Notes
Matthew J. Smith is professor of Caribbean history at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica. His research interests include Caribbean migration, and popular culture and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries with special emphasis on Haiti and Jamaica. He is the author of Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (UNC Press, 2014), and Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (UNC Press, 2009). He is co-editor with Diana Paton of The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Ruth Minott Egglestone grew up in Jamaica but has spent most of her teaching career in England and Scotland. She has a background in literature (English and Spanish), education, drama and cultural studies. Her seminal doctoral thesis mapped the development of the Jamaican Pantomime tradition as a model of national identity and a new theatrical form. She is currently working with children in the field of inclusive education, refining a manuscript about teaching with a reggae sensibility in Britain, and collaborating on a biography of Roger Mais. At present, there are also two Shakespeare-based writing projects in the pipeline.
Peter Ramrayka, MBA, CIHM, FIHM, FRSPH, FIHEEM, is author of the acclaimed monograph Recycling a Son of the British Raj (Hansib, 2015), which highlights the cultural transformational changes and challenges he went through in his early life as an Indo-Guyanese migrant to the UK. He was an officer in the RAF, and rose to a senior management position in the National Health Service. His career was interspersed with national, international and voluntary consultancies in the UK (including being appointed a Justice of the Peace), Botswana, Pakistan and Tanzania.
Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez is visiting professor of philosophy at Oxford College of Emory. His work focuses on the interconnection between history, politics, and aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a philosophical attempt at approaching these topics collectively. He is particularly interested in aesthetic theories and practices (such as literature and film) of this world region that critique colonial forms of self-understanding and self-expression, and contribute to new epistemologies of resistance. His work investigates a European philosophical tradition of history and aesthetics as challenged by the existence of the Americas.
Bruce Nobrega was born in Guyana and attended Queens College. He came to England for the second time in 1969, and settled, just in time to be included in what is now termed the Windrush Generation. He studied quantity surveying and up to his retirement worked on various projects including social housing. He is a long-standing treasurer of a BAME housing association, originally formed for women; he is a committee member on various organisations connected with the community; and he has been involved with the Adult Literacy Programme. He is an activist whose travels have enhanced his knowledge and understanding of black history, and the nuanced effects that the various western colonising powers have had on their subject–citizens.
Kelly Delancy is from Nassau, Bahamas. She graduated in 2011 with a BA in anthropology from the State University of New York and in 2015 with an MA in anthropology from the University of Florida. She hopes the information generated during her studies will be of value to future generations of Bahamians and others interested in the history of south Eleuthera and the Bahamas. Delancy currently assists researchers tracing Bahamian histories and continues to share information collected on community histories through the ‘From Dat Time’: Oral and Public History Institute of the University of the Bahamas, and through the Finding Home Bahamas project, which can be found on Facebook and Instagram.
Simeon Simeonov is a PhD student at Brown University interested in the history of extraterritoriality and its relationship to diasporas, empires, states, colonialism and decolonisation. His work historicises the creation of the modern nation state as a process shaped as much by ‘external’ as by ‘internal’ agents and institutions. Methodologically, his scholarship aims at transcending the inner-disciplinary boundaries separating cultural, social, political and diplomatic history. It is only by elucidating the role of marginalised groups as political and diplomatic agents that we can fully understand the stakes of creating colonial and post-colonial polities and the political-economic system of global capitalism.
William ‘Lez’ Henry, born in Lewisham, London to Jamaican parents, is the British reggae deejay Lezlee Lyrix. He is an associate professor at the University of West London and is renowned as a first-class public speaker. He has lectured nationally and internationally and featured in numerous documentaries and current affairs television and radio programmes. He also writes about many of the concerns of the African diaspora in the UK, and is a keen martial artist.
Jack Webb is a research associate in the School of English, Newcastle University, whose work focuses on the cultural history of the Caribbean and the British Empire. He is the author of Haiti in the British Imagination, 1847– 1904 (Liverpool University Press, 2020), and has published in the Journal of Caribbean History and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
William Tantam is postdoctoral fellow in Caribbean Studies, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, and directs the Centre for Integrated Caribbean Research. His work focuses on embodiment and agency in relation to class, gender and power in the Caribbean. His forthcoming publications include An Ethnography of Class and Masculinities in Jamaica: Letting the Football Talk (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Maria del Pilar Kaladeen is an associate fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She works on the colonial history of the system of Indian indenture in Guyana (1838–1917). Maria is co-editor of We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture (School of Advanced Study, 2018) and a contributor to Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children (Headline, 2018). Her monograph on indenture in Guyana is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.
Anne Braithwaite is a Guyanese living in London for almost 50 years, who has worked extensively with Guyanese, Caribbean and Pan-African political activists. Additionally, she has had an accounting and finance career in industry, commerce and education, then later worked with the Race Equality Foundation’s ‘Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities’ programme. These experiences propelled Anne’s rethinking of her own miseducation about Guyana’s race-based politics, [neo]colonialism, class and white supremacy. Anne’s trips to Haiti and Cuba strengthened further her understanding of culturally based history, Pan-Africanism and reparations. She remains available to support work towards these ends, alongside volunteering as associate hospital manager with South West London and St George’s Mental Health Trust.
Nadine King Chambers is an Afro-Caribbean raised by working-class grandparents and a librarian in Jamaica. Since 1991 she has been dividing her time between the semi-rural and urban Pacific west coast of Canada and Jamaica. Her formal studies have primarily been to hunt out the influence of colonisation in the areas of gender/law/resource management, literature and Indigenous studies. She has recently returned to academia to undertake a PhD at the University of Central Lancashire. She is grateful for acknowledgement of her unlettered support on multiple dissertations in social and applied sciences. Since 2015 she has been visiting archives in Jamaica, Canada and England.
Rod Westmaas was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1957. He has since lived in the United Kingdom, the United States and Guyana. He has performed independent research into the history of Guyana in archives situated in Guyana and at The National Archives (Kew) and has spoken about his findings at academic and public events, and his experiences of migration and sense of national identity. Now based in London, Westmaas has become a prominent member of the Guyanese community. In 2016 he, along with Juanita Cox Westmaas, established the organisation Guyana SPEAKS which brings together Guyanese people based in London to discuss issues relating to the social, economic and political condition of Guyana, as well as the concerns of members of its diaspora. These monthly meetings bring together a delegation of some 80 people, and are televised in Guyana, garnering an audience of around 10,000. In his most recent endeavours, Westmaas has been carrying out oral history interviews with Caribbean migrants to the UK with the view of publishing a book.