1 00:00:00,440 --> 00:00:17,220 I of. Yes, sir. 2 00:00:17,220 --> 00:00:24,060 All right, so I'm holding this, Mike, because we're recording, it's not going to amplify our voices. 3 00:00:24,060 --> 00:00:31,950 But good afternoon. My name is Christy Warren. I'm at the University of Leicester in the Department of History and Politics, 4 00:00:31,950 --> 00:00:37,800 and I'm here today with a panel of people who are doing research on Bermuda in a range of ways. 5 00:00:37,800 --> 00:00:41,280 So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to spend five minutes kind of 6 00:00:41,280 --> 00:00:46,020 contextualising Bermuda so that each speaker doesn't have to talk about Bermuda. 7 00:00:46,020 --> 00:00:51,210 It's like basics. And yeah, so let's start. 8 00:00:51,210 --> 00:00:55,680 A lot of people don't know where we meet. It is. We're just going to start with the very basics of where remita is. 9 00:00:55,680 --> 00:01:01,720 Bermuda is a mid-Atlantic island. It's 700 miles away from the closest point of land. 10 00:01:01,720 --> 00:01:08,610 It's associated culturally, most strongly with the Caribbean, but we're over a thousand miles away from the next island. 11 00:01:08,610 --> 00:01:15,330 And also, if you think about modern ways of moving around in order to get to the Caribbean, we have to fly to Miami first. 12 00:01:15,330 --> 00:01:20,610 This happened in the 80s at the beginning of the war against drugs supposedly about drugs. 13 00:01:20,610 --> 00:01:26,400 But it's also an issue about cultural connexions is cause issues around cultural connexion. 14 00:01:26,400 --> 00:01:30,510 The demographics of Bermuda are quite unique as well. 15 00:01:30,510 --> 00:01:37,500 Bermuda, historically in our imaginations as these have been, has been 60 percent black and 40 percent white. 16 00:01:37,500 --> 00:01:41,670 Those numbers, of course, are much too simplistic. 17 00:01:41,670 --> 00:01:45,270 There's a lot more dinosaurs. It is much more dynamic than that. 18 00:01:45,270 --> 00:01:53,370 But it is the case that it is a majority black country that was historically white ruled and that will come through in a lot of the papers as well. 19 00:01:53,370 --> 00:01:59,790 It's one of the most densely populated places in the world. I've seen many lists, the one I looked at most recently said world number 11. 20 00:01:59,790 --> 00:02:06,810 There's twenty one square miles, one mile wide at the widest point, and it's down as being 100 percent urban. 21 00:02:06,810 --> 00:02:12,240 So there's very little arable land. We're talking about 15 percent. We don't grow much of our own food. 22 00:02:12,240 --> 00:02:20,490 The other thing I think that affects Bermuda, they don't have up there at the moment is religion and still seen as a very religious place, 23 00:02:20,490 --> 00:02:25,260 very and mostly Christian, but not only Christian. 24 00:02:25,260 --> 00:02:33,990 And that influence a lot of how we're media society, culture and politics runs our political status. 25 00:02:33,990 --> 00:02:38,940 My own work is on the independence debate in Bermuda. We are still a colony. 26 00:02:38,940 --> 00:02:43,920 The title that we hold at the moment is British Overseas Territory. 27 00:02:43,920 --> 00:02:53,820 You can say on some level, that's by choice. We had a referendum in the 90s where we the polity chose to remain a colony. 28 00:02:53,820 --> 00:02:57,090 But a lot of that, I have argued, is about internal politics, 29 00:02:57,090 --> 00:03:03,870 about how comedians and all the other stuff I just spoke about before impacts how we feel about each other. 30 00:03:03,870 --> 00:03:13,590 So it's not just about Britain. That's my spiel. Hopefully, it'll be a bit interesting, reviewed it and come and visit us some time. 31 00:03:13,590 --> 00:03:19,500 We enjoy having people around as well. This is a very interdisciplinary panel. 32 00:03:19,500 --> 00:03:26,880 You can see some of the disciplines up on the board and I think some of the key things that themes that come out across the papers, 33 00:03:26,880 --> 00:03:30,900 regardless of discipline, are issues around race making, 34 00:03:30,900 --> 00:03:38,820 everyday race making in the way that people engaged with each other and the way that they draw on the past in the present. 35 00:03:38,820 --> 00:03:44,970 A continued issue around disavowal of what has happened in the past and what continues to happen in the present, 36 00:03:44,970 --> 00:03:55,680 a co-option of stories and people's pasts, as well as a continued push towards social justice. 37 00:03:55,680 --> 00:03:59,490 So I'm leaving each of the panellists to introduce themselves. 38 00:03:59,490 --> 00:04:04,830 I'm going to go and load up the first speakers slide and I'm going to hand the mic over to her. 39 00:04:04,830 --> 00:04:12,006 And it is Dana Selassie.