Hemispheric Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami is a collective of scholars, artists, advocates, and students of critical Caribbean Studies. Working across boundaries, the collective brings together expertise in a number of geographic, thematic, historical, and disciplinary sites. The use of multiple Creoles — Sou-Sou/Konbit/Kolectá (signifying aspects of cooperation, investment, and collective work) — represents our aim to continue to problematize and disrupt colonial modes of thought and action. It also conveys our ethos and praxis as: (1) A trust in which we each invest and mutually receive feedback, support, and incubation of new ideas; (2) An ethic of cooperative work and solidarity; and (3) A lasting and historically grounded enterprise made up of individuals working toward a new horizon in the critical study of the Caribbean and its historical and contemporary projections and “presence.”
Hemispheric Caribbean Studies builds on a number of programs and collaborative initiatives at the University of Miami including Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies, founded by Sandra Pouchet Paquet over twenty-five years ago, and Caribbean-focused working groups of the former Center for Latin American Studies. Today, Hemispheric Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami orbits around the following four axes. They too are conceptualized as interrelated, sometimes overlapping, and neither mutually exclusive nor closed:
