I of. Yes, sir.
All right, so I'm holding this, Mike, because we're recording, it's not going to amplify our voices.
But good afternoon. My name is Christy Warren. I'm at the University of Leicester in the Department of History and Politics,
and I'm here today with a panel of people who are doing research on Bermuda in a range of ways.
So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to spend five minutes kind of
contextualising Bermuda so that each speaker doesn't have to talk about Bermuda.
It's like basics. And yeah, so let's start.
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.
Bermuda is a mid-Atlantic island. It's 700 miles away from the closest point of land.
It's associated culturally, most strongly with the Caribbean, but we're over a thousand miles away from the next island.
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.
This happened in the 80s at the beginning of the war against drugs supposedly about drugs.
But it's also an issue about cultural connexions is cause issues around cultural connexion.
The demographics of Bermuda are quite unique as well.
Bermuda, historically in our imaginations as these have been, has been 60 percent black and 40 percent white.
Those numbers, of course, are much too simplistic.
There's a lot more dinosaurs. It is much more dynamic than that.
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.
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.
There's twenty one square miles, one mile wide at the widest point, and it's down as being 100 percent urban.
So there's very little arable land. We're talking about 15 percent. We don't grow much of our own food.
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,
very and mostly Christian, but not only Christian.
And that influence a lot of how we're media society, culture and politics runs our political status.
My own work is on the independence debate in Bermuda. We are still a colony.
The title that we hold at the moment is British Overseas Territory.
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.
But a lot of that, I have argued, is about internal politics,
about how comedians and all the other stuff I just spoke about before impacts how we feel about each other.
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.
We enjoy having people around as well. This is a very interdisciplinary panel.
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,
regardless of discipline, are issues around race making,
everyday race making in the way that people engaged with each other and the way that they draw on the past in the present.
A continued issue around disavowal of what has happened in the past and what continues to happen in the present,
a co-option of stories and people's pasts, as well as a continued push towards social justice.
So I'm leaving each of the panellists to introduce themselves.
I'm going to go and load up the first speakers slide and I'm going to hand the mic over to her.
And it is Dana Selassie.