The presentation yesterday went well. I enjoyed the experience. No pictures though, so apologies for that. I’m toying with the idea of making the presentation a podcast or a youtube video or something. The google powerpoint leaves a lot to be desired…

Found this little link on the web and found it interesting that other tourist resorts are dealing with similar issues to what the Bahamas dealt with all those years ago.

“What? Nobody got shot?”

Representations of Caribana violence in the Toronto print media

Research Project, April 10, 2007

Group members:

Shane Bentham

Franciene McLeod

Edward Minnis

Nassim Shirvani

The festival of Caribana is marking its 40^thanniversary in the city of Toronto this year and it has become quite the cornerstone of a typical summer of fun within the city. This is deservedly so because, coming from modest origins, Caribana is now the largest outdoor festival in North America, and generates well over 200 million dollars in local revenue. It attracts over two million people from all over the world, to the point where hotel rooms are often booked out a year in advance for the next parade (Trotman 177). 

Caribana is often pointed to, usually by the government and the festival organizers, as a symbol of successful multiculturalism, of what is possible for a diverse city like Toronto. Despite this however the annual festival and parade has a perceived aura of fear and imminent violence. The Toronto Star reported that a staff sergeant ”addressed some 30 officers about to start their shift [at Caribana], he told them that [it] was not quite the festival they had heard about. He suggested they had nothing to fear.” (Barahona A9) Is Caribana really so dangerous that the police who manage the parade are scared for their lives and require a pep talk just to walk the streets? Or is this merely the effect of the mainstream media that wishes to paint this predominantly black cultural festival with a negative brush? This essay will argue that the Toronto media goes out of its way to represent Caribana as a violence plagued bacchanal despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Here is the poster from the upcoming LACS conference. If you are in Ottawa on the 27th of February please stop by.

Inaugural Ottawa Latin American and Caribbean Conference

I’m gearing up for the first Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) Conference in Ottawa on the 27th of this month. So I’m going through and pruning the presentation that I gave in Toronto. I’m clearing up little factual and grammatical errors in the text, in my Word version and also in the version on the site. So if you look really, really closely you might see something change right before your eyes. I will get to a more thorough editing shortly as the paper should be in to the conference organizers by the 20th.

I spoke to my supervisor last week and I’m supposed to have a draft of the second chapter to him by the 27th. Yes, it is a little tight but I really need to get the rubber to the road on this writing thing. Since I came back from Nassau I’ve been circling my work like a vulture waiting for the appropriate moment to strike. The time is now.

Very big Fergusons news to report: Audio has been found. At ZNS Freeport of all places. Turns out that the entire series was replayed in Grand Bahamas in the late eighties and all of those old reel-to-reel tapes were shipped over from ZNS Nassau. In the shipping back there was one box that was accidentally left behind. And lucky for us too as it seems that ZNS Nassau went and threw away everything in their archives nine years ago. Kind of defeats the purpose of having an archive don’t it?

I have a gut feeling that the tapes are there in Nassau. But I’m going to have to get some kind of authorization to look through the place myself. They may be right that nothing is there, but I would believe them more if they got out of their seats and actually looked.

And finally, I hope to get my interview / conversation with Ian Strachan’s radio show “The Nation Today” from February 2nd 2009 on this site soon, along with my little JCN TV moment from “Dialogue” with Etoile Pinder. As soon as I get the files / CDs / DVDs I’ll put em up.

Note: I wrote this essay in 2001 for English 120 at the College of the Bahamas. It was published the following year in the course booklet as a “Sample Informal Argumentative Essay.” The essay has some baby fat that needs cutting, and I hope to get to that later, but I offer it here as a quick read that encapsulates most of my ideas about culture.

Has Wendy’s started selling ‘conch snacks’, you ask? How can an American fast food chain ever possibly hope to be considered Bahamian? While I agree that the idea may sound shocking, I believe that because of its importance in the lives of Bahamians today, it is possible to say that Wendy’s is just as Bahamian as Bamboo Shack. But before I explain my position, allow me to clarify a point: when I say Wendy’s, by extension I’m referring to the other major fast food restaurants such as Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), and McDonalds. It naturally follows that by referring to the Bamboo Shack I can be making reference to any well-known Bahamian Restaurant, like Castaways, Dirties or The Palm Tree.

The first objection any red-blooded Bahamian would raise about the above claim would be the menu. Obviously the food that these fast food restaurants serve is not considered traditional “Bahamian cuisine”. You cannot, and probably never will be able to, go into a Wendy’s and order a conch snack, or go to McDonalds and order a dish of sheep-tongue souse. However, the questions I ask are these: is the food served the only test of Bahamian-ness’? Just because something is not indigenous to the Bahamas, can it be considered Bahamian? Are there any other factors that contribute to something’s being considered Bahamian, or a part of Bahamian culture?

For the purpose of our discussion, it would help to have a clearer definition of “culture”. Patricia Glinton-Meicholas in her essay “Uncovering the Bahamian Self”, defined culture as “the sum of the historical and physical experiences of a people, and how they interact to create endemic group attitudes and behaviors.” What this means is that culture is a fusion of a peoples’ history and how they as a people have coped with that history. Or, put another way, culture is created by people surviving and reacting to their environment. So, despite what Bahamians in general may think “their culture” is, it really is a dynamic fusion of past and present that does not remain static. It is constantly evolving taking into account the complete environment that makes up the modem Bahamas and our reaction to that environment, including the general lifestyles that we as a people lead.