Announcing our new digital series, "Caribbean Feminisms"
This four-part series pays homage to historical & contemporary Caribbean feminisms and feminists.
Black Women Radicals presents “Caribbean Feminisms”, a four-part online event series paying homage to historical and contemporary Caribbean feminisms and feminists. The series is curated and hosted by educators, organizers, and scholars, Nana Brantuo and Dr. Andrea N. Baldwin. You can check out our past events and the reading list for the “Caribbean Feminisms” Series here.
About The Series
Caribbean feminists and feminisms are central and essential to national, regional, and global movements - actively “deconstructing the categories of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ and exposing their gendered character” (Reddock, 2007) and mobilizing for societal transformation. This series is a homage to the pioneering work of feminists such as Guyanese grassroots activist Andaiye; Grendian feminist scholar Eudine Barriteau; Jamaican diplomat Lucille M. Mair; Curaçaoan cultural anthropologist Rose Mary Allen; and Tobagonian Calypsonian Calypso Rose as well as space for engaging with contemporary Caribbean feminist scholars, activists, and artists across generations, borders, and languages.
Some of the questions we will be discussing include:
What does it mean to be a Caribbean feminist?
How has Caribbean feminism helped us to interrogate race, gender, class, and sexuality within and outside the region?
How has Caribbean feminisms impacted our contemporary social justice movements within and outside the region?
How has Caribbean feminisms influenced cultural perspectives, productions, and performance?
How have Caribbean feminist movements adapted to the changing digital world?
What is the future of Caribbean feminist knowledge production and organizing in an increasingly polarized world?
About the Curators: Nana Brantuo and Dr. Andrea N. Baldwin
Nana Brantuo is an educator, facilitator, researcher, and writer based in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. She is deeply committed to the creation and sustainment of transformative and equitable spaces, structures, and systems and centers Black feminisms, Black geographies, and intersectionality within her pedagogical and political praxes. Over the past decade, Nana has balanced teaching, facilitation, and advocacy appointments in the nonprofit sector and within higher education institutions. Nana has held several positions as policy advocate and strategist for several non-profit organizations and was named a 2020 AYOO Africa’s Top Ten Awardee in the category of Community, Policy, and Government. She currently teaches courses at both the George Washington University in the International Education Program and the University of Maryland, College Park in the College of Education and serves as a Words of Engagement Intergroup Dialogue Program (WEIDP) facilitator at the University of Maryland, College Park - facilitating 7-week dialogues on immigration, race, gender, socioeconomic status, and size and appearance. Nana has supported WEIDP’s curriculum assessment and development work by determining high-impact pedagogical interventions for program content, while designing new grading rubrics and experiential activities that supported programmatic learning objectives.
Nana is also a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation focuses on African and African descendant mobilities and migrations; immigrant identity and integration within host countries; and return migration. Her research has taken her to various institutions including Howard University, the University of Ghana, Legon, the University of the West Indies, Cavehill, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Virginia Tech, and the University of Havana - giving presentations, facilitating dialogues and workshops, and collaborating with activists, educators, policymakers, and researchers alike. Additionally, Nana is also a writer. Her published work can be found in The Hill, PBS Newshour, Black Perspectives (African American Intellectual History Society), Africa Today, OkayAfrica, Brittle Paper, and AYO Magazine. Nana holds a Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in African Studies from Howard University. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, Linktree, and Spotify.
Andrea N. Baldwin completed her doctoral studies at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill campus Barbados in 2013 with a thesis entitled, Investigating Power in the Anglophone Caribbean Middle Class: Ideologies and Love as Power – Barbados as a Case Study. She is an attorney-at-law who also holds an MSc. in International Trade Policy and her research interests include Black and transnational feminist epistemology, theorizing pedagogy as a form of feminist praxis, care in Black communities, and Caribbean cultural studies.
Dr. Baldwin is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana studies in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. She has several publications and is currently working on her first monograph entitled Black Feminism, Postcolonialism and American Higher Education: Gender, Race and the Body. Dr. Baldwin has also written and narrated a short documentary film entitled Self Care: A Radical Act which was screened at the Belin Feminist Film Festival in March 2018. She is the recipient of several awards and was awarded an international fellowship at Brown University in 2010. She was also awarded the 2018 John S. King Excellence in Teaching Award from her former institution Connecticut College, where she also served as the Assistant Director of Africana Studies and the Associate Director for Praxis at the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity. Dr. Baldwin was born and raised on the small Caribbean island state of Barbados and considers herself an all-around Caribbean woman and loves everything coconut and soca.