I teach Caribbean literature and culture in the English Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and serve as Editor of sx salon: a small axe literary platform. Our current issue includes a special section celebrating the work of Jamaican poet and professor Mervyn Morris.
I’ve abandoned Twitter, but you can find me on Mastodon: @rmordecai.
I was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Despite living in many places since, I continue to think of Kingston as home and to think of myself as a Caribbean Caribbeanist – that is, the Caribbean is both the object of my study and the ground of my identity. For this reason (although I do not study it professionally), climate change is never far from my mind. The Caribbean is, and will continue to be, on the front lines of the devastation we are already seeing and that we know will get worse. How much worse depends on the actions we take – or fail to take – right now. I have recently developed an upper-level undergraduate course on literature and environmental justice, intending it as a space in which my students can have thoughtful, hopeful, and factually driven conversations about the global dimensions of the climate crisis and the actions that we can still take to bend the needle toward more livable futures for all.
Current projects and news
Monograph: a study of Caribbean family sagas, underway; tentatively titled Caribbean Family Sagas in the Shadow of the Plantation (although I remain very partial to the other title candidate, “No Ancestry Except the Black Water,” which is a quote from Dionne Brand). The book is making slow but steady progress; a version of the chapter on Maryse Condé‘s family sagas recently appeared in a volume entitled Diaspora and Literary Studies, edited by Angela Naimou (Cambridge UP, 2023).
Other parts of my brain are still taken up with the new project on text and textile in Caribbean and African-diaspora lit. It’s still unclear to me what form(s) it will ultimately take, but I presented an initial foray in October 2018 at the West Indian Literature Conference in Miami; you can read that paper here. I’m also (less formally) writing on texts and textiles here, here and here; and I edited and contributed to a special issue of sx salon on this topic.
I’ve also joined a student-and-employee (faculty and staff) coalition on my campus entitled ESAM: the Environmental and Social Action Movement, which aims to shift UMass Amherst campus policies in the direction of ever-greater justice, equity, and environmental responsibility to meet the urgency of our times.
And, most recently, I was honoured to be asked to serve as a judge for the nonfiction panel of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (and even more delighted when the nonfiction winner, Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon: A Memoir, went on to win the overall prize).