2024-25 F. E. L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas: Three Island Overtures

Time and Memory are fundamental to how we relate to the past. In the Caribbean these concepts are especially contestable. Time and Memory often collapse in the accounting of a region where nation and society have emerged from the artificial creations of empire. Making sense of Caribbean history requires piecing together fragments of memory across time. These lectures will consider time and memory in Caribbean History by drawing on the lessons, research, and experiences of Professor Smith’s professional career as a Caribbean historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each lecture is concerned with how Caribbean people remember their past and are bound by a central question: If, as Caribbean artists have long demonstrated, the story of the Caribbean is a struggle of memories, then how might the history of the islands be approached differently if we consider the politics of how these memories are made and then projected through generations and carried by its people to other places? The Priestley lectures will collectively attend to this question through the lens of three distinct and interrelated movements in the course of the great sea of Caribbean History.