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Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies

Ameena Gafoor lecture series

For further details of the Ameena Gafoor Institute, please see their website:

Ameena Gafoor Institute

Inaugural Ameena Gafoor Lecture, 2017

Please click on the links below to see videos of the presentations given at the inaugural Ameena Gafoor lecture, 2017. As you click play for each video, it will list the speaker and the title of their paper.

  1. Inaugural Gafoor Lecture (Brinsley Samroo) https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/indenture-abolition-centenary-conferenceLink opens in a new window
  2. Changing Caribbean Geographies (Brinsley Samaroo) https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/writing-literature-indenture-and-its-legaciesLink opens in a new window
  3. Early Career Researchers' Keynote https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/indenture-abolition-centenary-conference-newLink opens in a new window
  4. Day 1, Panel 1B https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/indenture-abolition-centenary-conference-day1Link opens in a new window
  5. Day 1, Panel 2B https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/indenture-abolition-centenary-conference-day1-0Link opens in a new window
  6. Day 2, Panel 1 https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/indenture-abolition-centenary-conference-day-2Link opens in a new window

The 2nd Annual Gafoor Lecture on Indentureship Studies, 2018

Held on 28 November 2018 at Woburn Suite, Senate House, London WC1E 7HU

Professor Tina K. Ramnarine, Royal Holloway, University of London

In collaboration with the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies (University of Warwick), the Institute of Commonwealth Studies invited Prof. Tina K. Ramnarine (Royal Holloway, University of London) to deliver the 2018 Gafoor Lecture on Indentureship Studies.
The lecture featured live music illustrations by the vocalist, Budhaditya Bhattacharyya and the tabla musician, Mohanish Jaju, followed by a Musical Tribute to Cheddi Jagan by Keith Waithe
There were also two special poetry readings. In response to his research in Senate House Library’s Cheddi Jagan archive, poet Mr Gee performed a new piece inspired by the life of this remarkable politician. Following this the Commonwealth Writers organisation, who recently commissioned a unique piece of joint-poetry from the descendants of indenture, closed the event with the first public reading of this exciting new work.

Conveners: David Dabydeen (University of Warwick) and Maria del Pilar Kaladeen (Institute of Commonwealth Studies)

The Ameena Gafoor Lecture 2019.

The Gafoor Lecture 2019, on indentureship was given by Professor Clem Seecharan. It 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 IndoCaribbean writing.

Follow this link for the lecture on YouTube

https://youtu.be/0TUkK3GP8ugLink opens in a new window

Ameena Gafoor Annual Lecture 2021

The keynote speaker for this annual lecture on the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora was Gaiutra Bahadur with a talk on "Notes Toward a Prehistory: the allied afterlives of indenture and slavery."

The lecture was given online on 11th May.

Gaiutra

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

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.

Annual lecture 2022

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

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.