Issues

David Scott teaches at Columbia University, where he is professor of anthropology. He is the author most recently of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, forthcoming in 2004.

D. Alissa Trotz is an assistant professor in sociology and equity studies, Institute for Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She is the author of the essay “Behind the Banner of Culture: Gender, Race and the Family in Guyana,” New West Indian Guide 77, nos. 1 and 2 (2003); and (with Linda Peake) of the book Gender, Ethnicity and Place in Guyana (1999), and is currently completing research on Caribbean migrations and transnational practices.

Cary Fraser is a historian of international relations who teaches the history of American foreign policy and the politics of race in twentieth-century America at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism: The United States and the Genesis of West Indian Independence, 1940–1964 (1994). He is currently writing a book on the impact of the civil rights struggle on American foreign policy.

Gemma Robinson is a lecturer in literature at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Newcastle, UK. She wrote her doctoral thesis on Martin Carter and Guyanese literary culture, and has contributed to such journals as the Journal of Caribbean Literatures and Moving Worlds, and to Stewart Brown, ed., All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter. She is currently working on a biography of Martin Carter and a critical edition of his work.

Nigel Westmaas is a former executive member of the Working People’s Alliance. He served in various capacities in the organization, including stints as office manager and international secretary. He is currently a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

Nalini Persram is a lecturer in politics at Trinity College, Dublin, where she also runs a project entitled “The Postcolonial Presence in the European Union” in the Institute for International Integration Studies. Her research interests include questions of Caribbean identity, culture, and resistance; discourses of terrorism; gender and feminism; and critical practice. The book she is writing examines nationalist discourse in Guyana.

Percy C. Hintzen is a professor and chair of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include The Costs of Regime Survival (1989), West Indian in the West (2001), and (edited with Jean Rahier) Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States (2003).

David Scott teaches at Columbia University, where he is professor of anthropology. He is the author most recently ofConscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, forthcoming in 2004.

Jan Lowe Shinebourne was born and grew up in Guyana and now lives in London. She is the author of two novels,Timepiece (1986), which won the Guyana Prize for a first novel in 1987, and The Last English Plantation (1988), and the forthcoming collection of short stories The Godmother and Other Stories, to be published in spring 2004. She is working on another novel and a second collection of short stories.

Ruel Johnson was born in Guyana in 1980. In February of 2003, he received the Guyana Prize for Literature 2002, Best First Book of Fiction for his anthology of short stories, Ariadne & Other Stories, making him the youngest person to ever win a Guyana Prize. He is the only locally resident writer to have two works shortlisted (his anthology of poems, The Enormous Night, was runner-up for Best First Book of Poetry) for the prize.

Roshini Kempadoo is a digital artist. She artistically creates digital media to rearticulate historical material into contemporary spaces and networked environments. The work locates and visualizes a Caribbean colonial legacy, transforming stories and locations. She has exhibited internationally including solo shows in Port of Spain, Trinidad; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and Slovenia. She is a senior lecturer in digital media at the University of East London.

Hew Locke is an artist living and working in Brixton, London. Born in Edinburgh and grown up in Georgetown, he studied at Falmouth and the Royal College of Art, and since 2000 has won a Paul Hamlyn Award and the East International Award. His work is now collected by the Peter Norton family and Charles Saatchi. He is currently working on a series of large-scale voodoo-esque relief portraits of the royal family.

Stewart Brown is a reader in African and Caribbean literatures in the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, UK. He has edited several anthologies of Caribbean poetry and prose, and several volumes of critical essays, including All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter (2000). His own poetry is collected in Elsewhere: New and Selected Poems (2000). He is currently editing, with Mark McWatt, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Poetry, due to be published in 2004.

Geoffrey Philp is the author the novel Benjamin, My Son (2003), the collection of short stories Uncle Obadiah and the Alien (1997), and four collections of poetry, among them Hurricane Center (1998) and Xango Music (2001). His reviews, articles, poems, and short stories have also appeared in such forums as The Mississippi Review, The Caribbean Writer, and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories. He teaches English and creative writing at Miami-Dade College.