Last Wednesday (August 25) politicians, friends and family came out to Toronto's west end to celebrate the official unveiling of the 'Jean Augustine Park'. In paying tribute to Dr Augustine, deputy mayor, Joe Pantalone, and councillor, Mark Grimes, reminded the audience that during her tenure in the House of Commons, Dr Augustine was instrumental in getting funding from the Federal Government and making a reality the Toronto Linear Park System, in particular the Mimico Linear Trail, which is adjacent to the new Jean Augustine Park. This year Augustine became the first Grenada-born person to receive Canada's highest national honour. She was among the 57 Canadians named by Governor General Michaelle Jean to receive the Order of Canada - the country's highest civilian award.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
341 p, Studying cultural memory of the Grenada Revolution as it surfaces in literature, music, the visual arts, law, landscape, and everyday life, this book approaches the 1979-1983 Grenada Revolution as a pan-Caribbean event. Argues that in both its making and its fall, the 1979-1983 Revolution was a transnational event that deeply impacted politics and culture across the Caribbean and its diaspora during its life and in the decades since its fall.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., The Southern Caribbean was the last frontier in the Atlantic world and the most contested region in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolution. The three British colonies of Grenada, Trinidad and Demerera were characterized by insecurity and personified by the high mobility of people and ideas across empires; it was a part of the Caribbean that, more than any other region, provided an example of the liminal space of contested empires. Because of the multiculturalism inherent in this part of the world, as well as the undeveloped protean nature of the region, this was a place of shifting borderland communities and transient ideas, where women in motion and free people of color played a central role.
289 p., Argues that Caribbean writers challenge state notions of democracy and revolution by embracing ideological opacity (forms of political action that are not immediately legible) as a form of radicalism. Writers such as Merle Collins, Dionne Brand, and George Lamming narrated a new revolutionary consciousness using literary form and structure to express créolité (Caribbean cultural hybridity) and represent political resistance. This form of radicalism allows writers to explore political change in terms that are more subtle than discourses of outright revolution. The dissertation draws on the work of theorist Édouard Glissant who uses opacity as a critical term to articulate the right of Caribbean people to create their own forms of knowledge and to refuse Western epistemologies.
