Living Archives, Moving Tides: Black Feminist Caribbean Thought

Join us for two panels exploring the literary oeuvre of Merle Collins and the living archives in LaDigue, building on conversations from What Can Grenada Teach Us?

How can you participate? Join us in person by registering here or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

See schedule below:

Merle Collins is Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland and a distinguished Grenadian writer, scholar, and public intellectual whose work is deeply rooted in Caribbean histories, language, and memory and the lived experiences of Caribbean women. She taught for 26 years in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, USA, and served for two years as Chair of the university’s Latin American Studies Center (now the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center).

Collins’s intellectual and creative work emerges from longstanding commitments to Caribbean lifeworlds and the recovery of silenced histories. In the 1970s, she taught high school in Grenada and Saint Lucia, grounding her pedagogical practice in the region’s linguistic and cultural realities. From 1981 to 1983, she worked as a researcher on Latin America for the Grenada Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She later taught at the University of North London in the UK in the 1990s.

Across her novels, poetry, short stories, and critical essays, Collins is widely recognized for her attention to Caribbean voice, oral tradition, and the everyday geographies of village life. By foregrounding how memory, storytelling, and language carry histories of colonialism, resistance, migration, and return across generations, her work asks us to listen for and to the voices and experiences of ordinary people as a vital way of understanding the region’s past and present.

Her current research focuses on the life and legacy of Louise Langdon Norton Little, the Grenadian-born mother of Malcolm X, continuing her commitment to tracing Caribbean diasporic intellectual lineages and recovering the lives of Black women whose stories have been marginalized or forgotten. Collins’s major works include Ocean Stirrings (2023), Angel (2011), and The Colour of Forgetting (1995; reissued 2023). Across these texts, she returns to questions of memory, political struggle, and the enduring presence of the Caribbean past in contemporary life.

Organized by Caribbean Studies Working Group, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC), and The Simone de Beauvoir Institute.