Sensing the Caribbean: Art, Culture, History & the Sensory Turn

press release: The interdisciplinary symposium Sensing the Caribbean: Art, Culture, History, and the Sensory Turn will bring together scholars and artists to facilitate a conversation about different ways to make sense of the multiplicity of Caribbean sensoria that have defined the region over the past three centuries. The symposium will foster dialogue on the ways in which sound, touch, smell, taste, and sight have been experienced, created, and transmitted by the diverse groups of people who have inhabited the Caribbean over the past four centuries.

On Thursday September 21st at 6:00 pm., Festival Room, Memorial Union B196, 800 Langdon St., the symposium will be inaugurated with the art performance “Song for the Beloved” directed by the scholar, theater worker, and poet Honor Ford Smith. The show is a tribute to people who have died from urban violence in Kingston, Jamaica, linking these experiences to other forms of violence in communities around the world. Through visual arts, and different artistic interactions, this presentation intents that the participants negotiate contested memories across differences as an act of re-creating and repairing the past in the present.

In addition to the Thursday’s performance, on Friday 22 at 9:00 am, Memorial Library, Special Collections, Room 976 (Take elevator to 9th Floor), 728 State St., the organizers will offer a free international workshop where renowned academics from different universities of the U.S. will talk about the Caribbean senses from multiple perspectives and disciplines such as memory and critical aesthetics, ancestor and migrants, poetic and politics.

Both events are free and open to public.

More information:  Pablo F. Gómez, Professor of Medical History and Bioethics. University of Wisconsin, Madison. pgomez@wisc.edu

Sponsored by: The Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters and Sciences, Latin American, Caribbean, and American Studies Program (LACIS), the Institute for Regional and International Studies (IRIS), the Medical History and Bioethics Department, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Art Department, and the Center for Visual Cultures (CVC) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.