About the Project

Our goal for this website is to provide historical context, literary analysis, and bibliographical resources for Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge. Although this novel narrates the history of Mona Singh and her family, it also serves as a narration of the history of Indo-Trinidadians as a marginalized group and of Trinidad as a nation. By telling the story of Mona’s family, the novel traces the history of Indo-Caribbean women and the larger Indo-Trinidadian community from migration and indenture in the nineteenth century and the establishment of an Indo-Trinidadian middle class to the transition to independence from Britain and the family’s subsequent migration to Canada. This novel also emphasizes the importance of increasing the visibility of Indo-Caribbean women over the course of time, illustrating the suppression of both their experiences and their voices within Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, the family unit, and individuals. Through this focus, Espinet also illustrates how empowering it is to give voice to the voiceless and a place to the marginalized in regard to sexuality, race, and class.

Espinet has dedicated much of her career to revealing the archive despite the silencing she experiences as a woman herself. The historical archive, a key theme in the novel, is still in the making. Her novel fills in many gaps within the archive. Mona, the central character of the novel, mirrors the work of Espinet. Mona worked for a women’s film company where female historical figures, such as Cecile Fatiman, were ultimately silenced by history. Like Espinet, Mona has made it her goal to un-silence these women. The silencing of women permeated through time, over the generations of immigrants like Mona's family. Society, family, and even women themselves silenced women. Mona utilized the historical archive through photographs, letters, and interviews, just as we have done with this project in order to give voice to those who have also been silenced. We attempt to enhance the scholarship on The Swinging Bridge and Ramabai Espinet with the belief that they are relevant and significant to a wide readership. In doing so, we are contributing to the historical archive in the making. After discovering a lack of scholarship on The Swinging Bridge and Ramabai Espinet, we, the authors of the this website, have committed our research to contributing to the digital scholarship with the belief that The Swinging Bridge and the voice of Ramabai Espinet is significant and deserving of recognition.

This project is inspired by collaboratively produced guides to The Swinging Bridge that students produced as their final project for “Money, Migration, and the Making of Modern Caribbean Literature (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00021228/00001) in Spring 2014 at the University of Florida. The authors of this website, Christine Csencitz, Berta Gonzalez, and Kayli Smendec, were students in the class. In creating this website, we have edited information from the original course's projects, as well as provided new information from additional research, compiling and enhancing original entries, analysis, and sources. The original contributor, as well as the editor, if applicable, will be listed for each entry

Editors:

Christine Csencsitz

Christine is a senior Political Science and English double major at the University of Florida with plans of attending law school upon graduation. Currently, she is involved in Phi Alpha Delta Pre-Law Fraternity, for which she serves as Vice President, and Helping Hands Pet Rescue, a local nonprofit animal shelter.

Berta Gonzalez

Berta is a junior double majoring in English and African American Studies at the University of Florida. She is currently involved in UF Donate Life and Inspire Cuba, in addition to serving as President of the Cuban American Students Association at UF. Upon graduation, she plans on attending law school.

Kayli Smendec

Kayli is a junior double majoring in Political Science and English at the University of Florida. She is involved in organizations such as the Honors Program, Phi Alpha Delta Pre-Law Fraternity, and Student Conduct Committee, in addition to serving as Vice President of Public Leadership Society. She also works part-time as a legal clerk. After graduation, Kayli plans on attending law school.

Faculty Advisor:

Dr. Leah Reade Rosenberg

Associate Professor at the Univeristy of Florida

Leah teaches Caribbean and Postcolonial literature at the University of Florida and is author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean (2007). She worked with Kayli, Christine, and Berta to edit and expand a final project completed by a larger group of undergraduates in the course, “Migration, Money, and the Making of Modern Caribbean Literature” (spring 2013).The course was a critical study of the literary representation and historical record of two often overlooked migrations that transformed the Caribbean: the migration of indentured Asian immigrants (primarily from India and China between 1838 and 1917) and the migration of Caribbean people to work on the Panama Canal (primarily the US project 1904-1914). The course examines Caribbean literature that illustrates the great significance of these migrations to society and to the region’s literary tradition while providing students also with knowledge of key concepts, themes, tropes, styles, and aesthetic concerns of Caribbean literary discourse. At the same time, students are introduced to research methods for identifying and analyzing primary historical sources (online and traditional) as well as Digital Humanities tools for analyzing these sources and for presenting their own work. Their final project is to work collaboratively to annotate and explicate the novels using the primary historical sources, scholarly studies, and literary analysis. The course used the Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com) as a source for primary sources and engaged students in enhancing the catalog records (metadata) for these sources.

The course was originally taught a pilot for inter-collegiate digital humanities courses across three campuses and was designed by Rhonda Cobham-Sander (Amherst College), Donette Francis (University of Miami), and myself at the University of Florida. Course materials including syllabi, videos of guest lectures, and assignments can be found by searching “Panama Silver Asian Gold” at www.dloc.com. The course is an ongoing collaboration among the faculty and librarians at the three institutions and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

Contributors:

Dayna Clark

Alex Graham

Laurin Lavan

Chelsi Mullen

Hannah Nevill