Beyond Tragedy: The Grenada Revolution, Remembrance, and Renewal

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Shalini Puri (Pittsburgh) - That amnesia about the Grenada Revolution is a problem is widely recognized.  But what is asked less often is:  What does the predominant focus on the tragic fall of the Grenada Revolution in 1983 leave out?  What do other genres of memory enable? How do they think their way out of and beyond tragedy?  While the state, law, and politics undoubtedly have a role to play in reconciliation and renewal in Grenada, the arts and the everyday practices of ordinary people offer possibilities beyond the absolutes of politics, policy, and polemics. The author explores the arts not for agreement on the topic of the Revolution but for imaginative ways of living with disagreement that might yet aspire and contribute to an egalitarian and just society.

Shalini Puri is Professor of English at the University Pittsburgh, where she works on the literatures and cultures of the Global South.  She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory (2014).  An interdisciplinary humanities project, the book is a memorial, a critique, and a tribute. More details of her work on Grenada can be found at: http://www.urgentmemory.com. Puri is also the author of The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity, which won the Gordon and Sybil Lewis Award for best book in Caribbean Studies in 2005.  She is the editor of The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics (2011) and Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures in the Caribbean (2003).  She is co-editor (with Debra Castillo) of a volume entitled Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South (October 2016) and (with Lara Putnam) Caribbean Military Encounters (in press, 2017).