Africana Studies welcomes the Fall 2025 Visiting, Merle Collins
Join us at 4:30pm for her public lecture followed by a book signing!
Society, History and the Voices of Caribbean Literature explores the literary and creative writing journey that led to the novel, Ocean Stirrings. It indicates how the novel engages with history, society, and varied colonial legacies to produce what is effectively a work of fiction with historical scaffolding. Many details, including the language used most obviously in the first part of the novel, follow patterns shaped by French and British colonialism. The presentation considers the performative symbolism of words, noting the interplay between language and setting in a work of fiction shaped by lived experience in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The presentation also considers aspects of the Caribbean writer’s journey toward differing engagements with language, and how the approaches of other Caribbean writers contributed to perspectives on literature, history, and the “voicing” of Caribbean stories.
Merle Collins is a writer of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her most recent novel, inspired by the story of the Grenadian mother of Malcolm X, won the 2025 Caribbean Studies Association’s Barbara Christian Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (UK) and longlisted for the 2024 Bocas Prize for Literature (Caribbean).
Her novels are Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings (2023), The Colour of Forgetting (2023, 1995). La Couleur de l’oubli (French edition, 2023; Angel(2011, 1997); short story collections: Rain Darling (1997), The Ladies are Upstairs (2011); poetry collections: Lady in a Boat (2003), Rotten Pomerack (1992), Because the Dawn Breaks (1987); a biography, The Governor's Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe (2013). Her critical works include “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” chapter in Nicole Phillips-Dowe & John Angus Martin, ed., Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, and “Explorations of the Self,” chapter in Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, Caribbean Literature in Transition. Collins is also producer of a documentary, Saracca and Nation, exploring African influences on the culture of the caribbean island of Grenada and its sister isle, Carriacou. From 1995 to 2021, she taught Caribbean Literature at University of Maryland, College Park.