UC Santa Barbara English professor Cathy Thomas built a course around the celebration of Carnival in hopes that studying the festival can help increase knowledge and appreciation of Caribbean culture.
By Richelle Boyd
Students in a UC Santa Barbara class this spring about Caribbean Carnival burst into laughter and cheers as a classmate headed to the front to demonstrate his dance moves. He popped his chest, swung his arms, and moved one body part at a time to show how important control can be to dance.
English professor Cathy Thomas was the first to clap for him once he finished. She laughed and explained how right he was, and how essential control is in Caribbean culture, specifically for women during Carnival who lead their partners during dance, a central part of the festival.
“Women have that control in their hips and over their partners because they are the ones leading dances during Carnival,” Thomas said.
Carnival is a festival that began as a celebration of spring after Catholic Lent celebrations and now takes place all around the world. But it stems from areas in the Caribbean such as Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.
Thomas built a course around it because she feels that celebration itself and the culture it comes from is vastly underrepresented. Her goal as a professor is to bring creativity, culture, and literature together so her students can see more female, Caribbean, and minority perspectives as they study different forms of literary and creative expression.
Thomas’ Carnival class content ranges from Caribbean author Earl Lovelace to pop-culture music from Rihanna and Nicki Minaj.
“I think toggling between history and social media, the past and the present, allows people to understand that the Caribbean, blackness, women, different ways of being, have always been in existence, it’s just never been mainstreamed,” Thomas said.
Throughout her career, Thomas has made it a priority to focus on diverse writers that tend to be pushed into the background, or forgotten altogether in order to help her students become well-rounded professionals as they move out into the world. “You want to make sure that the narrative moving forward is equitable,” Thomas said. “It allows you to go back and look at what has been written and better understand what has been missing.”
English professor Cathy Thomas teaching in her Reading the Caribbean through Carnival course with student Elohor Ojose.
As was the case in Carnival class earlier this spring, she encourages her students to think creatively and evaluate writers with a critical eye. She credits this to her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing that focused on speculative fiction and her Ph.D. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.
Thomas said that within the United States, Caribbean culture begins to thin out west of the Mississippi. Though there is a Caribbean community in the West, Thomas said it’s very marginal and she wants to disturb the culture and let people know about this presence. “The Caribbean community is here and strong, but thin and small,” she said. “I think that’s why I have found a home here because of that void that needs to be filled.”
Thomas also has a background in film and media. Having read scripts for Oprah Winfrey, CBS, Warner Brothers, Sony, and other independent filmmakers, she feels comfortable bringing different genres of study together to get female and Caribbean voices into the mainstream of pop culture. “Most of the things that I’m invested in teaching are a lot of writers who have not been read before,” Thomas said. She wants her students to look at these writers with a critical, analytical eye.
Thomas began her career in medical-related fields, taking part in a Cornell Univesity study on AID/HIV in men and a UCLA study on genetics, among others. That scientific work, as well as her creative writing degree, has informed her current research, for which she and a colleague received a grant to study Women in Carnival with a focus on Trinidad. She works with Emily Zobel Marshall of Leeds Beckett University in the U.K., and Adeola Dewis of the University of South Wales.
English professor Cathy Thomas answering a student's question about traditional Caribbean Carnival practices, something she currently researches.
In the three-part study, researchers interact with women who participate in Carnival in the Caribbean and other festivals, such as Mardi Gras, that are a direct result of the spread of African-based culture. Researchers also attend the Leeds West Indian Carnival virtually. Thomas hopes to have students help her and her team transcribe recorded research.
She has traveled to Trinidad before, along with other places in the Caribbean, collecting pictures, videos, and other objects to help students understand the diverse culture. “Going abroad allows me to have a sort of comparative curiosity,” she said.
Thomas wants to foster in her students a passion for literature through real world experiences. “I’d like them to fall in love with language in a way that makes them have the ability to close read something in the future,” she said. “Just to have a very playful, cynical, informative curiosity about everything that comes in front of them.”
Students like Jeremiyah White say her background and approach is broadening their perspectives. He says her assignments are original, such as creating a six-word story or creating a small image of one of the characters in the carnival. “Every class is different and so are the students,” said White, a fourth-year English major who has been a student of Thomas’s twice. “She engages the students that, in my opinion, wouldn’t participate in class otherwise.”
White feels he’s learned more about multiethnic individuals and their life experiences through literature as well as the musical culture of Caribbean Carnival. “In her classes, I am constantly rethinking concepts and ideas with the new information she is providing,” he said.
Richelle Boyd is a third-year English Major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this piece for her Writing Program class, Digital Journalism.