Poverty & Social Development: A Caribbean Perspective

Some Ramblings on Cultural Policies, and their Imprints on Development issues and Decision-making

The recent gatherings of Caribbean writers which took place at the UWI’s Mona campus in Jamaica brought together a wide and distinguished set of cultural producers; and just to name a few among them were: Derek Walcott, Merle Hodge and Cecil Gray. The theme behind this conference was: “Writing Life: Reflections by West Indian Writers”, and I would like to highlight this little extract purged from the T&T’s Newsday:

St Lucian poet Kendel Hippolyte presented a paper in which he argued that the writer had social utility. “But”, he admitted, “I would have a hard time explaining and justifying why I should be paid for staying home and writing poems.” He asked, “Can we really believe that, in the Caribbean, the activity of a poet matters?”

And for me this is where I find interesting the contextualization between the role of cultural policies and any departure to create and nurture thinking vis-à-vis the adaptation in public consciousness of a definition of culture that evolves along matters of development and decision-making for societies.
If for example, in development thinking there has been lately calls gearing toward the ideas and expressions of cultural development, this concept translates the necessity to reflect about the integration of various mediums about cultural issues as they impact upon certain outcomes and patterns vis-à-vis well being or relevance of certain individual and collective choices.
Moreover, it is also a shift in thinking where matters of cultural development could steer discussions about the traditional views linked with the commodification of culture, to broader notions within the realms of politics, governance and the position of multicultural settings.

… Just some ramblings…/…

BRIEF