Since 2017 the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies have worked with the Ameena Gafoor Institute to promote learning about the history and legacy of Indo-Caribbean indentureship. Since 2022, thanks to generous funding from the Gafoor Foundation, the Centre has also hosted in-person lectures at Warwick. Further information on Dr Ameena Gafoor is available here and details of the lecture series below.

2023/24 Donald Ramotar

This year's annual lecture was given by by H. E. Hon President Donald Ramotar on ‘Cheddi Jagan: Developmentalist and Political Visionary’.

Donald Ramotar served as President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana from 2011 to 2015. He began his political career as a member of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and in 1992 was elected to the National Assembly, retaining his parliamentary seat until his Presidency. From 1997 to 2013 he also served as General Secretary of the PPP. In this lecture he spoke about the life and legacy of Cheddi Jagan, co-founder of the PPP who fought for independence from the British empire and served as President of Guyana from 1992 until his death in 1997. An audio recording of the event can be found here and a transcript of the talk here.

 

2022/23 Arlen Harris

This year's lecture was on ‘Coolies and The Great War’ and was given by Arlen Harris, an award-winning programme maker with over 30 years’ experience in the industry, working mainly for British broadcasters such as Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV and BBC TV and Radio. He has also produced programmes for National Geographic and Discovery. Arlen originated the groundbreaking four-part series, Britain's Slave Trade, for Channel 4. He has filmed with pirates in the South China seas, in Beirut and in Sri Lanka during the civil war.

 

2021/22 Patricia Mohammed

The speaker for this year's annual online lecture was Patricia Mohammed, Professor Emerita, Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies.

Patricia Mohammed is a pioneer in second wave feminism, founding member in 1978 of the first second wave feminist organization in Trinidad, Concerned Women for Progress and served as Coordinator of the First Rape Crisis Centre in the Anglophone Caribbean from 1985-1987. She has been involved in feminist activism and scholarship for over three decades and increasingly over the last decade in the field of Cultural Studies. She is architect of four national gender policies in the Caribbean. Her academic publications include Gender in Caribbean Development (Ed), 1988, Rethinking Caribbean Difference, Special Issue Feminist Review, Routledge Journals, 1998, Caribbean Women at the Crossroads, UWI Press, 1999, Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917 – 1947, Palgrave UK and The Hague, 2001,and Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought, (ed) University of the West Indies Press, Kingston, 2002, and Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation, Macmillan UK, 2009 along with over 100 essays peer reviewed and solicited essays and chapters in journals, books, magazines and newspapers. She is founder in 2006 and Executive Editor of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, the first open access online peer reviewed journal of the University of the West Indies in publication.

Patricia Mohammed _ Janet Jagan_ Freedom Fighter from Guyana_-20220524_050151-Meeting Recording.mp4 (sharepoint.com)

2020/21 Gaiutra Bahadur

The keynote speaker for this annual lecture was Gaiutra Bahadur with a talk on "Notes toward a prehistory: The allied afterlives of indenture and slavery." The lecture was given online.

Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American essayist, journalist, and critic who writes frequently about literature, history, memory, migration, and gender. Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. A former daily newspaper reporter and Harvard Nieman Fellow, she is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books and Dissent Magazine. She is a recipient of literary residencies at the MacDowell Artists Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and is a two-time winner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for creative prose. She has also won research fellowships at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Society of Authors in London and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. She currently teaches writing and journalism as an assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University in Newark.

Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, The MacDowell Colony, 2016.

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2019/20 Clem Seecharan

This year's lecture by Professor Clem Seecharan was a joint activity between the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies and the Guyana Speaks organisation, held in London on 29th September. Professor Seecharan 's lecture was followed by a screening of a film on Yesu Persaud (entitled, THE MAN FROM EL DORADO), followed by a tribute to Ameena Gafoor and the launch of her latest publication, a bibliography of Indo Caribbean writing. Follow this link for the lecture on YouTube.

2018/19 Tina K. Ramnarine

The Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick and the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, London University hosted a two-day conference at Senate House, London, to mark the centenary of the abolition of indentureship in the British Empire. The event was co-convened by Professor David Dabydeen and Professor David Lambert, representing the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies; Dr Maria Kaladeen, representing The Institute for Commonwealth Studies, London University; and Professor Tina K. Ramnarine, representing Royal Holloway, University of London. The keynote lecture was given by Brinsley Samroo.

Source: Ameena Gafoor Institute