Religion and culture Professor Carol Duncan of Wilfrid Laurier University will explore Caribbean women’s religious dress traditions at the next instalment of the Centre for Research on Latin America & the Caribbean’s (CERLAC) Caribbean Lecture Series.
“Caribbean Religion and Female Esthetic” will take place Thursday, March 10, from 12:30 to 2:30pm in the Conference Centre on the fifth Floor of the York Research Tower, Keele campus.
In particular, Duncan will look at the religious dress in the Spiritual Baptist faith as a site of meaning-making and identity construction. Drawing on ethnographic research, multiple associations of religious dress, including modesty, leadership and African diasporan religious identities are discussed.
“My research suggests that religious clothing is simultaneously material culture, artistic production and narrative in cloth, linking contemporary life experiences in large urban centres, to which Caribbean people have emigrated, and Caribbean past,” says Duncan.
Left: Carol Duncan
She is the author of This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008) and co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon Press, 2007).
The event is co-sponsored by Founders College, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, the Department of Humanities, Vanier College, African Studies, Culture & Expression and Religious Studies.