Professor Sarah Phillips Casteel of the Department of English, Institute of African Studies and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture will present “Blacks and Jews: The Other 1492 and the Holocaust in the Caribbean Literary Imagination” on Friday, October 17th, 3:00 p.m., 1811 Dunton Tower (English Department Lounge)
Caribbean writers regularly invoke two traumatic moments of Jewish historical experience: the Sephardic expulsions of the 1490s and the Holocaust. This talk argues that Caribbean literary treatments of Jewishness cannot be interpreted through the lens of Black–Jewish relations in the U.S. and especially not through a paradigm of “competitive memory.” Instead, they need to be contextualized with reference to the distinctive histories of contact and entanglement between Black and Jewish diaspora cultures in the Atlantic world.
For additional information, see here.