Donna Karan’s love Haiti relationship

Repeating Islands

Jane Gordon has written this profile of Donna Karan and her relationship to Haiti for London’s Daily Mail.

Donna Karan is reclining on a pure white ottoman in the shade of a banyan tree at her aptly named villa the Sanctuary on the private tropical island of Parrot Cay in the West Indies. She is, as you might expect, wearing something she designed herself (a copper-coloured draped skirt and tunic top) and she manages to look (without any make-up or obvious signs of surgery) a decade younger than her 63 years – a feat she puts down to ‘standing on my head doing yoga’.

The woman who, together with her late husband Stephan Weiss, created a vast fashion empire worth a reputed £415 million (it was sold to the luxury conglomerate LVMH in 2001) is supposed to be on vacation, but even here she is a whirlwind of creativity…

View original post 1,471 more words

Jamaica Kincaid short story inspires dance performance

Repeating Islands

Lauren Gallagher reviews Liss Fain’s new dance Jamaica Kincaid-inspired performance/installation for The San Francisco Examiner.

Liss Fain Dance just might be the most bookish dance troupe ever.
Novels, poetry and short stories have influenced Fain’s work for years.
Last year, she used literary superstar Lydia Davis’ short stories. She continues on the short story trajectory, using Jamaica Kincaid’s unnerving tales in “The Water Is Clear and Still,” a performance installation debuting Thursday at Z Space.
“A wave of nostalgia rushed over me when I heard Kincaid’s name in association with this piece,” says Val Sinckler, who first read Kincaid in elementary school and will read stories from Kincaid’s “At the Bottom of The River” as part of the installation. “She’s also considered a Caribbean author, and there is a wealthy reservoir of Caribbean culture in my family, so there is a personal resonance for me.”
Sinckler, a San Francisco…

View original post 289 more words

Edge Zones Hosts 1st Miami Performance Art Festival

Repeating Islands

Edge Zones presents the 1st Miami Performance Art Festival, taking place July 26-29, 2012. The festival will be a four day series of events through downtown Miami, the Miami Design District, and in the Botanical Gardens of the City of Miami. It will be curated by Charo Oquet, Cristy Alamaida, and Tori Arpad-Cotta and organized by Edge Zones Projects. The festival, which is free to the general public, will include workshops, lectures, artist talks, or other forms of interactive discourse. The first edition’s focus of inquiry is the “Art of Uncertainty.” 

Description: The first Miami Performance Art International Festival features several projects. The Live Art exhibition project seeks to reflect the varied approaches and underscore the wide spectrum of concerns of artistic practices and styles while surveying the contemporary global artistic strategies and conceptual frameworks where these works are put into play. M/P’12 will explore and study the tendencies…

View original post 191 more words

Call for Submissions: Sargasso Issue—”Agency and Intervention in Caribbean Contexts”

Repeating Islands

SARGASSO, a peer-reviewed journal of Caribbean literature, language, and culture, published at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, seeks submissions for the upcoming issue: “Agency and Intervention in Caribbean Contexts.” The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2012.

Description: The Sargasso team is looking for scholarship that addresses the varied ways that agency and/or intervention has been engaged, configured, and/or problematized within Caribbean societies, traditions, and cultures. Of special interest is scholarship that dialogues with ideas in the fields of literature, linguistics, performance/drama, ethnomusicology, anthropology, social sciences, and postcolonial studies; they strongly encourage work that is interdisciplinary in nature.

This issue of Sargasso will feature contributions that either rethink or creatively explore the issues of agency and/or intervention in Caribbean contexts. Current postcolonial theorists and scholars frequently foreground the interventionist possibilities of their work on contemporary inequities and material needs by demonstrating how subaltern or subjugated communities attain and…

View original post 263 more words

(Last Call) for Papers: Caribbean Irish Connections

Repeating Islands

Organizers Alison Donnell (University of Reading, UK), Maria McGarrity (LIU Brooklyn, USA), and Evelyn O’Callaghan (University of the West Indies, Barbados) remind us that the call for papers for Caribbean Irish Connections is almost over; the deadline is June 29, 2012. Caribbean Irish Connections, a multidisciplinary conference and workshop, will be held in Barbados on November 16-17, 2012, at the Beach View Hotel in Paynes Bay, St. James, Barbados [also see Call for Papers: Caribbean Irish Connections.]

Although there has been more recent scholarship on the connections between Ireland and the Caribbean, such as The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas, edited by O’Neill and Lloyd, there remains still too little conversation between scholars based in Caribbean Studies and Irish Studies. This conference aims to open up these conversations as they pertain to history, politics, language, geography, expressive cultural forms, and everyday practices…

View original post 134 more words

Tunisian Art Riots and the Play of the Serious

Africa is a Country (Old Site)

The long running art show, Printemps des Arts, held in La Marsa, a wealthier suburb of Tunisia, was the site of riots and attacks against art that incited the religious rancor among Salafi fundamentalists. On June 10, the last day of the exhibition, fundamentalists were incited to wreak havoc on the art when a government official (referred to as a bailiff) visited the exhibition, took photos and brought them back to show to a mosque populated by Salafist zealots. Calls for attacks against artists, and photos of the offending images on exhibition were circulated through the use of social media. In this case Facebook was the launch pad for a compilation video of images and text, as well as for a recorded statement from Cheikh Houcine Laabidi, an imam at the Zitouna mosque, denouncing the artists involved. Groups of agitators went back later that night, and the next…

View original post 789 more words

Miami Art Museum’s Jose Bedia retrospective surveys 30 years of a city icon

Repeating Islands

José Bedia’s stark images are part of the Miami cityscape, but it’s been three decades since a local museum showed his work. Here is John Coppola’s review of the show—curated by Judith Bettelheim—for The Miami Herald.

Cuban artist José Bedia’s stark silhouettes and totemic figures are Miami icons — at the Arsht Center, on Design District murals, in Key Biscayne traffic circles. Among the few places where his Afro-Cuban-inspired images have not been regularly seen are in the city’s public museums.

That gap has now been filled with the opening of Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia at the Miami Art Museum. The exhibition was organized by Los Angeles’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History and will be on display throughout the summer. Although Bedia’s work is represented in Miami public and private collections, his last solo museum exhibitions locally were back in the 1990s. MAM’s predecessor…

View original post 1,302 more words

Women’s Health: Birth Control Morally Acceptable To Catholics, Most Americans

LadyRomp

Hey Everyone, I would love your opinion on this story!

The Huffington Post  |  By Samreen Hooda

The controversial contraception mandate proposed by the president had Congress debating about the morality of birth control, however according to a recent Gallup poll, 89 percent of all Americans and 82 percent of U.S. Catholics agree that birth control is morally acceptable.

In fact, birth control ranked as the most acceptable of 18 behaviors tested this year with the second and third most acceptable behaviors being divorce and gambling, ranking at least 20 percentage points lower.

What does this mean for the embittered battle between congress and the White House?

According to a Wall Street Journal article, Americans overwhelmingly agree that employers should be required to offer birth control, but a slight majority opposes the rule mandating Roman Catholic and other religious institutions from having to provide the service.

“When asked…

View original post 258 more words

Gay rights in the Caribbean slowly coming out of the closet

Repeating Islands

Over the past six months, governments in two influential Caribbean trade bloc member states – Jamaica and Guyana – have floated political test balloons on the question of whether colonial-era laws criminalising homosexuality should be amended in keeping with trends in most Western states.
The climate for gay people in the two nations is very different, as Bert Wilkinson reports in this article for Caribbean360.com.
In Guyana, where many gays and lesbians live openly, the move has not made headlines, although some Christian churches have vowed to fight the governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP) to the very end on this issue.
The administration of President Donald Ramotar says that it is preparing to take a motion to the 65-member parliament as early as this week to begin debate on the abolition of buggery and cross- dressing laws, corporal punishment in schools, and capital punishment by hanging.
“The idea is to…

View original post 660 more words

A Review of Lakshmi Persaud’s Daughters of Empire (2012)

Repeating Islands

Lisa Outar reviews Lakshmi Persaud’s Daughters of Empire in this article from the Stabroek News.

Born in Port Mourant, Guyana and living in the US since 1985, Dr. Lisa Outar has a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She teaches at St. John’s University in the fields of Postcolonial Literature and Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing. Her research and writing focuses in particular on Indianness in the Caribbean and its diasporas.

Dr. Lakshmi Persaud, who was born in Trinidad and has lived in the UK since the 1970s, is the author of five novels that deal with the intricacies of Caribbean identity and individual and communal memory: Butterfly in the Wind (1970); Sastra (1993); For the Love of my Name (2000); Raise the Lanterns High (2004); and Daughters of Empire (2012).  In her latest work, Daughters of Empire, published…

View original post 1,422 more words