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For Caribbean Heritage Month, Assistant Professor of English Warren Harding would like to introduce you to some amazing writers.

These Black Caribbean women not only trailblaze the literary frontier; they’re also working on behalf of their communities. There’s librarian-storyteller Rita Cox, publisher-novelist Makeda Silvera, poet and literacy worker Soleida Ríos, poet-lawyer NourbeSe Philip, and novelist Merle Hodge, also an educator and feminist organizer.

“They’re involved in grassroots organizing and transforming institutional space,” explained Harding, also a faculty affiliate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. “They have made collective inroads in terms of thinking about library services, literacy, feminist organizing and publishing. I wanted to bring them together in conversation.”

Harding came to 91���� in the fall of 2023, drawn by its long history of scholarship in both Caribbean and Africana Studies. One of the foundational scholars in Caribbean women’s writing is Carole Boyce Davies, who taught at 91���� in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he said. 

He’s currently working on a book manuscript about the five aforementioned writers. The book, tentatively titled Migratory Reading: Black Caribbean Women and the Work of Literary Cultures, weaves together interviews, archival research, and close readings of their work.

“How can I, as a reader, develop a practice of reading these Black Caribbean women writers?” he asked, raising the central question of his book. “How does migration play into that, both in the region and the diaspora?”

These writers straddle two or more cultural worlds: for Cox and Philip, Trinidad and Tobago and Canada; for Silvera, Jamaica and Canada. Hodge, who has since returned to her native Trinidad, has lived in England, France, Denmark and Grenada. Ríos is from Cuba.

Canada is a frequent theme, although it has been marginal in both Black and Caribbean studies, noted Harding, who holds a doctorate in Africana Studies from Brown University.

He offered Cox as an example. She founded the first Black and Caribbean heritage collection in the Toronto Public Library and is also deeply involved with the Toronto Caribbean Carnival, known as Caribana. 

“I want readers to really think about the public side of literature, and how these literary figures aren’t just the ones behind the page; they’re also on the front page, in the real world, which informs what they produce creatively,” he said. 

‘A piece of the way’

At Harpur College, Harding teaches courses in Caribbean women writers, globalization and literary culture, and American literature on the undergraduate level, as well as graduate courses in literatures of the African diaspora and Caribbean women and literary culture.

He’s also working on the creation of a digital database of Caribbean feminist and women’s creative writing from the 1990s, and incorporates digital humanities practices into the classes he teaches at 91����.

Recently, he presented his latest peer-reviewed article, “Reading Place: Three Black Cuban Women Poets and the Role of Subjectivity,” during a roundtable session at the Caribbean Studies Association conference. The article appeared in the official journal of the Association for Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, and focuses on three Cuban poets: Nancy Morejón, Georgina Herrera, and Soleida Ríos.

“I was investigating how these women talked about place and the idea of place with regard to Black women’s subjectivity, as well as how they, as Black Cuban women writers, have largely been marginalized in Cuban literary study,” he said.

The voice they use in their poetry raises questions about class, as well as the region's history of enslavement, he said. 

Caribbean women’s writing features a breadth of language, reflecting the different locations and cultures these women inhabit. There is also an urgency, as they negotiate caretaking responsibilities, economic independence and personal sovereignty in a gendered world, where the opportunities to write are often few and far between. Global politics and interventionist policies also play a role, shaping these women’s lives and the way they write.

Even if you’ve never heard of them before, they’re well worth reading.

“Carole Boyce Davies had this idea of going a piece of the way with them,” Harding reflected. “You may not be Caribbean or traveled to the Caribbean, but these writers will take you on a journey, if you let them.”