I’m excited to be invited to Dundee, as part of the Robert Wedderburn @200 Conference, to share poems, accompanied by Indigenous Garifuna drummer Ronald Raymond McDonald!
Saturday, 28th September 2024
6:15 – 7:30pm
Verdant Works Museum
West Henderson’s Wynd, Dundee, DD1 5BT
Free – book tickets 🎫
Join us for an evening of drumming, spoken word and lyrical poetry in a new, improvised collaboration from Indigenous Garifuna drummer and dancer, Ronald Raymond McDonald, and Scottish Jamaican poet Jeda Pearl. Jeda will be speaking poems from her debut collection, Time Cleaves Itself, (and poems from elsewhere), alongside Ray’s vital, ancestral beats as we call upon time, our ancestors, our bodies, each other in this shared space celebrating resistance, resilience and liberation.
Jeda will also have some books available to buy £10 cash or £10.99 card.
Ronald Raymond McDonald is a Belizean professional drummer, dancer and singer from the indigenous Garifuna people of the Caribbean. He is a former performer for the Belize National Dance Company and has a successful family-run cultural drum and dance school in his home town of Punta Gorda, Belize. He now lives in Edinburgh, and in between working as a Porter for the NHS, offers Garifuna drum and dance lessons and performances.
The Garifuna people are a blended Afro-Caribbean people who have never been enslaved: descendants of Africans from shipwrecked slave ships who made it to the shores of St. Vincent and there mixed with the Amerindian Carib and Arawak who had been living there before Europeans arrived, creating a new blended people and culture. Their history is deeply connected with Edinburgh: The French and British fought over the island, and when the British won, Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, forced the Garifuna people from their island home in St. Vincent, and they migrated to Honduras, Guatamela and Belize.
Verdant Works Museum is cared for by a charity that relies on donations and annual pass fees to remain open. Find out how you can support Dundee Heritage Trust.
About Robert Wedderburn @200 Conference
27th and 28th September, Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee + Verdant Works Museum
Robert Wedderburn and the “Red and Black Atlantic”: Radicalism, Insurrection, Anti-Slavery
2024 marks the bi-centenary of the publication of Robert Wedderburn’s unsparing antislavery memoir The Horrors of Slavery (1824). This conference uses the occasion to revisit Wedderburn as a crucial figure in transatlantic radicalism, insurrectionism, and abolitionism, exploring not only his works and their importance but the broader “Red and Black Atlantic” of which he was a part.
This includes the people, ideas and cultures that shaped Wedderburn’s life and work through slavery and resistance; the influence of his mother Rosanna and maternal grandmother Talky Amy; theological and political liberation; the politics of abolition from below; gender, sexuality and resistance; and the connection between working class and anti-slavery cultures across the Atlantic world.
With a keynotes from Prof Hakim Adi and Prof Gary Younge; panelists include Lisa Williams, Stephen Mullen, Nyala Thompson Grunwald, Raphael Hoermann, Alasdair Pettinger, Taylar Carty, Katey Castellano, Ryan Hanley, Sami Pinarbasi, Alexander Scott, Michael Morris, Adam Bridgen, Désha A Osborne, Sarah Winter, Thomas Maddinson and Brown Davies.
