ASSOCIATION

TH
34 ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE CARIBBEAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
PATRICIA MOHAMMED
D
ear CSA members, first-timers and those
whose support has made this year's
programme possible – on behalf of the Executive
Council and Advisory Board I extend a warm
welcome to the 34th Annual Conference of the
Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) and to
Jamaica. We look forward to greeting old friends
and inviting new members and participants into
the extended family of over 1,000 who now
constitute the association's membership. When
you come to a CSA conference and join this
association, you have already made the
commitment to one of the many goals that the
association serves, of advancing the development
of this region and the welfare of its diasporic
population. In this vein I pay homage to the 33
presidents and the numerous executive council
members before this year's team who have
committed themselves to delivering a conference
and taking the CSA through another term.
In selecting the site of Jamaica this year, one of the
few prerogatives the president has for his or her
year of office, I have brought the membership to
my second home in the Caribbean. The theme of
the conference, “Centering the Caribbean in
Caribbean Studies”, started with a niggling
thought that refused to be dismissed over the last
decade. While the CSA emerged as an association
34 years ago through the initiatives of scholars
situated in North America, I was increasingly
concerned about the benefits to Caribbean
societies who served each year as hosts to the
annual conferences. How do these societies gain
from our annual invasions which require for
success the time of local organising committees,
and inputs of commercial and institutional
funding? Then there was the term 'Caribbean
Studies' itself, one which was taken for granted –
as if this had not itself undergone shifts in
emphasis and disciplinary interests in three
decades. Commenting on the selected theme,
Prof. Bhoendradatt Tewarie (Pro Vice Chancellor,
Planning, University of the West Indies) asks,
“What impact has the decades of Caribbean
Studies had on the Caribbean? What has thinking,
discussing and writing about the Caribbean done
for the Caribbean?”
A fluctuation of interest in the Caribbean must
also engage us: flavour of the day a few centuries
ago, the Caribbean has slipped gently into
obsolescence on the Western Hemispheric stage,
which two-day hosted meetings of the Summit of
the Americas cannot easily resolve – we are small
players in a very big field. In the world of
scholarship and publishing, Caribbean markets
are miniscule and hold very little interest for large
presses that must sell books and information to
survive. Thus when Dr. Diana Thorburn,
Programme Chair and UWI Jamaican scholar,
coined the phrase that would become the theme,
we were both committed as longstanding CSA
members to engaging this year's conference in
discussions around these issues. Jamaica was one
of the best places to do so, as site of the first UWI
campus. With the full support of Professor
Gordon Shirley, Principal of UWI's Mona
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