2026-2027 New Directions Lecture Series

Thursday, September 10, 2026
Devlin Hall 101, 4:30 - 6:00 pm
‘Beyond the Ancestors the Black Power People Find’: Kinship and Inheritance in Recent Caribbean Fiction
At the center of Dr. Faith Smith's presentation is a bleak novelistic portrait of the 1980s – two decades after political independence, in the English-speaking Caribbean landscape that she is charting. The refusal of kinship implied by “beyond” in her title suggests an impatience with political and scholarly platitudes -- about ideological kinship, about the tragedy of failed radical movements, and so on, that marks the fiction she will examine (and that also questions her own attachment to such platitudes). Dr. Smith invites us to consider what fiction from the past decade might tell us about our current moment’s investments in and narration of various pasts, as well as the present.