Preface 

1 

It is with great pleasure that we present to you the 2nd 
edition of Caribbean Quilt. Our first edition is now part of the 
collection at Ivey Library at the University of Toronto as well as the 
University of Guyana. This year‟s publication features over 20 pieces 
from over 20 authors. These authors are truly remarkable people: 
they include undergraduates, performers, teachers, PhD candidates, 
even aspiring professors. Moreover, many of the papers within this 
journal will be presented at this year‟s CERLAC Conference held at 
York University. Some were selected not simply by us as student 
editors, but by professors who made a concerted effort to have their 
student‟s best work showcased.  

Aside from our Caribbean focus, describing a unifying 
theme is something we purposefully avoid, though critical thinking is 
certainly fuelling this little enterprise. Maybe the best phrase that 
sums up this edition is “these systems are not our own.” „Systems‟ as 
a signifier of the contemporary fixed economic, political, cultural (all 
good students are now supposed to say „social‟) state of affairs may 
leap from the page more than the rest of the above words. „Systems‟ 
sound omnipresent, totalitarian, menacing and conspiratorial. Most 
of the pieces found here are not in disagreement: they stress the 
structural or institutional limitations of the present “post-colonial” 
situation, and see continuities with the old rather than blindly 
accepting the self-congratulating, utopian “new world”.  

The first sixteen to seventeen essays, poems and pull-outs 
can be roughly broken down into 4 comprehensive regional sections, 
they should not be read as independent of one another but rather as 
interrelated and overlapping. The first section focuses on Guyana, 
the second Haiti, the third Jamaica and the final, the French and 
Spanish Caribbean. The pieces after these relate to issues of female 
agency during carnival, gendered and racial oppression in slave 
societies, migration, tourism, and the environment.  

Any type of subversion today is hard to come by and is often 
doomed from the outset. That is why “our” (in “these systems are not 
our own”) may be more necessary than ever, the carving out of a 
“we” however small as a response to a vast totality, a type of micro 
challenge, if you will. Little CARSSU has grown and with it a 
community; a “we” has taken shape that along with the creation of 
this journal, has been deeply fulfilling for those involved. 

 
Editors, 

Kevin De Silva, Mark Chatarpal