Each year, undergraduate students in Caribbean studies organize a conference. Topics are of the students’ own choosing and have included: the popularity of skin bleaching products in the Caribbean; the human condition as represented in the art of Guyanese painters E. R. Burrowes and Bernadette Persaud; the poetry of St. Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott; Indian identity in Jamaica; and Jose Marti and the Cuban Revolution.

Presenters come from the three universities in Toronto (the University of Toronto, Ryerson and York) and all have different relationships to the Caribbean, from a young man who had been introduced to Caribbean literature in a course on migration, to a young woman with an interest in Indo-Caribbean writers whose family has returned to Guyana only once since they left some thirty years ago, to a recent migrant whose reflections on Caribbean homophobia included a discussion of the outrageous charges recently brought against a group of men for cross-dressing in Guyana.

• Read about the first student-run conference.
  
• This year’s conference theme is Diaspora Voices, New Directions, Studying the Caribbean in Toronto.