News & Reviews
THE CARIBBEAN DIGITAL V
In December 2018, The Caribbean Memory Project co-hosted the Small Axe Caribbean Digital Conference at the School of Education, University of the West Indies-St. Augustine Campus. Although the fifth edition of the conference, this was the first time the conference was held in the Caribbean, and we were honoured to be the local organizers for this important exchange of ideas in the Digital Humanities. Over the course of our day of multiform panel presentations, participants engaged critically with the digital as praxis, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that evermore intensely reconfigure the social, historical, and geo-political contours of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Presenters considered the affordances and limitations of the digital with respect to a wide range of disciplines and methodologies. Check out the 2018 presentations here or visit the Caribbean Digital website to learn more. |
REVIEW OF THE CARIBBEAN MEMORY PROJECT BY PETER HUDSON
September 2017 | Small Axe Archipelagoes So it was, then, that during a search for one thing, I found something else. A speculative, online query concerning a footnote in the history of Pan-Africanism led to a vast, living repository of the Caribbean: a lazy search for “George Padmore” opened up, in that inexplicable and surreptitious way, a pathway to Beryl Eugenia McBurnie; and McBurnie opened a portal to one of the smartest, most compelling Caribbean digital projects I have encountered—the Caribbean Memory Project. Read more... |
COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCES THE FOCUS OF ‘THE CARIBBEAN MEMORY PROJECT’
Publication date unknown | Potent Magazine WORDS BY NNEKA SAMUELThe Caribbean Memory Project, a participatory database founded by award-winning filmmaker Dawn Cumberbatch and Kevin A. Browne, a poet and Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Syracuse University, brings together multi-national narratives, creating a uniquely cohesive Caribbean identity. Created to access, celebrate and preserve oral, written and recorded history, CMP is a prime online locale for research, personal reflection and collective storytelling. Members of the website are encouraged to share their stories in the “Tell Me, Nah!” and “Pass It On!” sections. In the former, you can create a voice message that will be posted directly onto the site. The choice is yours – sing a song, tell a joke, share a favorite memory. Record as many stories as you like. Read more... |
TWO-INCH THICK EYEBROWS: CARIBBEAN MEMORY & HOW WE VIEW OURSELVES
June 11, 2015 | Twenty8+ Two-inch thick eyebrows used to be a trend. The original Mauby recipe is probably on a brown, tattered scrap of paper somewhere on one of the twenty-eight islands. And batty riders – yeah, those teeny tiny shorts that ride a woman’s ass – used to want to define fashion. There was a time too, when you probably remembered that your great-great uncle used to work with somebody in Parliament, or every doorway of your great aunt’s house, or even the woman who used to sell fresh snapper and sprat at the market every weekend – but one Saturday, she’s just not there anymore. |
No one knows what happened, and she, her story, – and all these other simple, seemingly meaningless memories – are too quickly forgotten. The memories of the Caribbean people are spread wide across the expanse of the sea, deep beneath the soil of sugar plantations, or etched into the bark of old, mango trees. Nature, however, can never really preserve the years of cultural stories and photographs schlepped across seas. In an effort to preserve these minute details that matter most to stories of cultural heritage and identity, Kevin Browne, Ph.D. and Dawn Cumberbatch created the Caribbean Memory Project – a space to share, preserve, discover and remember the cultural artifacts that are often lost to time, distance, and life.
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FINDING THE FORGOTTEN
May 27, 2015 | Trinidad Guardian Newspaper "I went away, I leave and I come back home. I come back to stay. I must see my way" —Andre Tanker "It’s not taboo to go back to what you’ve forgotten" —Akan proverb |
If you’re tempted to do a Dry Season clean-out and burn that “old rubbish”—documents, family snaps, old newspaper clippings, tantie’s hat, tonton’s ping pong and granpappi’s washikong—think twice and before you bun dong your own and your neighbour’s house consigning more of our collective and your own personal past to the flames of forgetting, introduce yourself and that pile from the past to the Caribbean Memory Project (CMP).
Earlier in the year co-founders of the CMP, Trini-born to the bone Dr Kevin Browne, assistant professor of Rhetoric at New York’s Syracuse University and Dawn Cumberbatch, local film, video and event producer and scriptwriter, hosted a colloquium at the Trinidad Theatre workshop, introducing CMP, an online resource “to promote public awareness and participation in the collection and circulation of everyday archives for cultural, social and historical research.”
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Earlier in the year co-founders of the CMP, Trini-born to the bone Dr Kevin Browne, assistant professor of Rhetoric at New York’s Syracuse University and Dawn Cumberbatch, local film, video and event producer and scriptwriter, hosted a colloquium at the Trinidad Theatre workshop, introducing CMP, an online resource “to promote public awareness and participation in the collection and circulation of everyday archives for cultural, social and historical research.”
Read more...
YOUR MEMORIES ARE NEEDED
March 11, 2015 | Trinidad Guardian Newspaper The Caribbean Memory Project: Community Archives and Caribbean Identity, a free colloquium will be held at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Belmont, on March 12 at 6 pm. Founded by Kevin A Browne, PhD and Dawn Cumberbatch, The Caribbean Memory Project is a long-term archiving and documentary project that relies on a combination of engaged social participation and academic inquiry that is designed to help us understand Caribbean history, society and culture in more productive ways. Read more... |