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Dr. Brodber and Dr. Catherine John-Camara are visiting William & Mary this week as part of the Coll 300 speakers' series.  Their joint presentation, "African Jamaican Disruptions and Routes to Freedom" will take place on Wednesday, March 15, at 5-6:30 in the Commonwealth Auditorium of Sadler Center.

Erna Brodber is a Jamaican community activist, historian, sociologist, and novelist. She was born in the rural village of Woodside in Jamaica and continues to reside there. She has worked as a children?s officer in the civil service as well, as a teacher, and between 1968 and 1985, as research assistant and lecturer in the Department of Sociology and as a research fellow in the Institute of Social and Economic research at the University of the West Indies, Mona. She is the founder of the b l a c k s p a c e workshops in Woodside, Jamaica. She is the author of seven non-fiction monographs dealing with the black experience, including The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica 1907-1944 (University of Florida, 2004), The Continent of Black Consciousness (New Beacon, 2003), Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O. (University of West Indies, 2004); as well as six novels including, Jane and Louisa will soon come home (New Beacon, 1980), Myal (New Beacon, 1988), and Louisiana (New Beacon Books, 1994).  Myal won the 1989 Commonwealth Best Book Prize for the Caribbean and Canada. Her current book project deals with the interaction between African Americans and African Jamaican between 1782 and 1996. 
 
Catherine John-Camara is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Oklahoma. Her scholarship comparatively emphasizes African Caribbean and African American literary and cultural traditions. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was jointly published by Duke Press and The University Press of the West Indies. Her current manuscript is entitled Afro-Indigenization: Internal Power as Cultural Practice. This new project addresses Hip Hop Studies which has been part of her teaching expertise for 10 years. Her other research interests include grassroots social and political culture as well as Black independent cinema. She is the co-creator of the ?Unlearning Racism? Faculty Workshop which together with three other workshops is being launched at OU in the Fall of 2016. She has worked with Erna Brodber for 16 years, helping to organize and bring participants to the b l a c k s p a c e workshops in Woodside, Jamaica.

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