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During the 2003-04 academic year, I had a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed me to return to a research project entitled Africa to the Caribbean: A Study of Village Festivals in Grenada. I spent the year researching in Grenada and Ghana and am continuing this work during the summer of this year (2006), doing video and audio tapes of a particular Grenadian festival and analysing and commenting on its origins. I hope that some of this video material will be ready for presentation and discussion at your December conference. I intend this to be the early stages of a project which, beginning with Grenada, will extend its concern to other places in the Americas. It is, in fact, a continuation of a project started some years ago, when I completed for BBC radio a project entitled "Africa to the Caribbean: A Journey of the Oral Tradition". I am pleased for the opportunity to have comments on this area of research.

The proposed title of my presentation is "From Africa to the Caribbean: Approaching an understanding and appreciation of the Grenada saraka". Attached please find a copy of my curriculum vitae. I look forward to further communication with you about this important conference.

This talk will explore the concept of "diaspora" by engaging contemporary scholarship and providing a reading of the poems of Brooks, Guillen and their literary children.

For many scholars and writers from the Anglophone, Francophone and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, among them George Lamming, Aimé Césaire and Fernando Retamar, Shakespeare's The Tempest presents an apt paradigm for exploring the consequences of colonization in the Caribbean. In her latest novel, Prospero's Daughter, Elizabeth Nunez, a Caribbean immigrant from Trinidad, returns to Shakespeare's play to tell a story set in contemporary times in the Caribbean that explores the price of European education in the Caribbean which paid scant attention to Caribbean history and the contributions of Caribbean thinkers. Nunez's work differs from earlier scholarship and interpretations of The Tempest in that she gives the women a voice.

The enduring value of Nicolás Guillén's poetry is due in large part to the combination of the perspicacity with which he views social matters and the subtle mastery by which he expresses his views. The former attribute has been noted by many of his critics, the latter by a few, although sensitivity to his artistic means illuminates and refines aspects of his message and elevates his poetic stature.

Dr. Daisy Cocco De Filippis, Provost, Hostos Community College
Dr. Dominic Nwasike, Provost, Medgar Evers College

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