Register for access
A celebratory event — also honoring Sylvia Wynter — featuring greetings, poetry, and statements from writers and scholars like NourbeSe, Abena P.A. Busia, Carolyn Cooper, Sandra Messinger Cypess, Pamela Mordecai, Elizabeth Wilson, Nancy Morejon, Evelyn O’ Callaghan, and Giovanna Covi, who contributed to this landmark field-founding collection as well as those who were influenced by its publication.
Writers already committed: Thomas Glave, Opal Palmer Adisa, Yomaira Figueroa,
Rinaldo Walcott, Donna Aza Weir Soley, Giselle Anatol, Myriam Moise, Marcia Douglas, Ramabai Espinet, Erica Johnson, Anu Lakhan, and more!
Registration: https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/overview/K032721/
“Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature” (1990)
Edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, this first collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature created a field of literary criticism which engaged the absence of women writers from the Caribbean literary canon as it established the presence of these writers historically. One of its signature lasting
contributions was“Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the Demonic Ground of Caliban’s Woman,” which has since become a theoretical staple in several fields. One of the sections of its introduction, “The Critical Context for a Caribbean Feminist Poetics,” examined these issues theoretically as it raised some critical questions and spurred the development of a continued and sustained intellectual debate.
Out of the Kumbla revitalized Caribbean literature and criticism as it expanded the narrow terms of Western feminist discourse. Using the metaphor of the “Kumbla” or “calabash” used to protect precious objects, first used by writer Erna Brodber, coming “out of the Kumbla” then signified a movement from confinement to visibility, articulation, process which allowed for a multiplicity of moves, exteriorized, no longer contained and protected or dominated. Since its publication thirty years ago, Out of the Kumbla has witnessed an amazing flowering of Caribbean women’s writing and its criticism all over the world.
This event is presented by eCornell in collaboration with the Literary Studies Department at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars.
The event is free of cost.
October 10, 2019
Ann Snitow May 9, 1943-August 10, 2019 Ann Snitow, a founding faculty member of Lang College and the creator of the Gender Studies Program at the New School, passed away on August 10, 2019. She was a beloved member of the Literary Studies faculty. While indeed her books and essays are crucial texts in feminist studies and in the life of the mind, as Literary Studies colleagues our remembrances here are more personal, testaments not just to her work but to the power of her being.
January 31, 2017
Fathima Sheikh (Class of 2019) shares her thoughts on the conversation between Robert Antoni (Pan-European MFA), author of Blessed is the Fruit, and Caryl Phillips (Yale), author of The Lost Child, at “Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea: A Celebration,” presented by Literary Studies at The New School’s Wollman Hall on October 19, 2016. . […]
Register for access
A celebratory event — also honoring Sylvia Wynter — featuring greetings, poetry, and statements from writers and scholars like NourbeSe, Abena P.A. Busia, Carolyn Cooper, Sandra Messinger Cypess, Pamela Mordecai, Elizabeth Wilson, Nancy Morejon, Evelyn O’ Callaghan, and Giovanna Covi, who contributed to this landmark field-founding collection as well as those who were influenced by its publication.
Writers already committed: Thomas Glave, Opal Palmer Adisa, Yomaira Figueroa,
Rinaldo Walcott, Donna Aza Weir Soley, Giselle Anatol, Myriam Moise, Marcia Douglas, Ramabai Espinet, Erica Johnson, Anu Lakhan, and more!
Registration: https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/overview/K032721/
“Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature” (1990)
Edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, this first collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature created a field of literary criticism which engaged the absence of women writers from the Caribbean literary canon as it established the presence of these writers historically. One of its signature lasting
contributions was“Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the Demonic Ground of Caliban’s Woman,” which has since become a theoretical staple in several fields. One of the sections of its introduction, “The Critical Context for a Caribbean Feminist Poetics,” examined these issues theoretically as it raised some critical questions and spurred the development of a continued and sustained intellectual debate.
Out of the Kumbla revitalized Caribbean literature and criticism as it expanded the narrow terms of Western feminist discourse. Using the metaphor of the “Kumbla” or “calabash” used to protect precious objects, first used by writer Erna Brodber, coming “out of the Kumbla” then signified a movement from confinement to visibility, articulation, process which allowed for a multiplicity of moves, exteriorized, no longer contained and protected or dominated. Since its publication thirty years ago, Out of the Kumbla has witnessed an amazing flowering of Caribbean women’s writing and its criticism all over the world.
This event is presented by eCornell in collaboration with the Literary Studies Department at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars.
The event is free of cost.
