Friday, October 12, 2012, 9am – 5pm In 2012 Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica celebrate the 50th anniversary of their independence from Britain; the year also marks the 50th anniversary of the collapse of the West Indies Federation. For more than fifty years, novelists, poets, visual artists, and others have been involved in imagining, revising, and challenging the project of independence and the future it promised for so many. The 50th anniversary is an excellent opportunity to revisit the independence movement, the arts movements it spawned, the cultural institutions that gave expression to the changes taking place, the rise and collapse of the West Indian Federation, and the implications of all of these developments for the Caribbean region in the new era of globalization. Hosted by the University of Miami Department of Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies, the conference features panel presentations by guests including Commonwealth Foundation Literature Prize winners Earl Lovelace of Trinidad and Olive Senior of Jamaica. The conference also includes a screening of Kaleb, a powerful film about Haitian-American communities, which will take place at Cosford Cinema and include a Q & A with filmmaker Kervans Barthelemy.