EDITOR'S NOTE

Caribbean Currents: Navigating the Web and the Word, the 22nd Annual West Indian Literature Conference, was hosted by Caribbean Literary Studies, Department of English, University of Miami in March 2003. The conference was also an occasion for marking key developments in Caribbean Literary Studies at the University of Miami since the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute of 1991-1996.

The first of these was the unveiling of the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute Digital Archives, a project made possible by the Digital Media Lab of the Otto G. Richter Library under the direction of Jeff Barry, and the tireless efforts of Kathryn Morris, Andrea Shaw, and Bryanna Herzog: http://www.as.miami.edu/cls/

Another key development in Caribbean Literary Studies at the University of Miami is Anthurium, a biannual, peer-reviewed, electronic Caribbean studies journal. An announcement was made at the spring conference and a call for papers was issued to participants and posted to the Caribbean Literary Studies website. An entirely web-based journal, Anthurium provides contributors with an opportunity to make their creative writing and their scholarship freely available to a worldwide audience.

This inaugural issue is the first of several that are broadly based on the conference theme “Navigating the Web and the Word.” It is edited with Andrea Shaw and Prudence Layne, Caribbean Literary Studies coordinators of that conference. Thanks to the generosity of Kamau Brathwaite who delivered the keynote address at the conference in March, we are able to dedicate this issue exclusively to his work. Over the course of the summer, Kamau Brathwaite devoted his time and creative energies to developing his keynote address for our new publication. The result is “Namsetoura & the Companion Stranger” which promptly became the cornerstone of our first issue.

Brathwaite’s “Namsetoura” is followed by three critical essays on Brathwaite’s work by Kelly Baker Josephs, Anna Reckin and Loretta Collins, all conference participants. While none of these scholars had read “Namsetoura” at the time of writing and revising their essays for publication, there is a lot to learn about ways of reading Brathwaite’s new work from each of them. Though Josephs’s frame of reference is primarily X-Self, while Reckin’s is History of the Voice, Barabajan Poems, and ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, and Collins’s is “Meridian” and Ancestors, all three essays develop analytical approaches that further an understanding of the core values of Brathwaite’s distinctive Sycorax video style, his concept of the tidalectic, and the remarkable coherence of his corpus.

Publishing Brathwaite and editing essays on his work presented a particular challenge to the editors of Anthurium who wished to preserve the visual integrity of Brathwaite’s work on the page. In one sense, reproducing “Namsetoura & the Companion Stranger” was easily accomplished because, despite the countless variations of Brathwaite’s Sycorax video style, the technology required was readily available through the use of Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf). Since the rest of the journal is produced in HTML, the task of synchronizing the variety of fonts used to reproduce and approximate Brathwaite’s work in the critical essays presented yet another challenge. After careful thought and consultation, it was decided that the journal would use only variations of its standard fonts in bold, italics, and capitals. It was argued that since all attempts to approximate Brathwaite’s Sycorax video style would be a misrepresentation of the original, this approach at least gave us the advantage of uniformity and coherence, and eliminated the risk of manipulating Brathwaite’s original texts beyond the parameters stated here.

Our second issue will be released in April 2004. It will include selected fiction, poetry, and critical essays submitted by participants in the March 2003 conference. Meanwhile, we welcome submissions from writers and scholars on all aspects of Caribbean life and culture. Anthurium anticipates a broad spectrum of readers across several allied disciplines wherever Internet access is available. In keeping with our sense of mission, the editors ask that you spread the word about our new journal to colleagues and friends so that we might continue to entertain new submissions, new readers, and new friends.

We also welcome your comments and suggestions about our format and focus. Anthurium combines high quality academic standards with the parameters of Internet publishing. Like the web-based Caribbean Writers Summer Institute archives, Anthurium is produced with the Digital Media Lab of the Otto G. Richter Library under the direction of Jeff Barry, with technical support provided by Bryanna Herzog.

Sandra Pouchet Paquet