Women walking through the market in downtown Kingston, Jamaica.
Workshop in Havana
On January 12, 2002 the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Havana (UH), Rogelio Rodríguez-Coronel received the largest single professorial delegation from a single US university to ever visit Cuba. The 17 person UB delegation was headed by Charles Stinger, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. They were there for a six-day workshop entitled "The Caribbean as a Real and Imaginary Space: The Havana Workshop," an initiative intended to create the conditions for effective collaboration between faculty members of UH and UB who will be teaching in the Caribbean Cultural studies graduate program, which is scheduled to begin in the Fall of 2002.
The workshop was an opportunity to reflect on the broad trans-disciplinary, innovative and integrative vision of the Caribbean that characterizes the program in Caribbean studies as it is conceived, and it was made possible through the generous contribution of the Ford and the Reed foundations. Mindful of the inadequacy of existing models for the study of the region, the organizers of the workshop in both Buffalo and Havana wanted to identify problem areas and design knowledge-based strategies to promote a better understanding of Caribbean societies and cultures. Workshop sessions covered the following topics:
- time and space in Caribbean history and culture
- population migration and development
- memory
- identity and representation