Tales of Skin in the Americas: Sabbatical Presentations by Racquel Goodison and Lara Stapleton

Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing FIG and the Africana Studies FIG.

Racquel Goodison’s “Skin and Other Stories” is a collection of short stories featuring Caribbean women at home and abroad. Some explore what it means to come of age during the 1980s in Jamaica, when neocolonialism meant a free-fall of the local currency’s exchange value and the establishment of “Free Zones”, manufacturing centers built for multi-national corporations to capitalize on the multitude of poor and unemployed workers on the island. Others look at what literary theorist, Homi Bhaba, calls “unhomeliness”, a kind of dislocation born of a history of colonialism and its still thriving socio-cultural legacies. Time becomes as much a protagonist as the women at the center of these stories and, like them, it struggles to move forward without being forced by the status quo to circle back.

Lara Stapleton‘s sabbatical focused on “1850,” a television mini-series set in antebellum New Orleans. Lara’s research was based much on the the history of miscegenation in the city,. The work includes representations of: inheritance tussles, passing, and court battles over racial definition. The Irish had also recently doubled the city after the Potato Famine, and their story is a large part of the research and presentation. The true historical trial of a woman named Sally Miller or Salome Muller was the basis for much work. She was claimed as an orphan niece by a German clan who had lost track of their relative in 1817 upon immigrating. The woman was either a mixed-race legally enslaved descendant of Africans or an olive-complected woman lost through indentured servitude upon arrival. The trials lasted three years and occupied the fascination of Louisiana. 1850  has integrated a fictional version of the experience of Sally Miller. 

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