweet Images: Coffee, Landscape, and Modernity in Brazil [20]

Linda Robins da Silva, “Soteropolitanismo” and the Cultural Imaginary of Salvador da Bahia [20]

Liesbeth De Bleeker, Boundaries and Contact Zones in the French Caribbean: Towards a Discourse-Oriented Approach to Space in Literature [20]

                             LTB 9  Chair: Alasdair Pettinger

Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, Northeast Brazil as a Standard Model of the Making of Modern America [20]

Nina Gerassi Navarro, Travelling the Tropics: Agassiz in Brazil [20]

William Marshall, A French Atlantic Space: Cayenne and Carnival [20]

11.30-1.00              Marquee

Lunch

1.00-3.00                LTB 6  Chair: Russell McDougall

Kate Hames, Traffics and Discoveries: Narrating the Thames to the Amazon in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out [20]

Lucy Evans, ‘Submerged Eldorados’: Retracing the Journey Upriver in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences [20]

                             LTB 7  Chair: Penny Woollard

Emily Senior, Tropical Ills: Disease, Landscape and Environment in the Literature of Caribbean Plantations [20]

Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Landscaping Hispaniola: Moreau de Saint Méry's Descriptions de Saint-Domingue [20]

Susan Castillo, The Caribbean Connection of Mme de Duras’s Ourika [20]

                   LTB 8  Chair: Alasdair Pettinger

Owen Robinson, Gateways and Telegraphs: Nineteenth-Century European Travellers and the Americanness of New Orleans [20]

Michael P. Bibler, Tropical Drag: Gender, Property, and National Borders in James Fenimore Cooper’s Jack Tier [20]

                             LTB 9  Chair: Marina Warner

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Winslow Homer’s Cuban Watercolors: Romance and the Twilight of an Empire [20]

Ben Jefferson, The Natural Space: Derek Walcott’s ‘Zemis’

 [20]

Sam Ellis, Markham – The Place Within a Place [20]

3.00-4.00                LTB Foyer

Tea

4.00-6.30                LTB 7  Chair: Sean Nixon

Sue Thomas, Prospects from English Harbour, Antigua: Anne Hart Gilbert, Benevolence and Anti-Slavery, 1816-1834 [30]

Bill Schwarz, Looking North to the South: The American South in the Caribbean Imagination [30]

Ben Schiller, Going Postal: Enslaved Epistolary Culture and the African American Diaspora [30]

                             LTB 8  Chair: Richard Price

                   Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Heavy Waters, Metallic Seas [30]

Mimi Sheller, “Out of the Ground, Into the Sky”: Tropical Bauxite, Space Age Modernization, and the Caribbean Struggle for Resource Sovereignty [30]

Russell McDougall, Caribbean Micro-nations: Collisions in Interstitial Space [30]

7.30                       Marquee

                             Dinner

Tuesday 7^th

9.30-11.30              LTB 6  Chair: Marina Warner

Kristian Van Haesendonck, Paratopia, Non-place and Light Colonialism in the Contemporary Caribbean Novel [20]

María del Pilar Blanco, Palimpsestic Genres, or the Interplay of Science and Magic in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [20]

Mathilde Mergeai, Caribbean Tropicality through Canadian Lenses: Identity and Spatial Representations in Dionne Brand’s and Althea Prince’s Writings [20]

          LTB 7  Chair: Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Lowell Fiet, New Tropicalism: Performance on the Shifting Borders of Caribbean Disappearance [20]

Supriya Nair, “Disasters in the Sun:” Crime and Carnival in the Caribbean [20]

Leah Rosenberg, Tropicality and the Development of Jamaican National Literature [20]

     LTB 8  Chair: Luciana Martins

Bruce Swansey, The Return to Otherness: the Rainforest as Cornucopia of Interpretations [20]

Bruce Dean Willis, Language Immersion in the Tropics: The Vanguard Quest for Language Origin [20]

Lesley Wylie, Tunchis, Sachamamas and Yacurunas: Amazonian Identity in Jaime Vásquez Izquierdo’s Rio Putumayo [20]

          LTB 9  Chair: Gordon Brotherston

Frederick Whiting, Geographic Space, Narrative Time, and the Figuration of a Post-National Chronotope in Américo Paredes' George Washington Gómez [20]

Hsinya Huang, Inventing Tropicality: Writing Fever, Writing Trauma in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes [20]

William Rowe, Ed Dorn’s Recollections of La Gran Apacheria: Towards a Critical Poetics of Space [20]

11.30-12.30             Marquee

                             Lunch

12.30-3.00              LTB 6  Chair: Peter Hulme

                   Tim Craker, The Five Directions [30]

R. J. Ellis, Why Guantánamo?: Handling Messy Comparativism [30]

                   Gordon Brotherston, From Zona tórrida to Tristes tropiques: the structuralist revision of the Roman

                        paradigm and what it implies [30]

3.00 Close