The Caribbean Goodbye: Britain’s Black Hauntings and The Future(s) That Never Came
In Britain and the wider diaspora, ‘The Caribbean Goodbye’ is when Caribbean people leave Caribbean cultural events without directly saying goodbye – sometimes taking hours, caught in the feel-good energy of being amongst one’s culture (totally opposite to spaces like the workplace and schools). The Caribbean Goodbye often comes attached to stereotypes and multigenerational jokes of perpetual lateness to appointments, family events, and Caribbean funerals. Based on Tré’s article of the same name, this lecture engages family anecdote and memory to consider Caribbean ‘lateness’ not as cultural quirk, but a horrific response shaped by histories of racism as histories of the present. When elders reminisce of ‘Back in the Day’ it is an idyl haunted by a future always out of reach. In this lecture, Tré suggests that racism, loss, and longing, do not stay historical, but linger in the present through extended farewells in sacred family-community spaces offering a commentary on how we remember, struggle, and imagine.
Speaker Bio:
Curated & Hosted By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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