As part of its Conferencias Caribeñas 10 lecture series for January-May 2012, the Institute of Caribbean Studies of the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR-RP), invites the academic community and the general public to the lecture “The Temples of the Other: The South Asian Aesthetic in the Caribbean” by Dr. Patricia Mohammed (Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies; Chair, School for Graduate Studies and Research, University of the West Indies-St. Augustine). Dr. Nalini Natarajan (Department of English, College of Humanities, UPR-RP) will comment the lecture.

The activity will be held on Thursday, March 15, from 1:00 to 3:00pm in Amphitheatre Manuel Maldonado Denis (CRA 108) of Carmen Rivera de Alvarado (CRA) Building, School of Social Sciences, UPR-RP.

Description: In The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1992), Derek Walcott writes: “I was filtering the afternoon with evocations of a lost India, but why evocations? Why not celebrations of a real presence?” This lecture interrogates how the migration of East Indians to the southern Caribbean territories from the 19th century has contributed to the evolution of Caribbean culture and the creation of another aesthetic sensibility in the region. Yet the visual metaphors of this ethnic group continue to position the Asian as the “other”, the religious and culturally saturated east, in a western context. The text draws on the recently published Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation (Mohammed: Macmillan, 2010), which unwraps the aesthetic layers of the different groups that have populated the region. The award winning short experimental documentary entitled “Coolie Pink and Green” will be screened as a supporting visual text.

This lecture will be broadcast LIVE online through the following website: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cc71***

Comments and suggestions on the presentation will be welcome at iec-ics@upr.edu

For further information, you may call Dr. Humberto García Muñiz, Director, at (787) 764-0000, extension 4212, or write to iec@uprrp.edu

Also see the Institute of Caribbean Studies on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#%21/pages/Instituto-de-Estudios-del-Caribe-UPR/146169468754542?ref=sgm

For photos and review of “Coolie Pink and Green” see http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/23-september-2010/colour-wheel/