I am a Caribbean. I have always been the ‘Other’ a different point of view, not a differing one. This is not an assumed role but rather, one inherited. Being multiracial in a multiracial society one does not ‘fit’. If one is the multiracial offspring of multiracial people, the ‘fit’ is even less likely.
Fostered by my professional pursuits as an advertising creative director, communications manager, newspaper columnist, actor, television producer and fiction writer – my academic life began in my late 30’s in an effort to formalise my interests and inquiry into Caribbean societies and their people; and to constructively add to the public discourse surrounding identity, nationhood, representation and regionalism.
Prior to the formal process of learning and engagement required to satisfy the requirements of my M.A. in New Media and Society at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, my knowledge acquisition was polymathic, dictated by what I needed to know when I needed to know it. The blend of practical experience in the making of cultural texts and the polymathic learning that my professional pursuits dictated, was the equivalent of the undergraduate qualification that I needed to matriculate.
My interest in the cultures, history and societies of the region has now transcended the casual – becoming the overarching stimuli for intellectual pursuit and engagement.
This desire and passion is something I would like to encourage in others; hence my future professional plan to research in and lecture on the Caribbean space – helping to transform the narrative of the region from the playground of the Americas to the birthplace of the Americas.
I see myself developing into the role of the resisting intellectual, an interpretive social scientist concerned with the totality of culture; engaged in critique and analysis of society’s contradictions and offering a point of intersection between the intellectual and the political.