Professors in Canada develop Caribbean diaspora courses

Two Jamaican professors at different universities in Ontario, Canada, have created courses that focus on the Caribbean diaspora there and abroad, writes Neil Armstrong for The Jamaica Gleaner. Dr Hyacinth Simpson, associate professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), and Ronald Cummings, an associate professor of Caribbean literature and black diaspora studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, offered the courses during the spring and summer terms.

From chattel slavery and the plantation society period to the present, migration in and out of the region continues to shape the experience of Caribbean peoples significantly. Simpson’s course, Literatures of the Caribbean, provided the students an engagement with literary texts (short stories, poems, and a novel), as well as films and music to better understand how migrations and mass movements have affected the identities (especially ethno-racial, sexual, and gendered) of peoples in the English-speaking Caribbean and its diasporas.

Meanwhile, Professor Cummings launched his new course, Windrush Writing/Writing Windrush: Empire, Race and Decolonisation, during the summer to teach his students more about the literature and other creative forms that grew out of the Windrush generation.
Full report on The Jamaica Gleaner site