Professor Patricia Mohammed
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

THE VALUE OF RECORDING OUR HISTORY

 

The Caribbean Studies Association possesses a rich resource of scholarly and experiential data about the region and its diaspora for over three decades now. It also prides itself on being an association that resembles a ‘family’ - caring, giving and entrusting its wealth to other generations, as very evident in the graduate student initiative fostered over the last few years by Drs. Dwaine Plaza and Diana Thorburn. Every family works out the mechanism of transmitting inheritance. The CSA Presidents Archive is a germinal point in recording that wealth that has thus far not been sufficiently stored for transmission.

 

It has not been easy for previous presidents, executives and membership to find a way to preserve the records. The association is a peripatetic one, moving its physical secretariat base every few years, changing its Presidency each year and Executive roughly every two years. This has made for greater democracy and for the rapid and necessary shift of ideas thus allowing the CSA to grapple with the topography of change in Caribbean economies and societies over the last three decades. If the Association is to survive into another three decades, we need to record some of this past so that its own history presents  a mirror to the many nations and constituencies we serve and to itself as it determines new direction for growth.  With the introduction of the World Wide Web and the digital technologies that have made possible the preservation of records in different format, the time is ripe for harvesting the memories and records of those who have been loyal to and served the association.  In my term as President 2008/9 one of the major projects that I have attempted to mount is that of filling our web archives for each of the 33 years of the past. This project has been ably supported by Allyson Salinger Ferrante, a PhD candidate of the University of Southern California and Professor Jorge Heine, Past President of CSA 1990/91, which was hosted in Havana, Cuba. In addition it has the support of Professor Holge Henke, CSA Newsletter Editor who has ensured that some of this data has been preserved in newsletter format.

 

Apart from its merit of memory and record, this data is a valuable one for understanding the growth of the Association itself, the shifts in research foci over the years, the ideas and issues which have had to preoccupy its membership and the people who have served society and community from a scholarly or policy activist positions. I thank Allyson and Jorge for leading of this initiative. Allyson describes the methodology of how this is being done in the first phase. It is not a static project; we hope that the membership will become equally involved by writing to us through the CSA Blog now available to you on the CSA website or a Facebook that has also been created for CSA membership. Please share with us anything, (well within reason) – photographs you have of any particular year, a paper you presented, that year, a brief memory or description of any year that you attended the CSA in the past. Once we have these submitted we will post them on the year to which they pertain under Past Conferences on the website, thus making each year