Welcome to Call for Submissions: Disaster Matters

Disaster Matters

Our Project

The Martinican writer Aimé Césaire described the Caribbean as 'a belated string of snuffed out islands and dozing volcanoes.' The landscape of the Caribbean has always evoked the imagination and there is a rich history of Caribbean writing and oral culture about the topography of the island chain. Césaire's imagery reminds us, too, that this is a powerful landscape that is potentially dangerous and at risk from natural disaster.  

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Funded by the UK Global Challenges Research Fund, we are producing an anthology of Caribbean writing on natural disaster in the region, that deals with healing and trauma after the episodes. This anthology will be used as an educational tool within the curriculum as well as with communities at risk from volcanic activity and other natural disasters such as hurricanes, flooding, and earthquakes.

This anthology will unite the Arts and Humanities with the Sciences to create a teaching and educational tool for discussion between teachers and students. We envisage the anthology being utilized across the curriculum but specifically it would be a useful resource in English Literature and Language as well as Social Studies, Geography, and Environmental Science.

It is our hope that the anthology would be a gift to schools within the Eastern Caribbean and a resource material for students.

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This project has been born out of an AHRC GCRF funded project, Explosive Transformations: Cultural Resilience to Natural Disaster on St Vincent and Montserrat which brought together literary studies with volcanology, international development, and project partners in the Eastern Caribbean responsible for future emergency response on the islands, to  investigate the ways in which resident populations have responded historically to severe natural threat, how crises have been dealt with, and recovery undertaken. The project explored the extent to which knowledge of disaster translates between cultural and scientific experiences of volcanic risk and the extent to which cultural experience of past risk shapes future response by offering a comparative analysis of the literary record, oral traditions and histories, songs, and other artistic expressions, and working with local populations to gain an understanding of the place of the volcano in the cultural imaginary.

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