This Island’s mine, by Sycorax, my mother”: Garifuna women, memory work and the more than human world

Keynote lecture This Island’s mine, by Sycorax, my mother”: Garifuna women, memory work and the more than human world, by Professor Melanie Newton (University of Toronto).

In March 2025 the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) declared Balliceaux, a privately-owned island that is sacred to the Garifuna people, a public heritage site. This presentation places the SVG government’s decision in the context of Garifuna women’s memory work and situates Balliceaux within longer gendered and racialised histories of the Caribbean’s public commemorative, heritage, monumental and memorial practices and sites. Colonial, misogynist, anti-Indigenous and anti-Black distortion and erasure remain features of Caribbean commemorative practice. Despite profound shifts in public commemorative historical narratives in the postcolonial era, pedestal statuary reified patriarchal concepts of more than human relations as ‘patrimony’ bequeathed to the nation by its forefathers. 

More recent commemorative sites– sometimes located in more natural settings close to the earth or the sea – reveal subtle but important shifts in the relationship between historical narrative, commemoration, land and gender. This presentation places two such sites in conversation with Garifuna women’s embodied memory work. Commemorative practice is both an index and a key element of meaningful acknowledgment of racial capitalism’s roots in systemic gender-based violence and to decolonial relationships with the nonhuman world.

Melanie Newton is Professor of History and Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto. She is interested in the histories of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World; slavery and emancipation; Indigenous and African diaspora; gender, social history and law.

At the University of Toronto, she has served in various administrative roles, including Director of the Caribbean Studies Program, Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Science Academic Appeals Board and Associate Chair (Graduate) of the Department of History from 2022-2024. She is currently the Tricampus Graduate Chair for the Department of History (2024-2029).