Chanting down Babylon, in our own voice

For five days in early June, roughly 500 scholars, writers, artists and graduate students from more than 30 countries converged on Kingston, Jamaica for the 50th Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA). What resonated most was the strength and reinforced sense of community that comes from gathering in person — and the power of demanding that the Caribbean region must be studied in its own voice.
 

A theme, and a question
The sitting president, Jamaican cultural studies theorist and ethnomusicologist Professor Donna P Hope, conceived the theme ‘Caribbean Vibes and Vibrations: Culture, Identity and Development in Transformative Times’, pressing delegates with the question: how will history remember us in this geo-political moment?
Founded in 1974 by 300 Caribbeanists, the CSA is now more than 1100 members strong. In an age of anti-intellectualism, the breadth of scholarship convened was heart-warming and even defiant — over 700 submissions were narrowed down to 208 sessions across five days, in English, French and Spanish. 

UWI Mona Principal Densil Williams drew on Rex Nettleford's language to convey the significance of the gathering as an illustration of the ongoing effort of Caribbean people "to battle for space”. The conference’s cultural-studies slant confirmed the region as a cultural powerhouse whose output permeates the major Western nations.
Caribbean issues, the conference made clear, are global issues.
 

"No one is coming to save us"
The register was set in the opening plenary by UWI Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor C. Justin Robinson, whose sobering address turned on a single proclamation: "No one is coming to save us”. Robinson traced how the post-war order that once shielded small states is dissolving — sovereign equality retired to a "legal fiction," the region exposed to bilateral coercion that picks the islands off one by one. His words have only rung truer as geopolitical tensions have sharpened over the last few weeks.
Robinson read post-independence history in four acts — the Independence generation's ambitions on weak structures; the cover academics gave structural adjustment; a services economy he called "plantation in new clothes"; and a present reckoning with every escape hatch closing. The predicament is sustained not by weakness but by a comfortable complicity that must be unlearned: structure cannot change without first changing the consciousness that animates it. Ours is, finally, a "crisis of feeling" as much as of knowledge, demanding an "education in feeling" — liberation, he insisted, begins with how the region thinks, not a
borrowed Western axis.

Centring Caribbean culture
That insistence on epistemic sovereignty was read through the Caricom Reparations Commission's framework in the recurring question of how it shapes policy at scale, as well as climate-centred discussions that evaluated how the region, and in particular Jamaica post Hurricane Melissa, can navigate resilience, reparation and recovery, with climate vulnerability inseparable from the histories that produced it.
Jamaica’s Minister of Culture, Olivia Grange, revealed a proposed Institute for Cultural Practitioners and a National Cultural Fund to finance the creative economy; the Colombian Ambassador to Jamaica, Emiliana Bernard Stephenson, insisted culture be treated not as decorative diplomacy but as a strategic instrument for sovereignty and development.
Visual culture did similar labour with presentations that examined painter Aubrey Williams’ history as a transnational artist who crafted a modern Caribbean art narrative from London to Georgetown and Kingston; Bahamian artists April Bey and Gio Swaby’s reclamation of Black Caribbean womanhood through textile; and the hard economics faced by Caribbean artists to develop sustainable careers in a global fine art market despite unequal access and limited support.
Fittingly, considering Hope, the sitting president, is the world's foremost Dancehall authority, and this conference took place on the 20th anniversary of her text ‘Inna di Dancehall’, ethnomusicology was well represented throughout the programme — dancehall's sonic resistance, mento as an early archive of dissent, French-Caribbean dancehall.
 

Gathering ‘Inna di Yard’
Beneath it all sat the association's oldest purpose: the value of gathering. Names usually linked only in citation lists converged in person as colleagues and interlocutors, an iconic communion that no remote exchange could replicate. Budding scholars and graduate students mingled with emerita figures in sessions designed to foster mentorship, such as a Graduate Students' Breakfast, a rare plenary by Professor Emerita Carolyn Cooper, and Culture Night at the Louise Bennett Garden Theatre. 

Some 50 years on, the CSA remains one of the few spaces where global Caribbeanists convene to build camaraderie, exchange ideas, and advance their field. The CSA even delays its conference journal until after the gathering, as delegates are meant to further expand their research with insight gained during the convening from interaction with their peers.
Professor Hope handed over to President Professor Patricia Saunders, who will convene CSA 51 in Miami in 2027, amid much impassioned debate and discussion, as the location shifts to a centre of geo-political controversy within the Caribbean basin and to a rare gathering at a diasporic Caribbean site.
The gathering's momentum carries through — answering Robinson's challenge by closing where it began, in the conviction that Caribbean futures are imagined not in isolation but together: in a room, in the region, in its own voice.

Rachael Barrett is the principal of Three Sixty Degrees Consulting Services and holds an MA degree from Sotheby's Institute of Art in London.